Danganronpa, Zero Escape and Steins;Gate heavily discounted this weekend

Visual novel fans can grab a bargain this weekend: some of the best PC games in the genre, including the Danganronpa, Zero Escape and Steins;Gate series, are heavily discounted until Monday as part of developer Spike Chunsoft's sale.

It's worth browsing through the full list of offers, but Danganronpa is a good place to start: the first two games in the series are 80% off, making them just $4/£3. You play a new student in what appears to be a school for an elite, but is actually a sadistic battle royale, and you have to kill another student to "graduate". As characters are murdered, you're asked to solve the crime in court trials that play out a little like Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. It's brilliant, and you can read Andy's review of the first game, Trigger Happy Havoc, here.

Both Zero Escape games—The Nonary Games and Zero Time Dilemma—are 80% off too, making them less than $6/£5. They're gruesome tales of a group trapped in an underground facility, and they have arguably the best puzzles of any visual novel. Katharine gave The Nonary Games a 90/100 in her review.

Steins;Gate Eilte, a remaster of the 2009 original, and the follow up Steins;Gate 0 are less about murder and more about time travel. You alter the past to create branching worlds, tangling together cause and effect into a variety of different endings. It's complex, but never hard to follow. Both games are 60% off.

Fire Pro Wrestling World, one of our favorite sports games, is also on the list at 70% off. Browse through all the deals on Spike Chunsoft's Steam page: again, the Danganronpa games are the perfect place to start if you're new to the genre, not least because they're so cheap. The deals expire at 10am PDT on Monday, August 12.

If you need more advice about getting into visuals novels, follow our guide here.

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Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.