The full Zero Escape trilogy is £6 on Steam this weekend

Resident deals-dealer Katharine is on holiday this week so we've not got a regular deals post. However! I will highlight something I know she'd want noted: the Zero Escape series, those strange and wonderful games of life-and-death puzzle rooms and doomsday experiments and robots, have honking great discounts this weekend. You'd be hard-pushed to get more foolishness for £6. The sale by publishers Spike Chunsoft also includes Danganronpa, Fire Pro Wrestling, Steins;Gate, and more.

Katharine declared Zero Escape: The Nonary Games (a collection of the first two games) as "top bestest best visual novel of all time, fact, no recounts." High praise, there. The games are about people trapped in murderous escape rooms for mysterious and often-ludicrous reasons, stories which are surprisingly catchy in their silliness. Katharine continued:

"What's truly brilliant about Zero Escape, however, is the way it turns that classic visual novel trope of multiple playthroughs on its head, as the idea of jumping back in time and making different decisions based on what you've just experienced is built straight into the game's story. And it doesn't always play out like you might expect, either.

"Combine that with some truly excellent point-and-click style escape room puzzles that give your brain as much as a workout as your text-box-clicking finger, and you’ve got a genre-defining classic on your hands."

The third game isn't as good, she said in her Zero Escape: Zero Time Dilemma review, but "it's a fitting end to the trilogy's story arc."

Right now, you can get the whole trilogy with an 84% discount for £6.27/€6.67/£7.98. If you want to complete your trilogy, Nonary Games and Zero Time Dilemma have 80% discounts separately too.

I've heard as much praise for Danganronpa, another series of murderous puzzling visual novels.

"These are undeniable flawed games, absolutely rotten with anime cliche and abrupt plot swerves, fumbled threads and abstruse pacing," Stephen T Wright wrote for us. "Yet beneath all that lie two of the most intriguing, daring, and downright transgressive murder mystery games this side of Blade Runner '97."

Yup, those are on sale too. And other games that Spike Chunsoft publish.

See the Steam sale page for everything. This sale will end at 6pm on Monday the 12th, no time-rewinding or second chances.