A Steam sale is upon us, folks, and that means just one thing: sifting through literally thousands of deeply discounted games to figure out which ones in particular deserve your hard-earned cash. If you're short on time, take a gander at our recommendations below. Since it's Halloween, they're heavy on horror, but just about anyone should be able to find something they can enjoy. Note that most of these selections are decidedly adults-only: Let the kids get their spooks in Minecraft. Half-Life is a genre-defining staple of both first-person shooters and horror games, but 23 years later, it's not exactly looking like a spring chicken.

This term is a portmanteau derived from two beloved games that arrived on the Nintendo Entertainment System in the mid-1980s, Metroid and Castlevania, and is usually applied to 2D games in which the world is explorable in all directions (as opposed to classic platform games, in which you go from left to right). There are usually secret rooms and areas that can only be accessed once you've found some key or item later on, so players have to mentally map their progress and backtrack when necessary. In this way a good metroidvania world is like a story, with tension, foreshadowing, plants, payoffs and surprise reveals built into the very foundations. Try: Hollow Knight, Axiom Verge, Ori and the Blind Forest. One of the most popular indie game genres, the term roguelike comes from the 1980 game Rogue, originally developed by coders Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman.

For the last 20 years, machine learning has been about one question: Can we train a model to do something? Something, of course, can be any task. Predict the next word in a sentence, recognize faces in a photo, generate a certain sound. The goal was to see if machine learning worked, if we could make accurate predictions. What can we build with these models, and how can we do it?

For the last 20 years, machine learning has been about one question: Can we train a model to do something? Something, of course, can be any task. Predict the next word in a sentence, recognize faces in a photo, generate a certain sound. The goal was to see if machine learning worked, if we could make accurate predictions. What can we build with these models, and how can we do it?

But now for the good news: A staggering number of excellent games are coming to PC this holiday season. Like seriously, too many for any one person to play. We've rounded up 15 of the PC games we're most looking forward to this fall. While a few of the usual heavy hitters make the list (Forza), we've also tried to pick out a few surprises, or games you might not have heard of, like The Occupation. Because hey, you definitely know Shadow of the Tomb Raider is coming out this fall, but have you heard the good word about Outer Wilds?

If you lost hours and hours delving beneath Tristram in the original Diablo, you have David Brevik to thank, who created and programmed the classic action RPG. The veteran developer went on to co-found and head the studio that became Blizzard North, which made the even-more-successful Diablo II. After years consulting and leading studio Gazillion Entertainment, Brevik is returning to dungeons and lurking horrors in his next game It Lurks Below, which he created entirely himself and will launch later this year. Like Diablo, It Lurks Below is a hybrid adventure game mixing class-based RPG elements with live action...and a lot of loot. Brevik even built the engine bringing the game's 2D pixel-block look to life.