Three for a tenner! Come get yer games. Three for a tenner!

Consider this: you've just been handed a tenner from your grandmother. She doesn't know what the hell she's doing. She thinks you'll spend it on sweets, or put it in your piggy bank. What a fucking idiot! No, you're going to rummage through the bargain bucket at your local game shop.

Except, oh no, all the game shops are dead. That's okay, Steam is having a sale this week. The correct way to find proper deals in a Steam sale is to create your own bargain bin by fiddling with the dials and sliders of the store's search page, like a coked-up rodent messing with levers in a lab experiment. One of these has got to open the cage, right? No. The cage is capitalism. And you are trapped. The best you can hope for is for cheap videogames to come sliding down the tubes. Let me aid you in this by taking ten pounds (British, valuable, suspicious) and seeing what we could buy in the Steam Autumn sale with granny's cash.

First, let's go to the Global Top Sellers list and crank that price slider all the way down to "less than £4". You should never spend money, that's my philosophy, but if you absolutely must then £4 is as expensive as any videogame should be. On a long enough timeline, all games will be less than £4. Think about it. It is a matter of patience. Okay, now let's tick a bunch of boxes - tick tick tick - ooh that feels nice. Then we'll sort by - ugh - user reviews. Disgusting, but it's got to be done. Or, you know what? Look, just click here, I've done it all for you.

I'm not here to tell you what to do with your ten quid from gran, but I will give you an example trio of good games you can get all under the price threshold. (You could also get six (!) games by Saturnalia developers Santa Ragione, what the hell).

Pools - £5.10

Pools is a couple years old now, but it is great. Eerie, playful, and relaxing in the most unusual way. I would spend an entire weekend there in real life, if I could.

Idols Of Ash - £2.12

Wouldn't you love to get chased down a dark sinkhole of concrete and rubble while being chased by a ferocious, giant centipede? Graham did, and he has not been the same since.

Horse Magnifier: The Full Horse - £2.12

I haven't played this one. The description reads: "this is a game about magnifying horses." I am willing to recommend this on trust alone.

There are many other games that you can get in the penny pincher's pail. Some are a decade old and still wonderful. Others are fresh 2026ers, and will vanish into obscurity by the end of the year. But they are united in one thing: they are cheap and other people seem to like them.

In our accursed virtual era, this is as close as we can get to replicating the wire basket in Woolworths full of battered Sold Out editions and price-slashed "Platinum" games. Stay away from those flashy new Ace Combatses and Star Warses and Control Resonantses. Instead, dig through the tub of tat, and tell me: what are you spending granny's tenner on?