A new Steam Sale is unexpectedly upon us, and PC gamers everywhere are already scouring the Steam Store for the best deals on thousands of games.

With such a ridiculously large library of games, it has become increasingly difficult for users to discover new games on Steam, which is bad for both developers and fans, but for the new Lunar New Year Sale, Valve Corp has done something clever by hiding a form of content discovery in a fun “Choose Your Own Adventure” story.

On the main store page, there is a brief introduction to a story about a monkey trying to make his way home, and users are first given the option to choose between swimming across a river or hitching a ride the long way around.

Steam then shows you around two dozen games based on the theme of your choice: water themed games like Sunless Sea or Bioshock if you decided to swim, or car themed games like Euro Truck Simulator 2 or Project Cars if you decided to drive.

From there, each page offers you another choice on how you want to proceed in the story, which then takes you to another themed store page. Some of the other game themes you can find through the Choose Your Own Adventure story include ninjas, pirates, dragons, and more.

Why it matters

Obviously discovering new games is great for players, but it is also extremely important for developers, particularly for independent developers.

During the Steam Winter Sale, Valve tried a different experiment with content discovery where it offered up to three Steam Holiday Trading Cards per day for users who went through their entire Discovery Queue, which suggests a number of games based on those already in the user’s Steam library.

“One of our concerns going into the Winter Sale was that extrinsically motivating customers with a trading card might encourage people to just click through their Discovery Queue and not actually pay attention to the games being presented,” Valve said at the time. “It turned out that customers found a lot of value in using the Discovery Queue, resulting in a huge up-tick in sales and wishlist additions.”

Valve noted at the time that major games always sell well during the Holiday Sale, but thanks to its Discovery Queue experiment, a large number of games that weren’t as well known also performed strongly.

The adventure story for the Lunar New Year Sale appears to have the same goal in my, but it is definitely more fun than clicking past a bunch of games just to get your cards for the day.

Screenshot by Eric David | SiliconANGLE