The Steam Summer Sale closed its books on July 9, and if you were hoping for a quiet week before the next round of discounts, you're out of luck. Valve's calendar has Social Deduction Fest starting July 13 and running through July 16 — a themed spotlight event built entirely around games where someone at the table is lying to you.
That's a genre packed with cheap, endlessly replayable multiplayer picks, so it's worth getting your wishlist in order now rather than scrambling once the storefront banner goes live. Below are seven hidden-identity and deception games likely to be in the spotlight, priced at their current regular USD cost as checked today, July 10 — treat these as your "before" prices and expect at least some of them to drop once the Fest opens.
What Social Deduction Fest actually is
Per Valve's own event listings, Social Deduction Fest is a themed sales spotlight — the same format Steam has used this year for things like Cooking Fest, Bullet Fest, and the Party-Based RPG Fest. Expect a dedicated storefront page, deep discounts specifically on games tagged Social Deduction, developer livestreams and "how to lie" strategy content, and free demos for a few upcoming entries in the genre. It runs July 13–16, then the storefront reverts to normal until the next themed event.
If you missed our roundup of the best co-op and multiplayer deals from the just-wrapped Summer Sale , this is basically that same "games are better with friends" impulse, just narrowed down to the genre where your friends might secretly be trying to kill you.
7 hidden-identity games to wishlist before July 13
Prices below are each game's standard Steam listing today — no Fest discount has landed yet, so use this as your baseline for spotting a genuine cut once the sale goes live.
| Game | Price (today) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| $4.99 | The genre's biggest name. Touch-friendly UI holds up fine on Steam Deck; cross-play means your lobby doesn't care what anyone's playing on. | |
| Free to Play | 16-player Among Us-alike with proximity voice chat. Uses Easy Anti-Cheat — generally fine on Deck, but check ProtonDB before a big session in case a driver update breaks it again. | |
| Free to Play | Text-and-role-heavy classic, 7–15 players, over 50 unique roles. Reviews are currently Mixed, so go in knowing it's divisive with the existing playerbase. | |
| $24.99 | A single-player spin on the genre — you loop through the same social-deduction game against AI crewmates, gradually unlocking new tactics. No lobby required, which makes it an easy Deck pick for a plane ride. | |
| $19.99 | Social horror rather than sci-fi: one of your friends is the Neighbor in disguise, and everyone else is trying to escape his basement. | |
| $24.99 | The 1-on-1 opposite of the usual formula — one Spy tries to blend into a crowd of NPCs while one Sniper watches for tells. Still in Early Access after years of refinement, and still one of the sharpest two-player games on Steam. | |
| $9.99 | The 2006 original that arguably started this whole genre on Steam — everyone's hunting a target while evading their own hunter aboard a 1920s cruise liner. Old enough to run on almost anything. |
Worth checking back for
None of these are can't-miss purchases at full price except maybe Among Us, whose $4.99 asking price is already low enough that a Fest discount is a nice-to-have rather than a dealbreaker. The better move is wishlisting whichever of these fit your group size and taste now, so Steam emails you the moment a real discount posts on July 13.
If you'd rather see what Steam Deck-friendly picks are still worth grabbing from the Summer Sale's closing days, our best-deals roundup is still a useful reference even with that sale now closed, since several of those titles carry standing discounts independent of the big seasonal events.
We'll follow up once Social Deduction Fest actually goes live with real percentage cuts and confirmed Steam Deck compatibility ratings for anything that changes.
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