Long and Cheap

Mount & Blade: Warband is a 2010 game holding 97.1 over 73.7 hours, and it is still what I say when someone wants a hundred hours for the price of lunch. The cut around it: twenty dollars or less, 40 hours or more of main story, a BANG of at least 80, 48 games. Price and hours alone would give you 130, so the score bar throws out more than half. Long and cheap on its own describes a bad grindy game as well as it describes a good one. The 80 is what separates Terraria from a $3 idler with 200 hours of nothing in it.

Terraria is 97 across 51.7 hours and 1,542,077 reviews. Stardew Valley matches it at 97.1 with 53.4. Persona 4 Golden is 95.4 over 67.1 hours at a $19.99 list, which is the one on here that will eat a whole winter.

The 40 hour floor is arbitrary and I know it. It comes from HowLongToBeat's main story number, which does not exist for every game on Steam, so a long cheap game with no match is invisible here rather than rejected. Cookie Clicker is in this list at 147 hours and a 97. That should tell you advertised length and hours you would actually want to spend are not the same measurement.