My Beautiful Paper Smile
Fair · Action · 2021
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $14.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 4h
- Value
- $3.75/hr
- Reviews
- 84% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce 470 GTX or AMD Radeon 6870 HD, 2 GB of storage. Windows only.
Welcome, child, to your new home. Here you shall learn the art of perfection. Here you shall learn to smile. Be sure that smile doesn’t fade into sadness, or you will need to run and hide…
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
December 2022 is where it bottomed out, at $3.74. 47 discounts in the 6 years on record. They run about 50 percent off, roughly 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 12 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 84 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 85 percent. The games it most resembles do better on the same math. Fran Bow ($14.99, scores 83) and Rusty Lake Hotel ($1.99, scores 96) both outscore it.
Steam's global achievement data says about 16 percent of players ever finish it. On a 4-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. 3 of the 353 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written June 2020 to September 2026.
The drop-off
77% start to 16% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
What players say
Very good artstyle and the story is interesting. However the game itself is mid, 80% of the time it feels like a walking simulator (especially act 4); puzzles are way too easy; the stealth is badly implemented since you have low area of vision you don't really know if you have an enemy near you or not, it may happen that you go in a new room and get immediately caught. Worst part for me is locking lore dialogues...
for the love of God put controller support in your game As soon as you add controller support. And I'm able to actually play this game to completion I. I will then change my review. But until then. It's staying this way until you add controller support.
There's really no other game like this. Such a unique animation style and world, and what a powerful, emotional journey from the main character. I don't want to spoil anything by writing it down since it's definitely best to go in blind for this one, but please pick this game up when you have the chance. It's not perfect, but so much heart went into making it and it shows.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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My Beautiful Paper Smile scores 51/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1036700/my-beautiful-paper-smileThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 15, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.