Sands of Aura
Skip · RPG · 2023
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
It scores 41, under the fair line, at $9.99.
- Length
- 25h 58.6h to 100%
- Value
- $0.40/hr
- Reviews
- 75% of 852 positive
Full price
Today
Watch this gameOne alert at a price you pick.
Buy now or wait
Discounted in each of its last 8 seasonal sales.
- Next sale
- Winter Sale, Dec 17 to Jan 4
Sources: IsThereAnyDeal, Valve.
What drives the score
How to read this
Grades run S to D, read from the buyer's side. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. How the grades work
About the game
Sands of Aura is an open-world action adventure with a fantasy setting of a realm in its twilight--a world buried beneath a sea of sand. Sail across the sandseas to return life to a dying world in an unforgettable experience that is equal parts engaging story and unrelenting, souls-like combat.
Minimum specs
Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, Nvidia GTX 960 / AMD R9 285, 22 GB of storage. Windows only.
The value story
44 discounts in the 5 years on record, a median of 40 percent off across all of them, roughly 5 weeks apart. Today's $9.99 at 60 percent off matches the lowest price in the record.
Value puts it in the top 30 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 92 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Death's Door ($19.99, scores 73) beats it on value, while it beats Alaloth: Champions of The Four Kingdoms ($17.49, scores 28).
More about Sands of Aura
Steam's global achievement data puts about 4 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. On a 25-hour game, the hours short of it still count in its price per hour. 6 of the 434 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written October 2021 to August 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 2,866 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 496 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 51 percent of the 127 reviews written there were positive, against 75 percent overall, and those are 22 percent of everything written about it.
25 hours to finish it, 59 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.3 times the campaign.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating, which is the one that means it just works.
The drop-off
74% start to 4% finishSteam counts fewer than one in ten of its players at the ending achievement. Steam global achievements
Players
- Players online
- 4 when we last checked, on Oct 3, 00:53 UTC
Player counts from the Steam Web API.
What players say
This is crucially overlooked... even by me. It's been in my library for so long and i was setting around with a messed up foot of work and started playing it than the next thing i know im completely hooked. It's hard but not impossible, its loot heavy without being loot heavy, its has mini games without having 'MINIgames' Lets just say I actually had to stop playing for a minute and look up Developer to see if they...
2 more reviews
I expected maybe 20 hours or so from this game but ended up with over 80 hours. Pretty fun, sort of a top down dark souls. I highly recommend. 8/10.
This game is so fun. I had a blast going to all the different areas and exploring and fighting.
Steam reviews, mixed to its ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
Sands of Aura scores 41/100 on the BANG Score (a skip) as of Oct 19, 2026. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1119840/sands-of-auraReviews set the ceiling, and price against real length moves the BANG Score inside it. How it works, and where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 28, price as of Oct 18. A number here look wrong? Tell me and I will check the inputs.