Methods: The Detective Competition
Fair · Strategy · 2020
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $19.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 9.1h 19.6h to 100%
- Value
- $2.20/hr
- Reviews
- 91% of 763 positive
Watch this gameOne alert at $15.09 or less.
Buy now or wait
Discounted in each of its last 8 seasonal sales. Last cut ended 11 days ago.
- 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
One hundred detectives compete against each other in a crime-solving competition.
Minimum specs
Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, 2 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
The value story
It has been discounted 51 times in the 6 years tracked here. The median cut across all of them is 60 percent, about 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price, and its last discount ended 11 days ago.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 7 percent on value. It is pricier than 90 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 95 percent. Among the games that feel like it, The Darkside Detective ($14.99, scores 67) beats it on value, while it beats Cyanide & Happiness - Freakpocalypse (Episode 1) ($19.99, scores 0).
More about Methods: The Detective Competition
Of the 358 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, none come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written September 2020 to August 2026.
The main story runs 9.1 hours. Doing everything runs 20, 2.2 times as long.
The drop-off
61% start to 23% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
- Players online
- 3 when we last checked, on Oct 15, 00:53 UTC
Player counts from the Steam Web API.
What players say
Basically a VN about a mysterious detective contest that consists of 100 chapters, many weird characters, and dozens of mini mysteries. The separation to 100 chapter is a neat way to make it digestible for me who rarely manage to finish a VN. In my opinion, interesting concept that's not executed well enough. The art, the mystery, the writing, the characters, all just feels too shallow or half-baked to me. The...
2 more reviews
Loved every second of playing this. This had a unique voice, sense of humour, and art style with an intriguing take on death games with the Detectives vs Criminals concept. All the characters were so charming, especially Detective . The mysteries themselves could have been more complex, I feel, but I have a feeling that their relative simplicity was perhaps the point(implication of the detectives' and criminals'...
Honestly one of my favorite games I played over the past year and one of the best book adaptations I've ever played! The setting is phenomenal and the attention to detail is incredible- there are over 200 characters in the story and it feels like we are able to track a very large portion of their stories throughout the game - there's a bonus where you can see interviews for nearly every character that gets flashed...
Steam reviews, mixed to its ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
Methods: The Detective Competition scores 63/100 on the BANG Score (fair value) as of Oct 19, 2026. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1271300/methods-the-detective-competitionReviews 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.