Source of Madness
Skip · Roguelike · 2022
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
It scores 17, under the fair line, at $19.99.
- Length
- 4.8h 32.3h to 100%
- Value
- $4.16/hr
- Reviews
- 69% of 1,585 positive
Watch this gameOne alert at a price you pick.
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
Source of Madness is a side-scrolling dark action roguelite set in a twisted Lovecraftian inspired world powered by procedural generation and AI machine learning. Take on the role of a new Acolyte as they embark on a nightmarish odyssey.
Minimum specs
Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, Nvidia 450 GTS / Radeon HD 5750 or better, 502 MB of storage. Windows only.
The value story
Across all 53 discounts in the 5 years tracked, the median cut is 65 percent, about 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price, and its last discount ended 11 days ago.
It is pricier than 81 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 86 percent. On the same math Dead Cells ($24.99, scores 95) and Corpse Keeper ($6.99, scores 34) are the better buys, and they are the games it most resembles.
More about Source of Madness
This site sampled 732 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 32 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written September 2021 to October 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 9 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 1,174 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 33 have a larger share. The typical game sits near 5 in 1,000, so the score docks it. Inside the two-hour refund window, 47 percent of the 588 reviews written there were positive, against 69 percent overall, and those are 42 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 4.8 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 32, 6.7 times as much.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, and at 4.8 hours it is short enough to finish on one.
The drop-off
77% start to <1% 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
What players say
It takes a while to get use to the game physics, "floaty" as others mentioned, but it gets better as you progress, the different ring combos are fun to experiment, recommend for anyone who likes Dead cells or Hades.
2 more reviews, 1 not recommended
Foreword: Not AI slop (at least not in the modern sense) This is an older creative use of early generative AI before the slop craze of more recent years, using some generated patterned cutouts to play into the game's narrative themes of eldritch horror, just as early diffusion models produced manmade horrors that were absolutely maddening and eye-straining to look at. What the game has always needed was more polish...
It's, not very good. The procedural generation loses its charm fast, and the gameplay gets stale quickly as well. Not really worth it unless you're really into the old and twisted Ai-generated art style, before AI generate content started to piss on everything.
Steam reviews, mixed to its ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
Source of Madness scores 17/100 on the BANG Score (a skip) as of Oct 19, 2026. The developer disclosed AI-generated content on Steam, so the score is docked. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1315610/source-of-madnessReviews set the ceiling, and the size of the player base moves the BANG Score inside it. How it works, and where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 27, price as of Oct 18. A number here look wrong? Tell me and I will check the inputs.