The Past Within
BANGER · Multiplayer · 2022
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $5.99.
- Length
- 1.9h
- Value
- $3.15/hr
- Reviews
- 95% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce 9800 / ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT, 1 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
The Past Within is the new co-op experience from Rusty Lake! Play together with someone you deem trustworthy: one in The Past, the other in The Future. Observe and communicate what you see around you. Solve the puzzles and uncover Albert Vanderboom’s plan.
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
The lowest price on record is $1.79, set in December 2025. It has been discounted 31 times in the 4 years tracked here, typically at 40 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is better reviewed than 99 percent of its genre. Among the games closest to it, Tick Tock: A Tale for Two ($1.79, scores 66) and We Were Here Together ($12.99, scores 56) both come in lower.
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 16 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written December 2022 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 93 percent of the 4,110 reviews written there were positive, against 95 percent overall, and those are 28 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 1.9 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 4, 2.0 times as much.
At 1.9 hours it is a handheld-sized game, and Valve rates it Deck Verified.
The drop-off
60% start to 12% 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
51 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
The Past Within is a good fun puzzle game to play with a friend, it's quite enjoyable! Different for requiring co-op, but it's a great entry in the Rusty Lake series. There are missable achievements and no checkpoints to go back to after you've finished the game, so it may be worth keeping an eye on a list of the missable achievements. Not hard to 100% though.
Wow, that was money well spent! I didn't see the time go by and had such a great time with my friend! Great game design, absolutely amazing project. We'll play some more to get 100% of the achievements :))
This game is such a fun take at co-op puzzles, the way I played this with my friend without being directly connected and still be able to see the same stuff at the same time is peak game design!! Thank you very much for this masterpiece!
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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The Past Within scores 87/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1515210/the-past-withinThe 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 23.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.