Press Ctrl
Worth it · Short indie · 2021
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $1.99.
- Length
- 0.8h 0.9h to 100%
- Value
- $2.49/hr
- Reviews
- 90% of 616 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
A mind-bending puzzler where your avatar controls another avatar via an in-game keyboard.
Minimum specs
Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, Nvidia Geforce 1650, 61 MB of storage. Windows only.
The value story
Across all 37 discounts in the 6 years tracked, the median cut is 35 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 3 percent on value. It is cheaper than 72 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 93 percent. Among the games that feel like it, qop ($1.99, scores 76) beats it on value, while it beats Paquerette Down the Bunburrows ($11.99, scores 71).
More about Press Ctrl
2 of the 348 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2021 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 90 percent of the 443 reviews written there were positive, against 90 percent overall, and those are 91 percent of everything written about it.
The drop-off
99% start to 20% 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
I watched Nanahira's livestream and found it quite cute and interesting, so I bought the game. Even though I'm not sure if this is the first indie game to use nested control schemes, the game is definitely interesting. But honestly, after a little thought and figuring out the controls, it's actually much simpler than it looks. btw this pixel-style 2D game was actually made using the Unity engine. I'm completely...
2 more reviews
I bought it as a puzzle game. But it taught me that understanding how to do something, doesn't guarantee that you will be able to execute that. And that's very unpleasant. And that sometimes, when the answer isn't working, failure can actually show why your solution is working in your mind, but not in reality itself. That the solution itself might be actually incomplete. Not wrong. Incomplete.
Press Ctrl, developed and published by Idan Rooze, is a minimalist puzzle game that builds an entire experience around a single, deceptively simple idea and then steadily transforms that idea into something far more demanding than it first appears. At a glance, it seems almost barebones-simple visuals, limited inputs, and a straightforward objective-but that simplicity is precisely what allows the core mechanic to...
Steam reviews, mixed to its ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
Press Ctrl scores 73/100 on the BANG Score (worth it) as of Oct 19, 2026. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1533050/press-ctrlReviews 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 Oct 1, price as of Oct 18. A number here look wrong? Tell me and I will check the inputs.