Returnal™
Fair · Roguelike · 2023
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $59.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 19.1h
- Value
- $3.14/hr
- Reviews
- 81% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 70% over the last 30 days against 81% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 16 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6 GB) AMD Radeon RX 580 (8 GB), 60 GB of storage. Windows only.
BREAK THE CYCLE Fight to survive as this award-winning third-person shooter brings Selene’s story to PC. Take on roguelike challenges. Engage enemies in bullet hell-fuelled clashes. Share your journey through Returnal™ with another player.
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
It has never been cheaper than $19.79. That was June 2026. 24 discounts in the 4 years on record. They run about 50 percent off, roughly 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 7 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 40 percent on value. It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Risk of Rain 2 ($24.99, scores 88) beats it on value, while it beats MOTHERGUNSHIP ($6.24, scores 40).
Players rate it 81 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 70 percent. Something recent has soured the room. Of the 399 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 2 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written June 2026 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 49 percent of the 678 reviews written there were positive, against 81 percent overall, and those are 10 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 19.1 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 64, 3.3 times as much.
The drop-off
94% 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
Players
84 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
Ran into a game breaking bug in literally the first playthrough where the boss didn't respawn after I was revived, meaning I lose an hour of progress for nothing. A quick google search shows this issue is common and has been known about since launch 5 years ago, yet has never been fixed.
My review is around coop gameplay. The game looks nice and controls are responsive. The Metroid feeling around it is pretty nice too. BUT The game is filled with all sorts of bugs, consistently throwing away hour long runs. What sort of bugs will you get you may ask? - Reticle bug: Now you cant see your magazine info, nor when to overload. Amazing. - Locked Store: While in the middle of your run, you might encounter...
5/10 It's a decent roguelike... with some fun and challenging stuff... but it's pretty simple in terms of mechanics and upgrades between runs... The person who made Crimson Desert xenoglyphs should have his own bucket in hell...
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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Returnal™ scores 55/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1649240/returnalThe 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 Jul 31, 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.