Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth
Worth it · Narrative · 2017
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $19.99, a BANGER if it drops to $13.16.
- Length
- 14.5h
- Value
- $1.38/hr
- Reviews
- 92% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, AMD Radeon HD 6670, GeForce GTX 200 series with at least 1GB, 13.2 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
12th century, England: In a time of poverty and war, a small town begins the construction of a cathedral to claim wealth and safety for its people. In their struggle to survive, lives and destinies intertwine. Based on Ken Follett's world-bestseller ‘The Pillars of the Earth’.
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
April 2022 is where it bottomed out, at $1.99. It has been discounted 92 times in the 9 years tracked here, typically at 90 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. 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 5 weeks. It becomes a BANGER at $13.16, a level the record has reached 81 times.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is pricier than 93 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 94 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Pentiment ($19.99, scores 82) beats it on value, while it beats Little Misfortune ($19.99, scores 59).
Critics scored it 78. Players sit 14 points higher at 92 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Steam's global achievement data says about 14 percent of players ever finish it. On a 14.5-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 666 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 9 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 61 percent of the 430 reviews written there were positive, against 92 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it.
The drop-off
33% start to 14% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
11 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
A really good game that is very underrated. Excellent story, voice acting and characters with an awesome visual style that still looks good to this day. Absolutely recommend!
A truly wonderful piece of historical fiction, and I do recommend that if you liked it that you check out the book!
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.
Cite this score
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Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth scores 78/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/234270/ken-follett-s-the-pillars-of-the-earthThe 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 7, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.