Shelter
Worth it · Narrative · 2013
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $0.74.
- Length
- 1.3h
- Value
- $0.57/hr
- Reviews
- 85% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, GeForce 400 series, ATI Radeon HD 2xxx, 2 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
Experience the wild as a badger sheltering your cubs from harm. On your journey, you will be stalked by birds of prey, encounter perils of the night, cross fierce rivers, escape forest fires and face the looming threat of starvation. Food is to be found, but is there enough for everyone?
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
September 2026 is where it bottomed out, at $0.74. It has been discounted 80 times in the 13 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 8 weeks between sales. Today's $0.74 at 75 percent off matches the lowest price in the record.
At full price it scores 66. The current cut is what makes it a 69.
Value puts it in the top 4 percent of the games it competes with. It is cheaper than 78 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 82 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Meadow - A Shelter Game ($6.99, scores 74) beats it on value, while it beats Shelter 2 ($24.99, scores 42).
This site sampled 369 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 3 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 82 percent of the 1,746 reviews written there were positive, against 85 percent overall, and those are 65 percent of everything written about it.
What players say
(5/5★) The game Shelter One is a survival-based game that tells a story of motherhood. It makes you put yourself into the position of a mother badger who is trying to feed and nurture her children and protect them. While I was playing the game, I named each of my little badger children. Mini Me, Skunk, Pierce, Needle, and Ferret. {Yes, the names are a little weird do not judge me..} During the playthrough I lost...
Really short and a somber game I found it to be very cute I enjoyed it the art style reminds me of wind in the willows for some reason.
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), achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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Shelter scores 69/100 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/244710/shelterThe 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 20, 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.