The Novelist
Skip · Narrative · 2013
The verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $4.99.
- Reviews
- 74% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when The Novelist is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, 256 MB VRAM video card, 799 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
The Novelist asks one central question: can you achieve your dreams without pushing away the people you love? The game focuses on Dan Kaplan, a novelist struggling to write the most important book of his career while trying to be the best husband and father he can be.
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.
- How long it takes to beat isn't in our data. We scored it as a typical Narrative game (about 5 hours) and docked the score for the missing length.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $0.74. That was December 2019. It has been discounted 67 times in the 13 years tracked here, typically at 80 percent off, with about 8 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 27 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 8 weeks.
On the same math Shelter 2 ($24.99, scores 42) and Not For Broadcast ($24.99, scores 67) are the better buys, and they are the games it most resembles.
Critics scored it 66. Players sit 8 points higher at 74 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Inside the two-hour refund window, 68 percent of the 151 reviews written there were positive, against 74 percent overall, and those are 27 percent of everything written about it.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
The Novelist scores 32/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). Length is estimated at 5 hours, not measured, so the score is docked. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/245150/the-novelistThe 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 Aug 2, 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.