How to Survive
Fair · RPG · 2014
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $3.74. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 10.1h
- Value
- $0.37/hr
- Reviews
- 83% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, Ati 5700 series/NVIDIA GeForce GT240 or equivalent, 7 GB of storage. Windows only.
“A real Gem” – Destructoid at E3 “Offers a different experience for zombie game veterans” – Co-Optimus“Has a lot more going for it than smashing brains and gory, red goo ... With a surprisingly deep crafting system” – GamesRadarYou're shipwrecked on an isolated island, a desperate castaway in a total freakshow world. How will you survive?
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
The lowest price on record is $0.74, set in June 2015. Its cuts run 80 percent off as a rule. There have been 102 in the 13 years tracked, about 6 weeks apart. Today's $3.74 at 75 percent off still sits 405 percent above the floor, so a deeper cut exists in its history.
This sale is doing real work. 58 at list, 66 today.
Value puts it in the top 5 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 77 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 81 percent. The nearest things to it, How to Survive 2 ($3.74, scores 27) and How To Survive: Third Person Standalone ($9.99, scores 2), are both worse buys on this math.
The press gave it 60; the people who bought it give it 83 percent. A 23-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data says about 13 percent of players ever finish it. On a 10.1-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. 7 of the 637 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 58 percent of the 2,771 reviews written there were positive, against 83 percent overall, and those are 20 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 10.1 hours. Doing everything runs 34, 3.3 times as long.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating and runs 10.1 hours, about as long as a handheld game wants to be.
The drop-off
87% start to 13% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
10 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
I remember playing this when it first came out on xbox one and this still holds up. the game is still as good as i remember.
This game is really mediocre. I would give it a neutral review because it is not actually completely bad. But honestly it is not enough to give it a positive review.
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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How to Survive scores 66/100 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/250400/how-to-surviveThe 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 13, 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.