Darkest Dungeon®
Worth it · Roguelike · 2016
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $24.99.
- Length
- 56.8h
- Value
- $0.44/hr
- Reviews
- 92% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, Open GL 3.2+ Compliant, 2 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Darkest Dungeon is a challenging gothic roguelike turn-based RPG about the psychological stresses of adventuring. Recruit, train, and lead a team of flawed heroes against unimaginable horrors, stress, disease, and the ever-encroaching dark. Can you keep your heroes together when all hope is lost?
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
November 2024 is where it bottomed out, at $1.99. 93 discounts in the 12 years on record. They run about 75 percent off, roughly 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 5 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 10 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 96 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 85 percent. It outscores the games it most resembles, including Darkest Dungeon® II ($39.99, scores 37) and Iratus: Lord of the Dead ($29.99, scores 66).
Critics scored it 84. Players sit 8 points higher at 92 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 2 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written February 2026 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 69 percent of the 4,433 reviews written there were positive, against 92 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 56.8 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 128, 2.3 times as much.
Still 3.8K concurrent players, 10 years in.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating, which is the one that means it just works.
The drop-off
94% start to 21% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
3,848 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 strategy or turn based combat game needs perfect information to keep me interested. I don't enjoy random turn orders. Random hits chances and damage are fine, great even. But I know what those chances are before I make a decision. If I don't know what character is going next then I just feel no sense of engagement. Also the story was kind of lacking and the combat wasn't varied enough to be interesting.
Note that I have actually completed this game and I strongly suspect that the majority of positive reviewers have not done so based their total play time. I think this is one of those times where people like the idea of a game more than the actual game. This plays like a mobile game that was forced to remove its microtransactions after launch. The gameplay is extremely grindy and over reliant on randomness. It would...
i hate this game and i hate playing it. anyways im excited to play 7 more hours tomorrow.
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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Darkest Dungeon® scores 82/100 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/262060/darkest-dungeonThe 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 1, 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.