Castle In The Darkness
Skip · RPG · 2015
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $9.99.
- Length
- 6.8h
- Value
- $1.47/hr
- Reviews
- 77% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 256 MB or higher, 123 MB of storage. Windows only.
Castle In The Darkness is a fun and challenging shout out to the early days of video games! It's an action exploration platformer with some RPG elements, much like games from the Castlevania or Metroid series. It's super fast-paced, challenging, and full of secrets!
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
October 2020 is where it bottomed out, at $0.99. Its cuts run 50 percent off as a rule. There have been 55 in the 12 years tracked, about 12 weeks apart. 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 12 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 27 percent on value. It is pricier than 60 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 62 percent. Death's Gambit: Afterlife ($9.99, scores 60) outscores it, and so does Environmental Station Alpha ($7.99, scores 48). Both sit among its closest neighbours.
Steam's global achievement data says about 16 percent of players ever finish it. On a 6.8-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 257 of its Steam-purchase reviews; none were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 45 percent of the 208 reviews written there were positive, against 77 percent overall, and those are 18 percent of everything written about it.
6.8 hours to finish it, 15 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.2 times the campaign.
The drop-off
84% start to 16% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
2 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
Cite this score
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Castle In The Darkness scores 44/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/262960/castle-in-the-darknessThe 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.