Darkwood
BANGER · Roguelike · 2017
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $19.99.
- Length
- 18.3h
- Value
- $1.09/hr
- Reviews
- 95% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 (1 GB) / AMD Radeon HD 5770 (1 GB), 10 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Darkwood - a new perspective on survival horror. Scavenge and explore a rich, ever-changing free-roam world by day, then hunker down in your hideout and pray for the morning light.
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
It has never been cheaper than $2.99. That was December 2025. Its cuts run 70 percent off as a rule. There have been 97 in the 12 years tracked, about 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 4 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 89 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 93 percent. The nearest things to it, SUNLESS SEA ($18.99, scores 62) and We Happy Few ($59.99, scores 37), are both worse buys on this math.
The press gave it 80; the people who bought it give it 95 percent. A 15-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 15 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written January 2023 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 83 percent of the 2,642 reviews written there were positive, against 95 percent overall, and those are 12 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 18.3 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 41, 2.2 times as much.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating, which is the one that means it just works.
The drop-off
74% start to 3% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
86 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
You are playing a challenging and unforgiving game. You will not be led by the hand. Respect the woods. Be patient. Focus.
So I originally played this game on the Nintendo Switch. Got only as far as this one village area in the second location and got stuck. Never beat the game, but this thought always stuck to the back of my head. "What was I going to discover next if i kept going????" For years i kept thinking of this game and then I saw it on sale here on Steam and decided to give it another try. (mainly because I don't touch my...
No idea what's going on, walked about 80% of my game time, stepped on some poison, walked a bit more. No idea what items have to keep, how to store them, what should be prioritized. Nothing in the tags or the screenshots told me that this was project zomboid-like... I thought this was a type of a top-down shooter, horror adventure game. How it has so much positive reviews boggles my mind. After these four hours of...
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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Darkwood scores 87/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/274520/darkwoodThe 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.