The Room
BANGER · Narrative · 2014
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $4.99.
- Length
- 2.6h
- Value
- $1.92/hr
- Reviews
- 98% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when The Room is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, Video card with 512MB of VRAM, 1 GB of storage. Windows only.
A mysterious invitation leads to the attic of an abandoned house. In the room is a cast-iron safe laced with strange carvings and on top, a note from your distant companion. It promises something ancient and astonishing concealed in the iron chamber - you need only find a way in.
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 2017 is where it bottomed out, at $0.49. 68 discounts in the 12 years on record. They run about 75 percent off, roughly 7 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 7 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is better reviewed than 99 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Rusty Lake Hotel ($1.99, scores 96) beats it on value, while it beats The Room Two ($4.99, scores 91).
$7.49 is where it would stop being a BANGER. Today it is $4.99.
Critics scored it 73. Players sit 25 points higher at 98 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
5 of the 710 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written May 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 94 percent of the 3,160 reviews written there were positive, against 98 percent overall, and those are 10 percent of everything written about it.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating and runs 2.6 hours, about as long as a handheld game wants to be.
The drop-off
87% start to 65% 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
42 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 masterclass in tactile, tactile puzzle-box design with wonderfully atmospheric, gothic mystery vibes. Twisting dials, sliding secret panels, and peering through lenses to find hidden clues is deeply satisfying. It's a great little atmospheric diversion, but it's entirely too short and leaves you wanting a lot more depth.
As a long-time ARG and escape room enthusiast who has worked in the industry for a couple of years, I highly recommend this gem. As a lightweight escape-room-ish game, the puzzles were neatly fit into a relatively small space, with some really interesting designs that did not feel out of place or inconsistent. There are minor hiccups, such as some puzzles might be counterintuitive, the controls sometimes feel wonky...
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
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
The Room scores 93/100 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/288160/the-roomThe 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 16, 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.