The Hat Man: Shadow Ward
Skip · Shooter · 2016
The verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $9.99.
- Length
- 1.7h
- Value
- $5.88/hr
- Reviews
- 65% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 246 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
Based on a true story, discover the horror of the Canton insane asylum as you attempt to rescue your daughter. Experience the scariest game of 2014.
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 $0.19, set in April 2015. 77 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 27 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
It is less well reviewed than 80 percent of its genre. The games it most resembles do better on the same math. Scorn ($3.99, scores 49) and Choo-Choo Charles ($19.99, scores 60) both outscore it.
Steam's global achievement data says about 7 percent of players ever finish it. On a 1.7-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Inside the two-hour refund window, 62 percent of the 1,956 reviews written there were positive, against 65 percent overall, and those are 69 percent of everything written about it.
1.7 hours to finish it, 7 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 4.2 times the campaign.
The drop-off
18% start to 7% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 1.7-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
What players say
What's the point of a flashlight if you can't make anything out in these graphics anyway?
Generic Unity horror game where you avoid a monster while aimlessly walking around collecting pages. Underwhelming gameplay with an underwhelming monster - it can't even pathfind properly.
An unpleasant find in my Steam play history. Found with 5 minutes played.. It was barely worth completing all achievements~ Pros: -If you haven't bought this game. You've won. Cons: -The game has deteriorated from the initial debut. Or at least the version of The Hatman that I once saw Markiplier praise. Rooms and items around the building are repetitive. All walk-through were from 2014 and did not resemble the "end...
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.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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The Hat Man: Shadow Ward scores 13/100 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/291010/the-hat-man-shadow-wardThe 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 20, 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.