They Breathe
Fair · Action · 2014
The verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $1.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Reviews
- 84% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 512 MB RAM, 512 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
They Breathe is a short journey into the depths of a forest filled with water. As you swim deeper, it's up to you to figure out the rules of an insidious ecosystem where nothing is as it first seems, and where everyone is after the same precious resource – oxygen!
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.
- How long it takes to beat isn't in our data. We scored it as a typical Action game (about 6 hours) and docked the score for the missing length.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $0.49, set in June 2017. 60 discounts in the 12 years on record. They run about 60 percent off, roughly 8 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 8 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 7 percent of the games it competes with. It is cheaper than 83 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 87 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Penumbra: Black Plague Gold Edition ($9.99, scores 63) beats it on value, while it beats We Happy Few ($59.99, scores 37).
Steam's global achievement data puts 21 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. The median game this site can measure sits at 8. This site sampled 221 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 2 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 86 percent of the 800 reviews written there were positive, against 84 percent overall, and those are 82 percent of everything written about it.
The drop-off
24% start to 21% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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They Breathe scores 57/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). Length is estimated at 6 hours, not measured, so the score is docked. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/294140/they-breatheThe 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.