The Old City: Leviathan
Skip · Narrative · 2014
The verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $5.99.
- Length
- 1.9h
- Value
- $3.15/hr
- Reviews
- 72% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, 3 GB of storage. Windows only.
The Old City: Leviathan is an experiment in first person exploration that focuses entirely on story. All that exists is you and the world. Set in a decaying city from a civilization long past, The Old City: Leviathan puts the player in the shoes of a sewer dwelling isolationist.
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 2016 is where it bottomed out, at $1.49. It has been discounted 9 times in the 12 years tracked here, typically at 75 percent off, with about 18 weeks between sales.
It is less well reviewed than 69 percent of its genre. On the same math The Vanishing of Ethan Carter ($19.99, scores 52) and Homesick ($14.99, scores 32) are the better buys, and they are the games it most resembles.
Critics scored it 62. Players sit 10 points higher at 72 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Inside the two-hour refund window, 56 percent of the 200 reviews written there were positive, against 72 percent overall, and those are 38 percent of everything written about it.
1.9 hours to finish it, 4 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.3 times the campaign.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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The Old City: Leviathan scores 29/100 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/297350/the-old-city-leviathanThe 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 Aug 29.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.