The Long Dark
Worth it · Strategy · 2017
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $34.99.
- Length
- 23.5h
- Value
- $1.49/hr
- Reviews
- 89% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 80% over the last 30 days against 89% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, Intel 4xxx Series w/ 512MB VRAM or better, 7 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
THE LONG DARK is a thoughtful, exploration-survival experience that challenges solo players to think for themselves as they explore an expansive frozen wilderness in the aftermath of a geomagnetic disaster. There are no zombies -- only you, the cold, and all the threats Mother Nature can muster.
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 $3.49, set in April 2025. Its cuts run 50 percent off as a rule. There have been 93 in the 12 years tracked, about 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 98 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 94 percent. Among the games that feel like it, The Forest ($19.99, scores 85) beats it on value, while it beats Breathedge ($24.99, scores 53).
Players rate it 89 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 80 percent. Something recent has soured the room. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 4 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written May 2026 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 70 percent of the 7,290 reviews written there were positive, against 89 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 23.5 hours; clearing it takes 248, which is 11 times the campaign.
9 years after release it still had 2.6K people in it at once.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, so it runs on the handheld without fiddling.
The drop-off
50% start to <1% 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
2,575 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
From their Dev Diary 30th of August 2026: "...one of the things we've been considering as we plan out the business strategy for the new DLCs, is that we've priced ourselves into a bit of a corner with TLD. Since we started offering Survival Mode as a standalone product (with the launch of the TALEs DLC), the $25.99 CAD/$19.99 USD price of Survival Mode as the "base game" has also influenced what feels like...
I wish they stuck to making the main game better and not started making minecraft story mode because they felt like it. They also announced TLD2 before work had finished on the first game, which (rightfully) further pissed people off. Its a good game however. Tremendous atmosphere. If you like atmosphere stop reading and buy this damn game. No base building, no endline, just a slow snow covered crawl to the end of...
An excellent open-world survival game set during a harsh, freezing winter. The developer continues to add new chapters for free, without locking them behind paid DLC. The developer's attitude toward the players is truly outstanding. I personally spent a huge amount of time playing this game on Nintendo Switch, and I bought the game on Steam simply to support the developer and show my appreciation for the way they...
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 Long Dark scores 80/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/305620/the-long-darkThe 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 12, 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.