DARK SOULS™ II: Scholar of the First Sin
Fair · RPG · 2015
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $39.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 35.5h
- Value
- $1.13/hr
- Reviews
- 84% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 / ATI Radeon TM HD 6870, 23 GB of storage. Windows only.
DARK SOULS™ II: Scholar of the First Sin brings the franchise’s renowned obscurity & gripping gameplay to a new level. Join the dark journey and experience overwhelming enemy encounters, diabolical hazards, and unrelenting challenge.
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 $9.99. Its cuts run 75 percent off as a rule. There have been 50 in the 11 years tracked, about 9 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 22 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 9 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 7 percent on value. It is pricier than 97 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 84 percent. Among the games that feel like it, ELDEN RING ($59.99, scores 84) beats it on value, while it beats Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty ($19.99, scores 1).
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; none were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written May 2026 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 55 percent of the 2,857 reviews written there were positive, against 84 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 35.5 hours. Doing everything runs 102, 2.9 times as long.
11 years after release it still had 1.6K people in it at once.
Deck Verified, so no launch options and no controller remapping before it runs.
The drop-off
94% start to 7% 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
1,612 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
Ng+ that actually changes, bonfire ascetics, best fashion souls, best PvP, Animation canceling, Power stancing, most diversity in genuinely viable builds, most interesting magic system, no spam rolling so tactical gameplay is rewarded. The great outweighs anything bad by miles
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.
DARK SOULS™ II: Scholar of the First Sin scores 63/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/335300/dark-souls-ii-scholar-of-the-first-sinThe 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.