LISA: The Painful
BANGER · RPG · 2014
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $10.99.
- Length
- 10.9h
- Value
- $1.01/hr
- Reviews
- 95% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when LISA: The Painful is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 512 MB of memory, 1024 x 768 pixels or higher desktop resolution, 799 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
The miserable journey of a broken man...
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 $2.49, set in December 2015. Its cuts run 40 percent off as a rule. There have been 67 in the 12 years tracked, about 6 weeks apart. Today's $10.99 at 45 percent off still sits 341 percent above the floor, so a deeper cut exists in its history.
This sale is doing real work. 80 at list, 91 today.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 90 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Outcore: Desktop Adventure (free, scores 93) beats it on value, while it beats Kindergarten 2 ($14.99, scores 73).
On this data it would still be a BANGER at $14.97. It costs $10.99.
Critics scored it 77. Players sit 18 points higher at 95 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Steam's global achievement data puts 22 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. The median game this site can measure sits at 8. Of the 560 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 6 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 3,416 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 2,712 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 72 percent of the 711 reviews written there were positive, against 95 percent overall, and those are 5 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 10.9 hours. Doing everything runs 25, 2.3 times as long.
The drop-off
89% start to 22% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
23 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
Yeah man sure, show up, make one of the greatest RPGs of all time, disappear into the darkness never to be seen again. Find me Austin Jorgensen and get him making some new games!!
fabulous little rpg. my favorite part was when brad said "Well, LISA:... this truly was The Painful - Definitive Edition after all..."
Genuinely a modern day tragedy that Lisa the painful is barely talked about. This game is a masterpiece and might be my favourite game of all time. Just play it I have no more to say just play it already.
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.
LISA: The Painful scores 91/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/335670/lisa-the-painfulThe 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 16, 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.