The Descendant
Fair · Narrative · 2016
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $14.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 5.6h
- Value
- $2.68/hr
- Reviews
- 88% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, AMD or nVidia card with 1GB RAM, 12 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
In THE DESCENDANT, the end of the world is only the start. With what remains of humanity protected in underground Ark facilities, your mission is to keep survivors alive, while discovering a far greater conspiracy buried within Ark-01.
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 $0.59, set in November 2016. It has been discounted 10 times in the 11 years tracked here, typically at 80 percent off, with about 17 weeks between sales.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 10 percent on value. It is pricier than 82 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 88 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Frankenstein: Master of Death ($4.99, scores 60) beats it on value, while it beats Toki Tori 2+ ($14.99, scores 58).
Critics scored it 59. Players sit 29 points higher at 88 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Of the 339 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, none come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 60 percent of the 108 reviews written there were positive, against 88 percent overall, and those are 18 percent of everything written about it.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, and at 5.6 hours it is short enough to finish on one.
The drop-off
12% start to 5% 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
15 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
The mot lazy talentless "game" I have played in a while. Flappy bird got more depth.
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
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The Descendant scores 59/100 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/351940/the-descendantThe 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 22.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.