Downwell
BANGER · Roguelike · 2015
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $0.74.
- Length
- 6.4h
- Value
- $0.12/hr
- Reviews
- 97% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 205 MB of storage. Windows only.
Downwell is a curious game about a young person venturing down a well in search of untold treasures with only his Gunboots to protect him.
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
May 2018 is where it bottomed out, at $0.74. It has been discounted 81 times in the 11 years tracked here, typically at 67 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. Today's $0.74 at 75 percent off matches the lowest price in the record.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 4 percent on value. It is cheaper than 91 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 97 percent. The nearest things to it, Kaze and the Wild Masks ($9.99, scores 63) and Tcheco in the Castle of Lucio ($0.99, scores 67), are both worse buys on this math.
Critics scored it 81. Players sit 16 points higher at 97 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Of the 439 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 4 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 92 percent of the 2,189 reviews written there were positive, against 97 percent overall, and those are 28 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 6.4 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 15, 2.3 times as much.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, and at 6.4 hours it is short enough to finish on one.
The drop-off
75% start to 3% 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
16 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
What an amazingly simple concept crafted to perfection! I just love loading this game up and having a small little run. The perfect bite-sized game.
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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Downwell scores 88/100 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/360740/downwellThe 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 23, 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.