Narcosis
Skip · Narrative · 2017
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $14.99.
- Length
- 3.1h
- Value
- $4.84/hr
- Reviews
- 76% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, Nvidia GTX 560 or better, 8 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
Survival, horror at the sunless depths of the Pacific Ocean: Stranded on the seafloor with low light and few tools, an industrial diver takes desperate steps to surface before his oxygen — and sanity — give out.
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
It has never been cheaper than $2.99. That was October 2021. 82 discounts in the 9 years on record. They run about 66 percent off, roughly 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 48 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 82 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Iron Lung ($7.99, scores 66) beats it on value, while it beats Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs ($19.99, scores 20).
Steam's global achievement data puts 20 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. The median game this site can measure sits at 8. Of the 485 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 5 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 45 percent of the 272 reviews written there were positive, against 76 percent overall, and those are 23 percent of everything written about it.
The drop-off
32% start to 20% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
1 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
Will scratch the itch for a game to play after Soma but the controls take some getting used to.
Narcosis isn't a bad game, but it shoots itself in the foot by both requiring and disincentivizing exploration. It's required to locate all 40 collectibles, each providing flavor text fleshing out the 20 underwater residents, but disincentivizes it by making locomotion slow and cumbersome and navigation confusing, while limiting camera mobility and providing limited oxygen to counter a rapidly depleting 02 meter. If...
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.
Narcosis scores 34/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/366870/narcosisThe 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.