Hollow Knight
BANGER · Action · 2017
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $14.99.
- Length
- 27h
- Value
- $0.56/hr
- Reviews
- 97% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1GB), Radeon HD 7750 (1GB), 9 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Forge your own path in Hollow Knight! An epic action adventure through a vast ruined kingdom of insects and heroes. Explore twisting caverns, battle tainted creatures and befriend bizarre bugs, all in a classic, hand-drawn 2D style.
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 $5.99. That was May 2022. 57 discounts in the 10 years on record. They run about 50 percent off, roughly 7 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 7 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 86 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. The nearest things to it, Ori and the Will of the Wisps ($29.99, scores 74) and Death's Gambit: Afterlife ($9.99, scores 60), are both worse buys on this math.
$41.19 is where it would stop being a BANGER. Today it is $14.99.
87 from critics against 97 percent from players, and the player number comes from people who own the game.
Steam's global achievement data says about 7 percent of players ever finish it. On a 27-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 9 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written July 2026 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 3,221 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 2,857 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 83 percent of the 10,902 reviews written there were positive, against 97 percent overall, and those are 2 percent of everything written about it.
The main story runs 27 hours. Doing everything runs 66, 2.4 times as long.
It came out 9 years ago and 4.9K were still playing it at the last check.
Deck Verified, so no launch options and no controller remapping before it runs.
The drop-off
77% start to 7% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 27-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
4,912 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
Finished the main story in around 20 hours. Absolute blast, the art, music, characters, and the difficulty made this one of the best gaming experiences I have ever had. I am now 40+ hours in trying to 112% the game and Im still having fun discovering secrets. (Side note. White Palace made me wanna kill myself) :)
This game is so good i cant even describe it with words. The music, the atmosphere, the mystery it is perfect.
I had the usual dropping the game somewhere in the beginning, but picked it back up again once silksong dropped. (With a controller this time, it feels way more difficult on keyboard.) And man did I get obsessed with this game... I love everything about it! The stubbornness to keep trying a difficult boss fight again and again, and the satisfaction when you finally beat it. (Or just f*cking around and finding out...
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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Hollow Knight scores 97/100 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/367520/hollow-knightThe 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 11, 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.