Firewatch
Fair · Narrative · 2016
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $19.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 4.1h
- Value
- $4.88/hr
- Reviews
- 91% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 6 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce 450 or higher with 1GB Memory, 4 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Firewatch is a single-player first-person mystery set in the Wyoming wilderness, where your only emotional lifeline is the person on the other end of a handheld radio.
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
January 2024 is where it bottomed out, at $1.99. Its cuts run 75 percent off as a rule. There have been 47 in the 11 years tracked, about 10 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 10 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 12 percent on value. It is pricier than 93 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 92 percent. Among the games that feel like it, INFRA ($29.99, scores 70) beats it on value, while it beats The Vanishing of Ethan Carter ($19.99, scores 52).
The press gave it 81; the people who bought it give it 91 percent. A 10-point gap in the buyer's favour.
3 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written November 2025 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 70 percent of the 4,441 reviews written there were positive, against 91 percent overall, and those are 5 percent of everything written about it.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, and at 4.1 hours it is short enough to finish on one.
The drop-off
79% start to 8% 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
81 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
7.5/10 Nice sweet short game. The visuals and soundtrack is really really good! Story starts good but towards the end kinda meh for me personally. Overall if you are looking for something short and mysterious, its a good choice.
Replayed this game again recently to 100% the achievements because I missed the Shoshone tape earlier. This game is an amazing gem that I'll continue to think back on fondly. The story is engaging with an unexpected, and sad, plot twist. I know a number of people have finished the game wanting there to be a more conclusive ending, but I personally believe that's just one of the other ways the game attempts to craft...
great great characters but the story so underwhelming and game is so clunky at times
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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Firewatch scores 56/100 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/383870/firewatchThe 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 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.