Return of the Obra Dinn
Worth it · Narrative · 2018
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $19.99, a BANGER if it drops to $12.81.
- Length
- 8.2h
- Value
- $2.44/hr
- Reviews
- 97% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, Discrete GPU, 2 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
Lost at sea 1803 ~ The good ship Obra Dinn.
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 $9.99, set in October 2020. 34 discounts in the 8 years on record. They run about 30 percent off, roughly 10 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 17 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 10 weeks. Past sales have already crossed the $12.81 BANGER line 10 times.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is pricier than 91 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. The nearest things to it, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter ($19.99, scores 52) and Thimbleweed Park™ ($19.99, scores 73), are both worse buys on this math.
The press gave it 89; the people who bought it give it 97 percent. An 8-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data puts 46 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. The median game this site can measure sits at 8. 18 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written June 2023 to August 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 1,677 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 1,011 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 70 percent of the 964 reviews written there were positive, against 97 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating and runs 8.2 hours, about as long as a handheld game wants to be.
The drop-off
62% start to 46% finishPeople genuinely stick with this one. Steam global achievements
Players
166 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
A brilliant game. I created my own strategy to solve some of the late-stage crewmates I call "Two Maybes and a Chinese Guy." Once I had gotten the info of two crewmates to a point I felt somewhat confident in, I'd find a Chinese sailor I'd seen die and cycle through their names until the three new fates were solved, or nothing happened. If nothing, change the cause of death or find my second-guess identity, then...
Whatever you do before playing this game, trust me when I say try and go into it completely blind.
I want to hang this game in the louvre, cut out the pages of all of the books in the British library and replace it with the story of Obra Dinn, and find a way to blot the memory of this game from my mind so I can play it again for the first time.
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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Return of the Obra Dinn scores 76/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/653530/return-of-the-obra-dinnThe 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 Aug 2, 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.