Prime Mover
Fair · Strategy · 2018
The verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $14.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 6.7h
- Value
- $2.24/hr
- Reviews
- 88% of 217 positive
Watch this gameOne alert at $6.60 or less.
Buy now or wait
Discounted in 4 of its last 8 seasonal sales. Last cut ended 11 days ago.
- Next sale
- Winter Sale, Dec 17 to Jan 4
Sources: IsThereAnyDeal, Valve.
What drives the score
How to read this
Grades run S to D, read from the buyer's side. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. How the grades work
About the game
Retrace the path of the Prime Mover to uncover the story of the Byte of Burden! Prime Mover is an open-ended puzzle game about designing circuit boards.
Minimum specs
Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 128MB, 205 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
The value story
It has been discounted 34 times in the 8 years tracked here. The median cut across all of them is 75 percent, about 11 weeks apart. Today it is at full price, and its last discount ended 11 days ago.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 11 percent on value. It is pricier than 83 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 89 percent. On the same math Infinifactory ($24.99, scores 91) and Human Resource Machine ($8.99, scores 83) are the better buys, and they are the games it most resembles.
The drop-off
86% start to 1% 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
What players say
The most AMAZING zachlike. It introduces merely 8 functional components (and they are ALWAYS available - no gimmicks!), yet you build whole freaking memory and processing chips that run actual algorithms like finding prime numbers (it gets really challenging!) ✓ solving straightforward problems ✓ solving constrained challenges (optional) ✓ solving problems that build on previous problems (previously made chips...
2 more reviews, 1 not recommended
This is definitely a programming zachlike. But it differs from a lot of other programming games by not being completely low level (you get integers instead of binary signals) but also not high level (only very simple tools, e.g. you only have an increment tool and not an adder), so you're solving low-level problems, but different ones than you might be used to. It has a good ramp up on difficulty--reasonably...
I preferred Turing Complete, where the signals are instantaneous. There's something about the Zachtronics style "things move in lockstep" that my brain doesn't wrap around quite right. YMMV.
Steam reviews, mixed to its ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
Prime Mover scores 57/100 on the BANG Score (fair value) as of Oct 19, 2026. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/693700/prime-moverReviews set the ceiling, and price against real length moves the BANG Score inside it. How it works, and where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 30, price as of Oct 18. A number here look wrong? Tell me and I will check the inputs.