Outer Wilds
Worth it · Action · 2020
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $24.99, a BANGER if it drops to $22.09.
- Length
- 17.1h
- Value
- $1.46/hr
- Reviews
- 96% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 6 GB of memory, Nvidia GeForce GTX 660, 2 GB | AMD Radeon HD 7870, 2 GB, 8 GB of storage. Windows only.
Named Game of the Year 2019 by Giant Bomb, Polygon, Eurogamer, and The Guardian, Outer Wilds is a critically-acclaimed and award-winning open world mystery about a solar system trapped in an endless time loop.
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 $12.49. That was February 2026. Its cuts run 40 percent off as a rule. There have been 54 in the 6 years tracked, about 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 5 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks. Past sales have already crossed the $22.09 BANGER line 54 times.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 96 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. It outscores the games it most resembles, including The Swapper ($14.99, scores 70) and Deliver Us The Moon ($24.99, scores 53).
Critics scored it 85. Players sit 11 points higher at 96 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
20 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written January 2026 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 63 percent of the 3,697 reviews written there were positive, against 96 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it.
It came out 6 years ago and 928 were still playing it at the last check.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, so it runs on the handheld without fiddling.
The drop-off
35% start to 2% 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
928 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
I first played this game in 2023 I did not purchase the game legally, I didn't have the money to. It changed my life. I have now purchased the game and the DLC 5 times. Once for myself to make up for the past, and four more times for friends. Thank you.
One of the best, coziest games that just scratches the right itch of my desire to explore the world!
This was a game that I had seen recommended many many many times on various social media platforms and I wasn't completely sold as I had literally zero idea what the game was about. Caught it on a Steam sale and just started playing. It was after about 7-8 hours that I actually realised that I just liked being in the universe. I enjoyed travelling, I enjoyed the gameplay mechanics, I enjoyed the story. It was really...
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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Outer Wilds scores 83/100 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/753640/outer-wildsThe 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 6, 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.