SpaceChem
BANGER · Strategy · 2011
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $9.99.
- Length
- 41.5h
- Value
- $0.24/hr
- Reviews
- 92% positive
Watch this gameOne email when it is worth buying. Your call on what that means.
Get one email when SpaceChem is worth buying.
One email per game. Unsubscribe in a click.
Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, frame buffer support recommended, 297 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Zachtronics is back with an ambitious new design-based puzzle game. Take on the role of a Reactor Engineer working for SpaceChem, the leading chemical synthesizer for frontier colonies. Construct elaborate factories to transform raw materials into valuable chemical products!
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
November 2014 is where it bottomed out, at $0.99. 71 discounts in the 14 years on record. They run about 75 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.
Value puts it in the top 1 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 70 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 97 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Infinifactory ($24.99, scores 91) beats it on value, while it beats Human Resource Machine ($14.99, scores 74).
On this data it would still be a BANGER at $35.55. It costs $9.99.
The press gave it 84; the people who bought it give it 92 percent. An 8-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data says about 6 percent of players ever finish it. On a 41.5-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 357 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 5 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 78 percent of the 287 reviews written there were positive, against 92 percent overall, and those are 11 percent of everything written about it.
The drop-off
36% start to 6% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 41.5-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
11 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
This game is actually really difficult and takes a lot of your brain. If you aren't willing to spend 6 hours beating a level then don't buy this game
Nearly 22hrs of gameplay over 9 years and haven't even made it halfway through the fourth level. Game is too hard and the brain is fried. 10/10
This is a very complex, very rewarding game with a lot of content. I genuinely believe that solving the puzzles in SpaceChem can enhance the way you approach problems in real life. My only qualm is that the controls are pretty bad. Not only are they awkward, but even simple things like mouse sensitivity cannot be changed in the options. Even though the game is available on GeForce Now (nice!), it can't be played...
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
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
SpaceChem scores 87/100 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/92800/spacechemThe 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 1, 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.