Is Owlboy worth buying in 2026?
Owlboy is ten years old. It costs $1.99 during the 2026 anniversary sale, it has an 88 Metacritic score, and it has 3,694 Steam recommendations. The question is not whether it is good; the question is whether it is good for you, now.
This page is the buying decision, not the review. It covers what holds up, what does not, and who should skip it.
The short verdict
At $1.99, yes. It is an eight-hour, hand-animated pixel platformer with a complete story, a strong soundtrack and no live-service nonsense. The anniversary update fixed the three things people complained about in 2016.
At $19.99, it depends. The game is short, linear and mechanically simple compared with the metroidvanias it is usually grouped with. If you want a long exploration game, this is not it.
What holds up
- The art. Owlboy's pixel art is still the reason to play it. The animation is unusually expressive for the resolution, and the sky islands are a coherent visual world rather than a set of tiles.
- The music. Jonathan Geer's score is 67 tracks and 94 minutes, with live instruments in many tracks. It is the part people remember.
- The story. A mute protagonist, a city that falls, and an ending that trusts the player. It is short but it lands.
- The pacing. No padding, no collectible bloat on the critical path, no backtracking for its own sake.
The anniversary update adds to this list: auto-aim, Super Dash and the removed door cutscenes make the game smoother than the version reviewers played in 2016.
What does not hold up
- The combat. It is simple. Geddy shoots, Alphonse blasts, Twig grapples, and the depth is in positioning rather than movesets. Bosses are puzzles more than fights.
- The length. Eight hours is short, and the optional layer adds five more at most.
- The structure. It is linear. There is no sequence breaking, no alternate route and no reason to explore off the path except coins.
- The controls, if you ignore the update. The 2016 build expected two sticks. The 2026 build does not, but only if you turn auto-aim on.
If you want a hundred-hour metroidvania with a build system, Owlboy will feel thin. That is a genre mismatch, not a quality problem.
Who should buy it
| You like | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Short, story-driven platformers | Buy |
| Pixel art and animation | Buy |
| Soundtracks | Buy, and consider the OST |
| Metroidvanias for exploration | Wait for a sale, or skip |
| Difficult combat | Skip |
| Long games | Skip |
At two dollars, the risk is low enough that the "wait for a sale" answer is really "buy it now".
How it compares to the price
| Price | What it buys |
|---|---|
| $1.99 | Eight hours of authored content, about 25 cents per hour |
| $9.99 | Fair for a replay or a collection |
| $19.99 | Normal indie pricing, steep for a 2016 game |
The price page has the full discount history. The anniversary sale is the deepest discount documented in the game's own news feed.
What to play after it
If you finish Owlboy and want more in the same register, the usual recommendations are Ori and the Blind Forest for movement, Hollow Knight for exploration, and Super Metroid for the lineage. The comparison page explains what each one does differently.
If you want more D-Pad Studio, the studio's other game is Vikings on Trampolines, which is a different genre entirely. There is no Owlboy sequel.
The one thing to check before buying
The controls. If you are buying on Steam, you can test the game for under two hours and refund it, which is enough time to reach the first dungeon. Turn auto-aim on, try the keyboard layout, and decide. The controls page lists the bindings so you know what to expect.
The ten-year question
Does a 2016 game still work in 2026? For Owlboy, the answer is mostly yes, because it was never a technical showcase. It is a hand-animated 2D game with a fixed camera and a small install, and none of that ages badly.
What ages is the design language. In 2016, a two-stick control scheme was normal; in 2026, it reads as a accessibility oversight, which is exactly why the anniversary update added auto-aim. A game that had shipped with these toggles would not need a decade to fix them.
The other thing that ages is the price-to-length ratio. Eight hours was a full-priced indie game in 2016; in 2026 it is a weekend. The 90% discount is the market correcting for that, and it makes the comparison to modern releases much less relevant.
What the reviews said
The launch reviews were strong: Destructoid gave it 10/10, GameCritics 9.5/10, The Jimquisition and GameReactor 9/10. The official site collects those quotes, and they are the reason the game has an 88 Metacritic score.
The common criticism, even in positive reviews, was the controls: aiming with two sticks was finicky, and the game asked for precision it did not always need. That criticism is now partly obsolete, which is the best argument for the 2026 version over the 2016 one.
The one-sentence answer
If you like short, beautiful, story-first platformers, buy it at $1.99; if you need a long game with deep combat, skip it at any price. The rest of this page is the reasoning behind that sentence.
_Checked 2026-11-03 against the Steam store page, Metacritic's score for the PC version, Steam's recommendation count and HowLongToBeat._