I played that $1,000 Steam game. I regret it

A recent Steam release has been making the social media rounds of late. Congratulations On Your Purchase is a, I hesitate to say 'game,' but a product, released at the end of May, that costs $1,000 / £748. "You paid for this. Not accidentally. Not on impulse. You saw the price. You read the description. And then you bought it anyway. Welcome" reads the description. Kind of. There's actually a bunch of broken HTML in there I can't copy over without confusing our CMS.

It's a status symbol, in essence: a 2026 replay of that I Am Rich iPhone app from 2008. The intention is that Steam users with more money than sense see it, purchase it, and flaunt it as a testament to their fantastic wealth, while also conveniently signing themselves up for the guillotine come the October Revolution 2.

(Image credit: Worth It Studio)

Naturally, I picked it up. Oh, don't worry. While it's true that I am incredibly wealthy from my lucrative games journalism career, I didn't drop a thousand bucks on Congratulations On Your Purchase. I used a Steam press account to play it for free and take a nose around, to see if the wonders contained therein could possibly justify the extortionate pricetag.

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They can't.

(Image credit: Worth It Studio)

"Congratulations On Your Purchase is a first-person luxury experience set inside a palace," goes the Steam description. "There is a red carpet. There are chandeliers. There are velvet rope barriers." All true. That's also pretty much all there is. There's you—in first-person—bearing whatever name you typed in at the game's start, an L-shaped corridor, and a legion of mildly deformed supporters fixed in a rictus of enthusiasm. They do not animate, they simply rotate on their Y-axes to follow you unblinkingly around the room. Many of them are identical. Looking at them slows my PC to a crawl and makes my fans spin louder than a BIOS update.

Your slack-jawed apostles exist behind the velvet rope. You cannot reach them and they cannot reach you. Instead, you roam the red carpet and, once you have passed the elbow of the L-shaped corridor, come face to face with a featureless blank wall.

This is Congratulations On Your Purchase's one and only mechanic: you can daub the wall with whatever you want—write your name, a witty quote, a rude picture; these are the privileges of wealth. Anything you put up there will go on the game's website. So long as you put it in the right bit, anyway: the first thing I scrawled was too far off to the left, meaning it's not included on the website.

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(Image credit: Worth It Studio)

I get the impression that Congratulations On Your Purchase thinks it's doing something, man. "There is no combat. There are no enemies. There are no quests, no skill trees, no loot boxes—well, there is one box, but it contains only the feeling of having arrived somewhere important," reads its description, enigmatically. "The question of whether this experience is worth $999.99 is, philosophically speaking, unanswerable. Worth is constructed. Price is arbitrary. The fact that you are reading this suggests you are already considering it—which means the answer, for you, may already be yes. We respect that about you."

Droll, but there's no 'there' there. The product doesn't live up to the possibly-satirical promises of its description. I don't think it's quite enough to slap a $1,000 pricetag on a hunk of junk and call it a savage act of detournement. At the very least, you probably ought to donate your earnings to charity. Moneygrabbing is still moneygrabbing if you do it with an arched eyebrow.

(Image credit: Worth It Studio)

Anyway, that's it. That is the entirety of the game, which you should under no circumstances buy. Indeed, judging by its credits page, it has only ever had seven players, of which I am number seven. There should never be a number eight.