Owlboy Critical Reception: Metacritic Score and Review Quotes
A roundup of Owlboy's critical reception, including its Metacritic scores and what reviewers praised or criticized.
Owlboy's Critical Reception: An 88 Metascore and a Warm Consensus
Yes — on the evidence available, Owlboy was a critical success. According to Metacritic, the game holds a Metascore of 88, labelled "Generally Favorable," based on 47 critic reviews, alongside a user score of 7.5 drawn from 347 user ratings. The official Owlboy site also collects press impressions in the 9-to-10-out-of-10 range. One caveat: these are third-party aggregations and quotes, not statements from D-Pad Studio, and the official store description makes no claims about review scores at all.
The Aggregated Numbers
According to Metacritic, the headline figures break down like this:
- Metascore of 88, described as "Generally Favorable," from 47 critic reviews.
- A user score of 7.5, based on 347 user ratings.
- The critic spread shown there is 94% positive, 6% mixed, and 0% negative.
Those figures are the clearest available answer to whether the game was well received, though the FACTS provided here include no sales data, so this article covers reception only.
Praise Collected on the Official Site
According to the official Owlboy website, the developer highlights a set of press impressions:
- Destructoid, 10 of 10: "Welp, it was worth the wait!"
- Jim Sterling, The Jimquisition, 9 of 10: "Owlboy is bloody terrific."
- GameCritics, 9.5 of 10: "There aren't many emotions that Owlboy didn't provoke from me."
- GameReactor, 9 of 10: "Moves the classic formula back into the modern world of gaming."
Because these are quotes selected and displayed by the developer, they should be read as a curated sample rather than a full survey of reviews.
A Mixed Voice
Not every write-up was glowing. According to Indie Bandits, the reviewer lists "fantastic hi-bit visuals," "beautiful animation," and "great writing and characters" as strengths, but calls the gameplay "dull" and the controls "awkward," saying movement felt like "moving a cursor across a spreadsheet." The same review acknowledges that Owlboy is critically acclaimed and that the game is visually and narratively engaging.
What Isn't Documented Here
The FACTS do not include sales figures, review counts beyond those listed by Metacritic, or any official D-Pad Studio statement summarising the game's reception. The developer's Steam announcements included in the FACTS focus on anniversaries, patches, and the Anniversary Update — a new dash move, auto-aim, and cutscene skipping — rather than on how the game was reviewed. Any claim about Owlboy's commercial performance would need a source outside this article.
