Hi all, with the Steam sale on I’m looking for new things to play on the deck.
I can kick it off with a few recommendations of my own that I’ve been playing, even if they aren’t new games:
Outer Wilds - Amazing exploration game that is best played without looking at any guides etc. I use the 40hz option to play and it runs great, not dropping below 40fps.
Hades - You’ve probably heard of this one! Runs perfectly on the deck, easy to just pick up and attempt a run.
TUNIC - A charming RPG in the vein of the old Zelda games, this one is unique in that you find pages of the ‘Instruction Manual’, which you’ll need to read to help you figure out puzzles within the game. It’s awesome, would highly recommend on the deck!
Let me know what you’re all playing so I can grab some bargains!
For me, the ideal Deck games are ones that don’t lose anything when scaling down to the small screen and APU.
I’ll never understand people playing high visual fidelity games at 30fps on Low settings on Deck, it that person has a more powerful PC to play the game on.
Meanwhile, something like Civilization VI basically loses nothing when played on Deck.
Hades and Tunic both make sense to me as Deck game picks.
The opposite end of the spectrum are people who feel they need to set everything at Ultra. I found that’s as unnecessary as Steam Deck users setting everything to low. You can often drop settings to high or medium without significant hit to fidelity.
The small 800p screen of the Steam Deck allows for more unnoticeable concessions on top of that.
And even with all that, if you can’t hit 60fps, 40fps at 40Hz refresh feels much better and smoother than 30 and allows for more flexibility on settings.
At the end of the day, I’ll take a smooth consistent 30 over unstable 40 or 60. But I won’t bother if I also have to do so at the lowest settings. So far, I haven’t run into anything so demanding I have to compromise both significant fidelity and frame rate.
I get people don’t like to tweak everything and just want to play. Totally fair. But the Steam Deck is great for it, if you bother.
You’re right, if you have the PC to play certain games on then the experience is definitely better, but it’s still good to be able to play on the go, or, in my case, I have a 6 week old daughter and I can play the deck while she sleeps in my arms!
I did this with Cyberpunk 2077 despite having an RTX 2080 in my main PC. My reasoning was that I wanted to play from my couch. Now I could have just use the Steam cast feature to play it from my gaming PC, but I didn’t see the point in mucking about with it (especially given that my house has terrible Wifi… I should fix this lol).