buffaloseven

I never felt compelled to try out the “Survivor” genre until DRG: Survivor came out. I’ve played about 12 hours of it exclusively on the Steam Deck and I love it. Part of what I think makes it so compelling for me is that the goal is actually to mine, just like in DRG, and the survivor aspect of it comes into figuring out how to mine as much as you can before you’re forced to move on or die. I can see the structure being frustrating for some – the game mechanics force you to move on, sometimes before you’d like to – but at its core it’s an optimization puzzle: you only have so much time per floor, how do you maximize the balance between mining for resources (which feed into both the run and meta progression) and defeating enemies (which gives you XP to level up). It’s a great game and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who thinks it looks half-interesting.

I didn’t even think of MGS5 on the Deck! I’d bet it runs great and it’s easily one of the best stealth action games ever made. The story was a bit of a let down, but that gameplay made up for it.

Yakuza 0 is a great entry point to the series and runs really well on the Steam Deck. I recently finished Dredge and really enjoyed it on the Deck. Lonely Mountain Downhill is a enjoyable skill-based mountain biking game that’s a lot of fun to explore and has a ton of content. Snowrunner is a chill game that works well on the Deck too…it’s kinda like Dark Souls for trucks, but meditative. Hollow Knight is great and looks really good on the OLED screen. Pretty much any of the Fallout games are a good choice; New Vegas is probably the best overall but you’ll need to use Desktop Mode to get some community patches in there while Fallout 4 is not as good story-wise but has better moment-to-moment gameplay feel. Hades is a great run-based roguelike that looks and works great on the Deck. I played the entirety of Jedi Fallen Order on the Steam Deck and it was great. Dead Cells and Scourgebringer are great action roguelikes that feel great to play and run well on the Deck. And while Baldurs Gate 3 is Larian’s latest triumph, it can run into performance issues in the latter half of the game on the Deck; Divinity: Original Sin 2 was their prior game and it runs very well on the Deck and is a great game in its own right.

There’s probably a lot more, but that’s off the top of my head!