not a deck, but a legion go and I am enjoying satisfactory a ton.

Minecraft when I want to chill, Helldivers 2 when I don’t

Eternal Strands. I’m loving it! I almost quit playing a few times in the first couple of hours but once you get into the loop of it and learn some more skills and combat techniques, things get amazing.

It has that same sense of wonder and exploration that I got from BOTW, even though it’s broken up into zones instead of one open world. It also takes a lot of great parts from Dragon’s Dogma, Shadow of the Colossus, and Monster Hunter, while still very much being its own thing. Plus, the loot is not overwhelming and feels meaningful, and you can re-spec all gear without penalty.

It’s all really streamlined to maximize fun.

My big two games recently have been Blue Prince (which I made a post raving about a week ago), and Clair Obscura: Expedition 33.

Blue Prince is a fantastic puzzle game/rogue-likes mix, and as someone who enjoys both genres I’ve found their combination is fantastic. Really satisfying game for me, I didn’t close the game on my deck for about a week after first trying it. I’m not done with it yet either, lots more to discover.

Clair Obscura Expedition 33 is a really flashy turn based JRPG made by a team of 30 people who quit Ubisoft because they wanted to make good games. It has incredible production values for such a small team and puts a lot of AAA games to shame. It pushes the deck performance wise, but I think it performs acceptably after tweaking some settings. I’d recommend people follow this guide for making it run it’s best, but the TL;DW is:

The game hides some graphics settings on deck by default and uses a deck specific present. You can re-enable the settings by using the launch option SteamDeck=0 %command%, and customize it to your liking. Basically it’s TSR to low, shadow and post processing to low, film grain off, chromatica off, motion blur off, any other option to medium, FPS capped at 30.

Fallout 4 for those end world vibes.

Waiting to see if Clair Obscura gets any performance patches. Heard mixed reviews about it running on Deck.

Oblivion Remastered. Playing via Remote Play, which has given me a decent amount of issues, but when it’s working, it’s great. The game looks gorgeous and has been a ton of fun to play, although I’m having a surprisingly hard time finding side quests. I seem to remember there being more than one or two per town. But whatever, I can always go find a cave, be stealthy and snipe things.

We finished Split Fiction recently, it was fantastic.

We tried Unravel Two yesterday but I found it a bit underwhelming, not sure it will stick.

Horizon Zero Dawn and Forza Horizon 5. What is it about video-games with the word Horizon in them?

NieR: Replicant

Pkmn unbound, magicraft, modded balatro

Heck of a time

Lately I have been mainly playing my usual, Operation Harsh Doorstop. OHD is a free and moddable, big map vehicle and infantry (including helis) multiplayer game like Project Reality but the big difference is that OHD is moddable and so the whole game is a really exciting platform for all kinds of games with functioning client side downloading of mods so you can just connect to a multiplayer server and go!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/736590/Operation_Harsh_Doorstop/

I sing the praises of the game a lot, but to be fair it has a lot of rough edges. OHD runs decent on the Steam Deck (keep view distance as high as possible, turn down everything else, lock the max framerate of the deck at like 40fps). Gunplay is fairly realistic, the bipod mechanics are awesome, APCs and AFVs feel weighty and powerful but this is definitely a game where unprotected armor gets eaten for lunch by infantry since… pretty much everybody on the other team who doesn’t have a better plan or wants an smg is strapping a RPG or other form of AT too. You have to turn the graphics way down on the Steam Deck… but I just don’t really care? I think the realism of OHD helps in that if you get the drop on someone you will probably win if you are smart, and pretty much any gun in the game can be used in any situation this isn’t some crazy confusing game like COD, Apex or another game with constantly changing gun metas and hyper specific strategies. Just pick a gun and go, it will work great lol.

The real reason OHD is one of my favorite Steam Deck games is flying helicopters on the Steam Deck it is an absolute joy, I mean driving any kind of vehicles is a blast (holy shit I have spent so many hours in Motortown powersliding around corners and I regret none of it lol) too but specifically helicopters become a form of psychedelic drug as your mind locks into flying them organically and it is a thrill to master using helicopters (transport and attack) effectively in a semi-realistic game like this. The skill ceiling is intimidatingly high, both for the crazy variable way you can apply attack helicopters in this game and also for the way you can realistically shift the momentum of entire matches by making effective troop drops with the transport helicopter.

Also if you aren’t looking for a realistic shooter… again this is a moddable platform and there are already mods like casualfield that make the game play more like call of duty or battlefield.

I have shared this game as a recommendation so many times but the reason I am sharing it this time is I ran into another player playing on the steam deck the other day and that was the first time that had happened!

Subscribe to the workshop mod “OHD Vehicle Overhaul” and you can mess around with flying helicopters in singleplayer if you are curious (pick singleplayer then ohd vehicle overhaul for mode and then jaziira for map).