Sadly, no. That game is definitely keyboard-only. Though I have played successfully with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse in the past.

Some games just don’t lend themselves well to a controllers based input.

While the Deck is capable of running some big AAA games, I personally find that it shines in the low-power, “chill” games that you can play for a while, put down, and come back to when you’ve got some more time.

I’m a big fan of RPGs, so my #1 recommendation is Sea of Stars. Dragon Quest: Builders is also good, along with it’s sequel, which is arguably better.

A good multiplayer game with endless hordes of monsters vs. your magic is The Spell Brigade.

You may not know this, but the Deck can also be plugged into a TV or monitor, and with the help of a USB-C hub, can support a keyboard and mouse too! If you go that route, then I can’t recommend Dyson Sphere Program enough. Ooh! and Timberborn! It’s both adorable and beautifully designed.

If you’re more of a 3rd-person shooter type, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is fan-fucking-tastic (my favourite series of all time) and it’s currently on sale for £5. There are 3 games in the series, and make sure you start with the first one! You don’t regret it.

Finally, note that you’re not bound to the Steam store if you don’t want to be. If you install the Heroic Launcher for example, you can get DRM-Free games from GOG for example. Sometimes you’ll find that games are available on both platforms, but cheaper on one of the other, and GOG games don’t come with controls on how many people can be playing it at the same time.

“My Time at Portia”: it’s not exactly the best-coded game ive ever played (weird geometry and animation bugs, and some of the plots feel half-assed) but the world is big, and complicated, and there’s lots of crafting and relationships, and overall Good Vibes. I built a bus stop last night and married a nice girl who sells flowers. I recommend.

It’s currently on sale on GOG for €3.

It might be interesting to test if changes in this area via KDE persist with the switch to game mode. Much of what you do in KDE is just making changes to much lower level system rules, so you may find you can set rules in KDE and use them in Steam.

It’s funny, I flocked to Steam because I was under the impression that I was owning the games. While other companies were trying to get me to sign onto their “play everything” subscriptions and Google had their “Stadia” (remember them?), Steam let me download the game and install it on my (Linux!) computer with no license key checks, working offline etc. etc. I feel like the assumption that I was in fact buying my games, rather than a license to play them when Steam saw fit was a reasonable one. This discovery was quite enraging.

Yeah I’ve not looked into that before, but I’ll check it out. I just want to keep the flexibility of the Deck: scoop it out of the TV and hop on the train. If I then have to go through a painful process of switching from family mode to “just let me play my games” mode, I’ll still probably be annoyed, but I’ll give it a try.

Yeah I’ve recently started tinkering with GOG in part due to this issue. I’m using Lutris in Linux rather than Heroic. I’m not sure if there’s a benefit to one over the other, but either way the size of the library of available games is quite small by comparison and of course I have lots of games trapped in Steam now.

Thanks, I’ll look into that.

Absolutely. This is less a criticism of the Deck (which I love) and more about my own coming up against this annoying DRM that I never even knew existed because I only had one place to play.

In case you’re wondering, the correct response was:

I’m sorry. My country is overrun with fascists and Nazis and I’m horrified by the threats to your nation’s sovereignty that manchild of a president is making. He does not speak for me, and I appreciate that you would decide not to spend money in a country that’s actively threatening your family.

You know, for the next time you feel the urge to defend a government that demonstrably doesn’t care about you or anyone else.

I’ve stopped buying from Steam on account of their country threatening to annex mine. GOG is looking good though.

Is this part 2 of 3 or part 2 of 2?

I use mine with either my Jabra 75t Bluetooth earbuds, or my big Bose over-ear ones using an aftermarket Bluetooth adapter. Both are great.

BG3 is a pretty impressive game really. It’s clear that they poured a lot of effort and talent into it. It just feels… pointlessly complicated to me. There’s like, 200 different spells to cast, each with their own effectiveness based on a dice roll, a multitude of different configurations for character development which all feel both too similar and like I’m closing the door on something I might really like. The story is… okay, but really not that interesting to me, and the pacing in combination with the very open world and constant fiddling with gear with a multitude of only slightly different attributes… it’s just too much. The game feels more like a job than something I’d do for fun.

Whaaaaat?? Friend you just made my night! Thank you!

I broke down and bought Baldur’s Gate 3. I really tried to like it, but I did not.

So now I bought Horizon: Forbidden West, but the Deck can’t play it, so I’m playing that on my desktop.

I’m reasonably sure that the size of the monitor doesn’t matter, but the resolution does. If you run your monitor at 720p, the performance should be the same as the Deck locally. If you try to run it at 4k (I’m not even sure how you’d convince the Deck to do that) it would decrease performance considerably.