Picked up Yoku’s Island Express during the sale. A unique 2D platformer/exploration game that seamlessly incorporates pinball mechanics. The world feels big with a lot of variety. The pinball stuff is fun and works better than I though it would. Great production. Very happy with the value so far.

Another new one to me is Downwell. This is a neat little game and it’s good at what it does but can’t help feeling that it could have been a lot more if it had more items that combined in fun ways. It was very inexpensive so I am happy with this one too and will keep it in the rotation, especially for short play sessions.

And of course more Isaac, my most played on the deck by far.

I thought that they would come to their senses after the CrowdStrike fiasco.

Finally picked up the Brotato DLC. Despite the mixed reviews I find it a lot of fun.

I also got Lonestar which is a space themed deck/bag and tableau builder roguelite. Enjoying it a lot so far. Probably won’t have quite as much longevity as the best of the genre but I think it will be good for a few dozen hours.

I also tried Undertale (currently at an all time low of $0.99) and Reventure but I didn’t end up keeping those. They felt too clunky and I guess they are not really my jam.

A nice aspect of survivor games on the deck is that you can play them single handed (for the most part). I like to clone the left stick onto the right one so I can play with either hand.

Brotato is my current pick for this.

100 kajigers

If I had to sum mine up it’s been Isaac on the Steam Deck and Tabletop Simulator on Linux. And a bunch of other stuff on both.

My boring advice is to spend a few weeks using it as it is out of the box: just play your favorite games on it.
After a while you might get a sense of what you would like to change (if anything) and then you can research how to go about it.

For casual games on the Deck some my most played are The Binding of Isaac (most hours by far), Brotato, Deep Rock Survivor, Slay the Spire, Balatro, Dead Cells, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Shotgun King. But there are so many good choices, it really depends on your taste.

It’s been mostly Isaac as usual but I picked up Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate yesterday and I like it a lot. It’s a fast-playing roguelite with a neat idea that’s implemented well. The game mechanics remind me of Hoplite on mobile.

The game is currently on sale and has a free demo. It has good controller input and low resource use, a great fit for the Deck.

I picked this up about 2 months ago. Took me about 100 hours before I could put it down.

Backpack Battles. It’s an inventory management based auto-battler. Chill game and I like spatial puzzle a lot.
The game uses the Godot engine and it runs great on the deck. The UI is very smooth and thoughtfully designed.
A neat thing about the battle system is that it’s fully asynchronous. No matchmaking delay and it even works offline. I believe it works by preloading a number of opponent-builds at the beginning of the run.