Looking for something that won’t kill my battey and has some depth. I have Vampire Survivor but that get stale after about 30 minutes.
Slay the Spire is a deck mainstay for me. A good run is 40 minutes to an hour.
It is also pretty easy on battery
Emulating Gamecube games is pretty low-spec if you compile the shaders beforehand. Battery life nets 2-3 hours on flights for me (Steam Deck). I have nearly 2000 hours of Animal Crossing GC combined, pls don’t judge me 😅.
Stardew valley can get like 5-6 hours of battery easy on the steam deck
Tunic, hades, dead cells, some old rpg like fallout nev vegas or fable
can’t recommend Tunic enough. Such an amazing game with extremely deep lore.
The Golden Path is probably one of the coolest puzzles I’ve done in a game, ever.
Check out Celeste if you haven’t already. For me it’s the perfect 2D platformer and works really well on the deck. Think I clocked around 100 hours on it just on it alone!
Stardew Valley would be my pick.
Chained Echoes. 16 bit RPG with great art and gameplay, but it’s not hard on the battery and it has modern day QOL features.
100% support this. Feels like it was made for the deck. Gives me super big Game Gear vibes but like you said, with 2023 qol.
Hades was practically made for Steam Deck
Hades is great, but it’s not very battery friendly for a 2d game in my experience.
You can turn on practically all the power saving features and it still runs great. I haven’t timed it, but it can go on pretty long.
If you prefer some story-heavy games, you can try Eastward. It has gorgeous art style and controls and UI are a great fit for handheld devices such as Deck and Switch. It takes ~15% battery a hour and can be completed in 10 to 15 hours.
If you’re fine with longer games which will take 45-70 hours total, try some 2D JRPGs like Trails in the Sky FC (which also has nice touch input in menus!), Trails from Zero and Chained Echoes. All tree aren’t battery-heavy at all.
Dead cells
I don’t know how draining Celeste was, but it can’t be too much. Most indie games probably work.
Portal!
Terraria plays really well IMO
Cat quest will take you about 5 hours to beat and is light to run. Streets of Rogue is good too.
FTL, Into the Breach, and Slay the Spire are mostly puzzle games – but since they’re roguelikes they have a little depth. Depends on what you mean.
I find them very replayable but I like puzzle games because I have bad hands and game controllers are not an option.
