RetroFed[Discussion] What games are you playing on your Deck or Machine? - August 2026
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Fubarberry
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Skate 3 Recomp, Windows version via Proton using Faugus. Freaking amazing.
Man the community with the recent recompilations of old classics to play them natively and enhance them is crazy. I have to get into this too (but different games). I would have thought with the recompilation of a game on Windows, a native Linux version should be possible too.
Factorio in docked mode on the tv. I can’t believe how well it runs. Looks just fine in 1080 or whatever on my 4k
Hades 2 and Dredge have been fun!
Valheim has been my go to for awhile now. And when I’m struggling there, I boot up Ghost of Tsushima
I’m in the middle of replaying Cyberpunk and finishing my fourth playthrough of Silksong. A friend also just got me neon white so I’ve been playing that too. Other than that still the occasional windblown run when I can convince my husband to play
How is Windblown? Been considering playing it with a friend
I adore it, I’ve sunk like 300 hours into it so far. Definitely worth picking up, especially if you can hook a friend!
I’ve been playing a couple games:
Sea of Stars - Been wanting to play this a long time, and it’s similar in some ways to the Golden Sun games, which are my favorite JRPGs. However the combat is slow, and the skill lock mechanic is actively unfun a lot of the time. Not sure if I’m going to play much more, I might tweak the difficulty settings to make combat really easy and just “skip” that part of the game. Mainly just disappointing because I really want to like this game.
Dragonsword awakening - basically was a heavily genshin inspired gacha game, that got reworked into a full premium release. Pretty fun if you want a game like Genshin but without any f2p crap.
Sifu - Really good combat game, I flip back and forth between feeling like a martial god and a bumbling idiot.
I feel your pain with the lock system in Sea of Stars. Sometimes you can only get it 80% power and just take the damage. There was a point early in the game where I was low on items and HP. I knew I would die in the next regular fight. I died and backtracked to craft more healing items from fish to get me over the hump.
I have a lot of issues with it.
If you try to break locks, to usually have to save your abilities/empowered attacks to be able to do that in the number of turns provided. Enemies also take reduced damage while channeling locked abilities (60% reduced in my game). So you’re encouraged to save all your strongest damaging abilities for when enemies take the least damage, making fights a slow awful grind.
Alternatively, ignore breaking locks, and save abilities for when enemies aren’t locked. Finish fights way faster, but the lock abilities are really strong and punishing.
Enemy locks aren’t staggered, multiple enemies will use lock abilities at the same time, making breaking them impossible and sometimes leading to impossible fights due to RNG.
Enemy locks sometimes require damage types that haven’t been unlocked yet (ie requiring poison before you get a poison character).
Just overall the lock system is supposed to add carefuld decision making to combat about what abilities to use and who to prioritize, but I feel like it almost never works out that way, and instead just makes combat really slow and unfun.
I finally picked up palworld on the deck (previously had it on ps5). I have been playing that a bit.
Palworld is addicting. I tried Pokemon, Monster Sanctuary, Coromon, Cassette Beasts, and Nexomon. Bounced off all of them. Who knew that adding base building, shifting to a 3rd person view, and adding a million things to do would make it stick with me.
I get bored rather quickly with Palworld. I will play for a month or so solid, then put it down for 8+ months. But I do that with pokemon too.
Hope it is cross compatible and you don’t have to start all over again.
It is not, and I did have to start over again.
Ah, I see, its a bummer. I guess the game is good enough that it was worth the purchase and starting again; speaks for the game itself. Especially with the version 1.0 release there are huge changes that its probably exciting again. However I find it a bit weird that it does not have cross-save, because it has cross-play joining console and PC servers. But this would require a third party account from Pocket Pair. Whatever, I was just thinking a bit out loud.
Just recently started playing Denshattack! on Steam Deck, it’s been really fun. Never knew i would appreciate arcade-style train hopping, parkour hybrid mixed into a pretty cool story around post-climate crisis Japan.
I was pretty interested in Denshattack, but when trying the demo I found the combo inputs to be really hard to do reliably. Have you had any trouble with that? I was hoping they would improve it for the full game
Not really, it can get some getting used to but default controls are flicking the right joystick around for the tricks. then with button combos you can get going pretty easily so I was able to get some sick moves while jumping rails
1000xRESIST and Pathogenic
1000xRESIST was on a lot of underrated games lists last year when it came out, and I kept putting it off because the plot points I had heard about seemed very heavy, but it is a beautiful piece of art. It’s a very cinematic game with a lot to say about identity, family, and the pain we inflict upon ourselves. Saying anything about the story would probably ruin it, but it’s a walking sim with some light puzzle elements.
Pathogenic is a rougelite twinstick shooter where you play as an infection fighting through the human body and upgrading along the way by adding internal upgrades that power up external upgrades like tentacles that allow you to move or appendages that shoot/attack. It’s almost the complete opposite of 1000xRESIST. Basically no story and all gameplay.
These games both look great. Any other recommendations?
Still on ufo 50, I think I’m at the end of cyberpunk: phantom liberty and dragging my feet /waiting to get a good chunk of time to fully pay attention to it, and just installed tunic and the witness
All good games, Tunic and the Witness are personal favorites of mine
Playing Absolum. I’m pretty bad at it, but I’m having fun.
This game caught me be surprise and I could barely put it down.
Just started with Moonstone Island on my new steam machine
Jigsaw Puzzle Dreams - F2P jigsaw puzzle game that supports multiplayer. You can use custom images after a DLC purchase but the base game has a good sample of puzzles. My first 500 piece puzzle took 10 hours to do. It tickles my nonogram crave as I hit a skill wall in Voxelgram. I would recommend.
Ara Fell - 2D RPG. Simple combat. Story is cheesy but I needed more calcium in my gaming diet. I would also recommend.
Just finished Gothic1 remake
Black Flag Resynced. Obligatory “fuck Ubisoft,” but I loved the original and I’ve been loving the remaster. And I’m pretty sure this is the first Ubisoft title I’ve bought since the original. It runs surprisingly well on the Deck if you limit it to 30FPS and put it on one of the handheld settings.
That is, I love it when I can play it. I’ve been traveling this weekend, and if I want to run the game I need to connect the Deck to my phone’s hotspot to start the game. It can run disconnected, just needs to be connected to start it. But fortunately the Deck suspends and wakes just fine while the game is already running, so I’ve just left it going.
(Obviously it looks much better if I play on my PC or stream it to the Deck from the PC, but I’ve been glad to be able to play it on the go with minimal fuss.)
A chill lil puzzle game Wilmot Works It Out
GTA IV. Been craving a replay of this, and need a hit of GTA before the next big installment.
Got back into Caves of Qud recently. I gave up on it a while back, but I have a renewed interest in it and it’s going well.
Into the Chronosphere and Spider-Man. Both run great and play great and having a blast.
skate story, i’ve beaten it twice and still wanna play more! by FAR the coolest skating game i’ve ever played.
It’s definitely visually striking
I started playing Sid Meier’s Pirates but got frustrated that no one has labelled the buttons in the control schemes. I’ll do it myself once I’ve fetched a keyboard.
I’ve also been playing Raccoin which is relatively fun.
Been playing Caves of Qud recently. Hadn’t played it since I hit the current endpoint in early access (IIRC it ended after Bethesda Susa) so I am catching up to the current version. Just looking for a god damn zetachrome weapon for my golem to climb the spindle. Fucking things never drop 😩
Also playing a super simple build that is strong AF. The only things that really can kill me are cheribum and chrome pyramids. Or evil clones of myself.
So I just started playing Brotato, the cousin (or should I say brother?^^) of Vampire Survivors, as if I didn’t have a backlog enough. I avoided these games until now, for whatever reason my curiosity picked up. But now I can see the appeal to it. Well for one price was not the actual issue. You can get them for 5 Dollars / Euros, or 3 on a sale.
Why would I chose to play Brotato instead the more famous (and vampires are cooler) Vampire Survivors? After researching and reading opinions about both games, I came to a conclusion that Brotato might be better on the gameplay side, with more depth in it through meaningful different characters and items. And Vampire Survivors is also focused on collectables, which I’m not such a big fan of, but for many that is a plus. I also like the idea of Brotato releasing enemies in waves and then in between one can purchase stuff with money in a shop. I will probably end up playing the other game too… and then there is Mega Bonk, which I also ignored until now.
Deep Rock Galactic Survivor is my personal favorite in the genre, so one more for your backlog.
Holocure would be my recommendation for the free tier of the Survivor genre. However, last I heard it has performance issues when there’s lots of enemies on screen…
I’ve seen this game too, but forgot about it, as I’m not really into VTuber stuff. But decoupling it from this, looking at the game itself, I might try it out. I mean i’m into the genre now, so its only a matter of time. :p Thanks for the suggestion.
It’s actually not a bad “problem” to have. ;-) Thanks, looks also good its wishlisted now.
I just finished the most recent Shinobi and it was exactly what I wanted from it. Nine Souls before that was quite excellent. Animal Well was even better than expected. Dome Keeper was fun. Sea of Stars was good but couldn’t hold my attention. I also played the newest installment of Axiom Verge.
I’m a sucker for good Metroidvania games. Open to suggestions for others in that genre.
It would be boring if I started talking about RetroArch again… so I will not mention it. At the moment I’m not playing too much on the Steam Deck, or in general for that matter. But I started recently playing Wreckfest, which is like Destruction Derby on Playstation (I’m old). Still early on and need to see if its any good in todays day and age.
I also want to go back to Shenmue 3, as a fan of the original Shenmue 1 and 2 on the Dreamcast. It feels like I would emulate an old game, lol. Man, I’m such a sucker for these oldschool games. There is also a new enhanced edition of Shenmue 3 upcoming, not sure if its worth the price and wait. Maybe I get it for free as an owner of the original version, just like that Rockstar did with GTA 5. Or maybe a discount…