All Hands on Deck
How does it play?
There’s going to be a whole cottage industry of Steam Deck accessories—the versatile USB-C dock, the fastest micro SD card, the most convenient travel keyboard and mouse—but I’m here to tell you that the single best Steam Deck accessory is a throw pillow. It turns out that the small, overly firm decorative pillows have been on our couches all this time just waiting for a higher calling: a Steam Deck to plop down on top of them. After hours of gaming on Valve’s new handheld PC, I’m amazed by how capable it is, but that power comes at a heavy price. As in, like, the Steam Deck is really heavy.
It’s inescapably a bulky device, weighing 68% more than the Nintendo Switch and 38% more than an iPad. Holding it high enough to keep my neck happy, I started feeling a twinge in my forearms after 20 minutes of ResidentEvil2 Remake and definitely needed a break before an hour was up. Thankfully, all it takes is a pillow to solve my biggest criticism of the Steam Deck—as soon as I nestled one into my lap, I was cosy and ready to spend a whole evening emulating Persona3, exactly the PC gaming experience I hoped the Steam Deck would give me.
BEST OF BOTH
From the beginning Valve has insisted that the Steam Deck is a PC that you do whatever you want with. Take it apart, install Windows, futz around on the Linux desktop to install other launchers. That’s all true, but the more I use the Deck, the more I’m genuinely amazed at how well it manages to be both PC and console, simultaneously deeply versatile and dead easy to use. Valve’s debut of SteamOS with Steam Machines may have flopped, but years of iteration have finally turned it into a secret weapon.
The UI is intuitive: The ‘Steam’ button brings up a menu of major screens like your library, the store, downloads, and settings. The ‘…’ button pulls up a settings menu that would look at home on a smartphone, with brightness and volume sliders and toggles for features like Wi-Fi and night mode. The battery tab gives a nice estimate of how much life you have left based on current use, and the advanced options let you tinker with all the framerate and power limits you want.
It all works seamlessly while a game is running. So does the controller configurator, the Deck’s greatest feature. If a game lacks official controller support, like Japanese indie classic CaveStory+, you can press the Steam button while it’s running, open up the controller settings, and likely pick a community-made configuration that works brilliantly (shout out to capy’s bindings for this one). The PCSX2 and Dolphin emulators I installed weren’t
built with controller-friendly UIs, so I set up the Deck’s trackpad as a mouse and its back grips as left/right click, then configured the rest of the inputs to mimic the original console controllers. I could even bind keyboard shortcuts like save states to the leftover grips.
That flexibility allows the Steam Deck to stretch beyond what consoles are typically capable of, but SteamOS still delivers their biggest perks. I’m in love with how seamlessly suspending games works: Even when I’m running an emulator I can just tap the power button to put the Deck to sleep and pick up where I left off an hour later. The same goes for hopping into settings while a game is running and then returning to the action. Alt-tabbing often isn’t even this smooth.
THE RIGHT STUFF
Bouncing around my Steam library has reassured me that most games will work on the Deck even if Valve hasn’t slapped a Verified badge on them. It’s also helped me hone in on what, exactly, I want to use this device for.
Breezy games like MonsterTrain and IntotheBreach run with gigahertz to spare, but I’ve happily played both on my six-year-old ultralight laptop, too. While the Steam Deck is portable enough that I’d pack it for a trip, it’s too chunky for me to toss in a backpack for a day out and about, which I would do with a Switch. It’s impressive that ResidentEvil2Remake runs at a stable 60fps, and Nightdive’s new retro shooter remaster of Powerslave runs like butter too. But I’d rather play both on my gaming PC, where I can max out ResidentEvil to appreciate that moody lighting and aim with a mouse in Powerslave.
This will naturally differ for every PC gamer. To me it’s a good fit for moderately demanding indies like Death’sDoor and Hades that don’t run at 60fps on the Switch. Emulation, though, is why I’d buy it. I just can’t sit at my desk to play 100-hour JRPGs, but now that I can play them under a blanket on the couch without hogging the TV? Hoo boy, do I have a lot to catch up on.
FROM THE BEGINNING VALVE HAS INSISTED THAT THE STEAM DECK IS A PC YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU WANT WITH