After selling some of my physical games for my older consoles on eBay recently, I decided to spoil myself by buying an item that I’d been debating for some time, a Steam Deck. Having heard much praise for Steam Decks, the recent availability of Steam Decks without reservation encouraged my interest in picking one up. I ordered a 64GB model and ordered a 512GB microSD card to use with it and it arrived within a couple of weeks. I’ve been using it for about a month now and, while I don’t think I’ve used enough of its features to do a review, I thought it might still be interesting to share my own first impressions when it comes to the Steam Deck.
When I first got my Steam Deck, I ran through the games that I had currently installed on my computer and looked to see which ones were either Verified or Playable and that I thought would make a good fit for the device (sorry Point and Click, First-Person and Strategy games). I ended up installing fifteen video games on the Steam Deck and have played through four of them since, Higurashi Chapter 1, Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna), Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Lucah: Born of a Dream. I’ve yet to explore much of Desktop mode with probably an estimated five minutes of use since I first got it so don’t expect me to touch on that in this article.
I’d spoken about my scepticism of whether or not I’d want a Steam Deck in the past since I don’t travel very much and I’ve yet to test Steam Deck in offline mode which, from what I’ve heard, seems like it still needs some improvement. It was hard for me to imagine how it would end up fitting into my routine but it has become a device that I use on a daily basis now for one very simple reason, fast suspend. As I’m sure most people can relate to, I often find myself with little pockets of time where I can’t do anything productive within that small period. However, the Steam Deck allows you to play a game and, regardless of what’s happening, tap the power button to put the system into a sleep mode. When you tap the power button again, you’ll instantly start from where you left off. This feature has allowed me to fill those little pockets with a quick bit of gaming and has proven to become quite invaluable to me.
While I don’t travel very much, I do find myself going from room to room doing some small jobs here and there and the portability has proven to be very convenient during those instances. I can just set the Steam Deck down nearby, do a quick job, pick up the Steam Deck and continue playing while I head to my next task. I’ve also not had any problems with the battery life of the device so far although I’ll admit that the games I’ve been playing haven’t been the most graphically demanding. However, Valve have offered an array of settings you can do to slow the drain of the battery and I’ve found that I’m instantly setting the frame rate of the games to run at 40 FPS which ends up saving quite a bit of power.
The games that I’ve played through and completed on the Steam Deck so far.
I will admit that it hasn’t been all smooth sailing so far. When I was playing Higurashi, the audio would sometimes start to crackle after I quick resumed and it required me to reload the game in order to fix it. While appearing a couple of times in Never Alone, the issue didn’t arise while I was playing Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor or Lucah: Born of a Dream so I’m not sure if the issue has been fixed in a recent update or whether it was game specific. Talking about game specific, I ran into quite a frustrating problem in Lucah: Born of a Dream where the left bumper button was completely unresponsive. While I was still able to finish the game by remapping the controls, it still led to a few frustrating situations. Similarly, I just started playing Alice: Madness Returns on the Steam Deck and I ran into an issue where the gameplay elements of the screen would go completely black whenever Alice shrunk. I ended up finding a Reddit post that fixed the problem for me but, as you can imagine, I was quite annoyed before I found that solution.
The Steam Deck certainly isn’t a perfect device but it has nonetheless found its place within my everyday routine and proven to be quite invaluable to me now. I’m also excited to see how Valve, who have been continuously pushing out new updates and features, will continue to improve the Steam Deck. Let me know your thoughts on my first impressions of my Steam Deck, whether you’ve picked up a Steam Deck and, if you have, what your own impressions are, how it has fit into your daily life, what games you’re excited to play on it and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.