I’ll be travelling soon and was wondering what are good games for low power-usage and offline?
Previously I enjoyed:
- Into The Breach
- Baba Is You
- Vampire Survivors
- Super Mario All-Stars (SNES)
At the moment I’m planning to set up:
- Lufia 2 (SNES)
- Shadowrun (SNES + Genesis versions)
- Golden Sun (GBA)
- A Link To The Past (SNES)
- Minish Cap (GBA)
- A Link Between Worlds (NDS) - never played it, hopefully the controls map well!
- Fire Emblem: Awakening (NDS) - same as above, never had a NDS
- Oracle Of Ages (GBA)
- Chrono Trigger (SNES)
- Ogre Battle 64 (N64) - not sure how bad the power usage is on the N64 emulators
Maybe the Ace Attorney and Professor Layton series too which I haven’t played. Also GTA1, London and 2 if they work. I love Advance Wars too but I’ve played it too many times already.
Basically anything that is easy to run, low power, and easy to play with just the controls and small screen in a cramped space. Ideally nothing too difficult / stressful like Hollow Knight that could be hard to play without good screen brightness or cramped.
I like a lot of older PC games but unfortunately they’re difficult to play without a mouse and on the small screen - e.g. Ultima VII and Arx Fatalis.
FTL : Faster Than Light, a must have.
I never beat the final boss, like the game is relatively easy up to that point and then it’s a huge difficulty spike.
FTL multiverse is a must. It has much more variety and chances to equip yourself for the final boss, removing much of the randomness of being able to win.
Edit: it has a system requirements spike on the original…I dont know what exactly it needs, but my shitty backup laptop doesnt have enough memory for it while the original works fine.
How easy is it to install the mod on Deck?
Quite the hassle it seems… https://www.reddit.com/r/ftlgame/comments/xlztak/ftl_multiverse_on_steam_deck/
Ahh that looks tricky! There are some comments in that post with (what looks like) easier solutions. I’ll have to give this a go at some point.
I got stuck overnight at the airport with my Deck and this game saved me from falling in to insanity. Hard recommend keeping it installed in case of emergency
Been enjoying Dave the Diver after seeing it recommended on Lemmy. Surprised by the depth of the game, no pun intended.
I’ve been addicted to Dave the Diver lately. It’s so good!
For me lately it’s Tales of Maj’Eyal, Halls of Torment, and especially right now Shapez and FTL (with the Multiverse mod).
+1 for Halls of Torment. You won’t be able to think about anything else.
On a side note, how is Tales on Deck? Does it work well with the controller?
so glad to see this, I just got a steam deck this week and tales of majeyal is my all time favorite game ever. I’ve played for years and beat it once, my greatest achievement
I think it works just fine. You can solo mouse the whole thing with the right trackpad but I also have the hotbar mapped to the left pad.
Chained Echoes is perfect for this situation.
Wow, this looks really fun I’d never heard of it. Have you played Octopath Traveller?
I played about 10 hours of it but I never finished. I like Chained Echoes a lot more tbh.
I was looking at this game, and it was what literally made me pull the trigger on a steamdeck… It should be arriving today, and i hope to have the ssd swapped, reimaged, and get that installed so i can play some this evening!
Don’t Starve (Together), Cuphead, Stardew Valley, Dead Cells, Hollow Knight
These are my current go-tos
If you want a good list of battery-saving games:
Cool website, thanks for the link!
Return of Obra Dinn. Low power but high aesthetics. One of the most unique gaming experiences I’ve ever had and quite perfect for the Deck.
Yeah, it’s one of the best games ever. The Case Of The Golden Idol was good too but not quite as great.
I’m holding out for Shadows Of Doubt.
Here’s some recent games I enjoyed that all run well on Steamdeck
- fan patched (tweak romhack) copy of FFTactics:WotL (PSP) (the fan patch for this game fixes many of my grievances)
- Chrono Trigger (NDS) has some extras
- FF12 Zodiac Age (Steam) doesn’t burn through power too quickly (hasn’t gotten hot yet)
- FFTA (GBA)
- Persona 3 Portable (Steam) gets okay battery time
- Stardew Valley (Steam)
- FF7 (PS1)
- Inscryption (Steam) was quite good; the klunky controls work OK on turn base games
- Fallout: New Vegas (Steam) is very playable
- Hades (Steam)
Hollow knight!
I went camping a bit ago and loaded my Steam Deck with a bunch of games. The only game I ended up playing was Mega Man: The Sequel Wars. It’s a Genesis/Mega Drive remake of my favorite NES game Mega Man 4, with many more features. It was crazy fun, and my Steam Deck lasted the whole trip on one charge. If you don’t want a hard game, you can set it to Easy difficulty, turn on Infinite Lives, or activate any of the other cheats it provides.
Now that my Sequel Wars shill is out of the way, here are bunch of other battery efficient games:
- Emulating retro consoles, but it seems like you have that covered.
- Any Shantae game. Light-hearted, casual, well designed 2D platformers.
- Halls of Torment. Similar to Vampire Survivors, and I personally like it more. Worth it for the classic-PC-game art style alone.
- Boneraiser Minions: Also like Vampire Survivors, but instead of trying to see how many projectiles you can fire per second, you’re raising a small undead army to fight for you while you focus on dodging. Very fun.
- Ace Attorney. The first trilogy is entirely 2D and is basically a visual novel with puzzle elements. What some people do for visual novels on Steam Deck is limit the framerate to something miniscule like 15 fps. The battery lasts for an eternity.
- I know you said you don’t want to play Hollow Knight, but I’m physically incapable of doing a Steam Deck recommendations list without saying Hollow Knight.
This is amazing, I didn’t know this existed. Brings back memories of getting whooped by Pharaoh Man. That utilization of the genesis sound chip is 10/10 too
Most of the games I like to play on Deck have to target the 3-4 hours as my “Sweet Spot” so most of these will fall in there:
- Dredge
Dredge is billed as a cosmic horror fishing game, and it is super engaging, and works great with gamepad controls. I played through the entire thing on Steam Deck. I think I lowered some graphics settings to hit the sweet spot but it wasn’t any kind of extreme compromise due to the game’s low poly art style.
- The Messenger
You’re a ninja who gets sent on an adventure to defeat the demons who attacked your village. There’s some gameplay and story twists I don’t want to spoil, but even outside of that it’s a fun game with good platforming, new abilities, and boss battles. And it’s got a great sense of humor
- 3DS games
I don’t think I’ve played any that don’t offer at least 3+ hours. My go-to is Mario Kart 7, but pretty much anything in Citra is cool. My 3DS battery died out so I can only play tethered to the charger, so it’s nice to have an alternative - plus you can upscale them to 720p and play them in HD. Lots of fun!
- Hades
I really dislike most roguelike games, to the point that I lose hype now when I hear a cool indie game is one. Hades is one of the handful of exceptions for me. Combat feels very fluid and responsive, the visuals are gorgeous, and it sips battery.
A lot of people say they like the story and characters, though I’m not really clicking with it. But I haven’t finished it yet so maybe I’m just not at the cool story stuff yet? Either way, I’m enjoying myself quite a bit.
The Banner Saga is a superb turn-based strategy game. Slay the Spire is a deck-builder roguelike. Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn are also great.
Yeah, I keep Slay The Spire installed too.
Wildermyth is fun too but unfortunately the performance is awful.
Going on my first flight soon. Will games still launch in airplane mode? Do I need to do some prep?
I noticed that you have to launch some stuff for the first time when you’re not in airplane mode. So don’t just download a game and then hop on a plane without at least opening it first!
Reading what you previously like, I assumed you would prefer something that focus more on gameplay than (usually text-heavy) story.
If that’s the case, then I don’t think Ace Attorney or Professor Layton will be up your alley. Maybe Professor Layton is better because it has puzzles but tbh the games’ vibe feel geared more toward kids, I still enjoyed the mystery though.
My recommendation:
- CrossCode (I’m playing it right now, loving it so far. Classis JRPG visual but without the sluggish turn-based combat, I predict it’s going to be quite long)
- Gorogoa (Pure puzzle, kinda short)
I’ve been playing Endless Sky, which is a free space sim (lite). Been really enjoying it.
If you into city building and realtime strategy Widelands might be of interest for you. It is an open source game inspired by the Settlers II, but with much more depth and with online play. It is really freaking cool and you can play it for over 6h. It is installable via Discover on the desktop.
