I purchased a Steam Deck one month ago, the 512GB model with the anti-glaring screen, and the system turned out to surpass my expectations far more than I initially thought. I assumed most games would require lot of hassle and tinkering in order to properly work, an idea which was fueled by my past experience with Linux (Mint) a decade ago. But the out-of-box compatibility list is actually far greater than I imagined, even surpassing the official list.
So far I've tested the followed games, for at least 5 hours each (Colors are meant to represent the official compatibility list between
Verified,
Playable and Unsupported/Unknown)
20 Minutes Till Dawn
Earth Defense Force 5 - Battery-hog if you let it run at (an inconsistent) 60fps. Online and spilt-screen co-op both work no issues.
Earth Defense Force World Brothers - Battery-hog if you let it run at (a more consistent) 60fps. It somewhat crashes when closing the game normally, but Proton Experimental fixes that.
DJ Max Respect V - Avoid using TDP limit because of the anti-cheat rootkit Xingcode3 (which also forces the game to be online-only)
Dungeon Warfare - There is a bug if you hang out too long in the level select/map screen but this problem also appears on the Switch port.
ElecHead
Hades
Nier Automata
Orcs Must Die 1
PixelJunk Monsters Ultimate
Tetris Effect Connected
Vampire Survivors
X-Morph Defense
Ace Combat 7 and Serious Sam Fusion seemed to work well but I have only tested one level on each (games were completed long ago on my desktop PC), so it doesn't exactly count as a matter of principle. I'm currently playing Elden Ring which works wonders so far with High preset (by default) and 30fps in refresh limit.
Looking forward to how Armored Core 6 and Earth Defense Force 6 will run on the Deck.
Beyond Good & Evil - Sole game so far that really required troubleshooting, by tinkering an .ini file (on desktop mode) in order to make the settings manager works, thus correcting the very low resolution. I was stuck playing the game in english dub, instead of the original french voice-acting however.
Granblue Fantasy Versus - Looking at the command list will softlock the game because of the preview thumbnails that use a specific video codec format.
Muse Dash - Seemed to work fine out-of-the-box for a couple of hours until I was hit by a saw during a song level (Glory Day track on Hard), which softlocked the game.
Pix the Cat - Control inputs stopped functioning in the last 20 seconds of Arcade Mode. Switching to Proton Experimental fixed the issue.
The Talos Principle - Upon a certain game boot, the graphic settings were changed to DirectX 11 on their own, thus leading to a window error of "Swap-chain image cannot be acquired from recreated" which prevented the game to run. Proton Experimental fixed that problem. Button prompts however do not show up correctly, displaying as <span_class> instead.
I haven't tried emulation much, only installed Retroarch, PCSX2 and PPSSPP through the desktop software manager. PCSX2 seems to have been improved compared to my last experience somewhere in 2020, as one of my niche japanese games (Fuuraiki 2) can be emulated beyond the start menu. Battery life is large enough from a full charge for those emulators that run on low-power, easily over 5-6 hours in use.
I also own the official dock and use it to connect to my large >30" PC screen (like a TV),in similar fashion of my Switch.
Valve needs to polish up a few things, such as giving a simple way to delete shader cache, which remain on the internal storage even if the games are uninstalled. There were also two times where the Steam Deck refused to properly wake up from sleep, nothing a good hard reboot with the power button couldn't fix, but still.
But overall, I'm very satisfied with the purchase.
