I unboxed my new Steamdeck over the weekend. It's a very cool device, though it is host to several rough edges.
That's part of the charm, however. It isn't a polished walled-garden console, but a fully functioning Linux PC in a hand-held form factor -- for that I am willing to make many concessions!
With my newfound ability to play shiny AAA super-graphics games on a handheld device I dove into... The Excavation of Hobb's Barrow, an indie pixel-art point-and-click adventure (akin to the Monkey Island games).
The game was good! It's certainly not the deepest game or the best ending, but the whole game is voiced, the puzzles were reasonable, the pacing wasn't horrible, and I was rarely lost for long. It scratched an itch I didn't realize I had!
Back to the deck -- besides playing steam games it has the ability to drop into a full-blown KDE desktop and mess around. I understand that there's some default limitations and a read-only root filesystem but that's not impeding anything I'd want to do on this kind of device, and unlocking it is only a single command.
Besides doing the expected "play the games in my library", I've managed to:
- SSH into my dev box (bluetooth keyboard had zero issues)
- Install Chiaki to use the steamdeck for PS4 remote play (works better than the Vita!)
- Have my brother share his very large steam library with me, allowing access to his games if he's not online
- Install and configure a GBA emulator
All this is stuff I could just do on a Linux laptop, but besides the SSH bit I usually wouldn't since I'm not a fan of laptop / desk gaming. I can certainly say I'm a fan of this device, however!