What are some good games you play that you think are good for extended travel (i.e. battery friendly)? Emulation and TDP-adjusted options count!
What are your favourite games? What genres do you like? It would be difficult to recommend without knowing your preferences.
No context. I want to know yours. Sometimes, it’s good to explore genres you wouldn’t expect!
Ace Attorney Phoenix Wright
Fallout 3
Super Mario RPG (SNES)
Final Fantasy 6
Dragon Quest 3
What Remains of Edith Finch
Burnout 3
Mass Effect 1
Oo, I wouldn’t expect Fallout 3 to be lower power. But I guess being designed to run on 2008 hardware means it wouldn’t take much!
New Vegas runs better with modern hardware, so that’s a great choice too! Plus you can mod it more.
I’m old, so I like playing nostalgic NES era games. Super Mario, Double Dragon, Final Fantasy 1, Tetris classic, etc.
I’ve been going hard on Balatro lately. Fun rogue-lite deck-builder.
Same here. My only issue is sometimes I mix up some card suits due to the lower resolution and smaller screen size, and because I’m not paying close enough attention, end up playing a high card hand instead a flush.
Might help to turn off the scanline effect.
Otherwise it’s a perfect Deck game.
That and of course Slay The Spire, IMHO peak rogue like deck builder.
You can turn down everything to minimal (so maximal battery life) and have a perfect playing experience with that.
I really enjoyed Dave the Diver on my deck, I’m only 9h in but didn’t play for a while due to lack of time.
Another one that isn’t really my thing but uses practically no battery is Minecraft through PrismLauncher (I don’t like playing Minecraft on controller).
And some other games from my library that play nicely on deck, some might take a little bit more power:
- Celeste
- Geometry Dash (especially with the new platformer levels)
- Hue (might be a bit boring, I got it for free)
- Pole (might be a bit frustrating, I got it for free)
- Rayman Legends (there’s a certain patch to make it run without uplay)
- Stardew Valley
- Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion
- Turnip Boy Robs a Bank
- Undertale
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion was a fun one! I didn’t know Rayman Legends had a patch to skip Uplay; I’ll have to look into that!
Here’s the relevant comment on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/app/242550/discussions/0/3647273545686004759/#c1642052612837096572
Hollow Knight lasts a good amount of time on airplane mode (no online connection is needed)
Hotline Miami is a good one. Not super demanding and great for short play sessions
Been a while since I played that one!
Slay the spire and FTL are my two go-to travel games. They don’t use much battery and give hours of entertainment
Oh god. Do I chance another bout of FTL addiction? Makes me wonder if Into the Breach would be similarly low-power.
Can confirm that into the breach is similarly lowpower. It’s absolutely great for deck. It isn’t time-based like FTL is, which makes it even better suited. (FTL makes me miss a mouse sometimes)
I play Slay the Spire or Into the Breach on my phone on every flight I take. Both are light on the battery.
Openttd and openrc2 I can get 20 hours easy
Darkest Dungeon is probably top of my games not already mentioned, Slay the Spire is definitely up there too!
I haven’t actually benchmarked this, but I believe Dead Cells is pretty battery life friendly.
In a weird way it is the really really fast paced games I like the most when on the go.
If I play 5 mins of Voidigo, DIG or Enter The Gungeon, I can potentially experience a lotttt of gameplay .
Playing Xonotic against bots is a blast, Xonotic probably uses less battery than any other 3D game in existence lol. Similarly 5 mins of Xonotic is a LONG time.
Motor Town is a great driving game to play while traveling, so is Snowrunners.
I only know one of those! I’ll have to check those out.
Dwarf Fortress, Skyrim, Valheim
Outrun 2006 Coast 2 Coast, you’ll need to use wine/proton tricks to get the water rendering correctly or Ys games before 8.
How did you ever get the controls mapped correctly? I LOVE Outrun 2, but my ZR /ZL were mapped to a single Z axis, meaning I can’t break and use the gas at the same time, making drifting almost impossible :(
Worked out of the box for me, no need for steam input of anything else.
I’m currently traveling and really enjoying Against the Storm on the deck. Its easy to pop in for twenty minutes or just sink a couple hours into it. Runs super smooth on the deck.
It’s technically “unverified” for steam deck for some reason but one of my absolute favorites.
Heat Signature
It’s a top down shooter roguelike with tight controls and and tons of replayability and it’s extremely battery friendly, i remember being trapped in the woods for a few days and I was able to get 8 or so hours of play from that game
Do you have to use the touchpads?
Yo thank you for the suggestion, this game looks hilariously amazing. For anyone else, its also in space and looks like a darn blast if you love space themes. Only 15$
