Steam Deck Review (Patreon)

(Hi, here's a review of Valve's Steam Deck, which I thought you might be into. I'll be streaming on Friday morning! Also the new Jeff Gerstmann Hall of Fame episode and a new podcast for people at the Co-Conspirator tier or above will be coming over the next week! Thanks for your support and I'll see ya soon!)

Ritual’s wise-cracking first-person shooter, SiN, was released in November of 1998. It hit just ten days before Valve released Half-Life. I remember the coverage at the time really trying to pit the two games against each other, like you kinda had to pick one. As someone who primarily played shooters for their multiplayer modes at the time, I went with SiN. It had a great, multiplayer-focused demo prior to release, and I played the heck out of it. Half-Life, by comparison, launched with some basic multiplayer functionality, but Valve seemed really focused on this whole “story” thing. I remember making it to somewhere around chapter six—the Blast Pit where you have to defeat a big alien tentacle thing—before largely losing interest in the whole thing. I’d return to HL here and there, but it was mostly to just get a few rounds of deathmatch in. It’d be a decade or more before I’d return to the first Half-Life. I think I finished Half-Life 2 before going back to the first game, in fact.

Eventually Valve became the Counter-Strike people and launched a storefront in 2003 to better facilitate the downloading and play of a game that’s still, like, one of the most popular video games in the world. I don’t think it’s overstating things to say that the 2003 launch of Steam, the eventual launch of Half-Life 2 in 2004, and the addition of third-party games in 2005 set PC gaming on an entirely new course.

In the years since, Valve just seems like a weirder and weirder company. Game developers go there and seemingly ship nothing for years and years. Stories of Valve’s extremely open, almost self-led nature end up being undercut with tales of office politics and cliquishness. At Valve, they say, you can work on whatever you want. But if you aren’t perceived to be working on the “right” thing, you might find your career bumping its way off track. Games get developed, killed, started over, killed again, and so on. The software side of Valve, at least, seems stuck. Fans give the studio a ton of rope, but at this point you seem to hear a lot more about the anger surrounding Team Fortress 2’s ongoing issues than you hear about excitement for, say, a new Portal. Someone, somewhere, is probably still bummed out about Artifact.

Valve no longer seems like a company focused on making video games for video games’ sake. Instead they ship games that seem designed to support the company’s ongoing hardware initiatives. This started in earnest with The Lab, which hit alongside the company’s foray into virtual reality. The Lab is a perfect little smorgasbord of VR activities that really helped new users get a feel for what VR and HTC’s Vive were truly capable of. After that, Half-Life: Alyx returned to the world that made the company famous and served as an updated look at what you could actually do in virtual reality.

This year Valve released Aperture Desk Job, another brief jaunt back into the universe of Portal that serves as a decent little intro to the controls and capabilities of the Steam Deck, Valve’s Linux-based handheld that feels like the natural culmination of the Steam Controller and Steam Machines, two fledgling projects that felt like misses at the time, but we almost certainly wouldn’t have this new handheld without the existence of those two projects.

The Steam Deck, in case you haven’t seen one, is a handheld PC that feels like someone accidentally crossbred a Nintendo Switch with an Atari Lynx. It’s big… but not unmanageably so. It has the standard sticks, buttons, and triggers you’d expect out of a modern control scheme, but it also includes two mouse-like trackpads and four buttons on the back in case you need extra functionality. For the most part, I think the on-device controls are pretty good, though I’m finding over time that the D pad could be better. It’s stiff in a way that makes it difficult to reliably hit the diagonals, and that’s impacting my enjoyment of some fighting games. I’m hoping it’ll “break in” a little bit over time, but we’ll see. Also, while we’re talking hardware, the fans can get a bit loud when they spin up. This hasn’t been a huge issue, personally, but I’ve definitely seen some complaints about how loud they can get.

The promise of the Steam Deck is immense. It’s a handheld computer that runs Steam, a storefront that contains so many games that I’m not even going to bother looking up the real number, because that number will already be wrong by the time you read this. It’s the de facto standard when it comes to finding a place where you can buy games for your Windows PC. But that’s the catch! The Steam Deck, by default anyway, doesn’t run Windows.

SteamOS is really just a fancy word for “a version of Arch Linux that Valve has heavily customized and built out to work better for running games.” The device boots into a friendly, console-like UI that splits the difference between desktop Steam’s look and feel and the controller navigation of Big Picture mode, the Steam interface built for use on TV screens. You can visit your entire Steam library here and pick out games to install. You can visit the store and buy new games. Most of the social features of proper Steam are here in one way or another, though some of the deeper tunnels into Steam eventually just open as web pages, which reduces the functionality of the controller and asks you to start using the touchscreen instead. It’s a little funky.

The other thing SteamOS does is ship with Proton, Valve’s game-focused compatibility layer that sits between the Linux-based OS and your Windows-based games and tricks the games into running. These efforts are built on top of Wine, a long-running open source program that performs the same functionality, but always felt like it was more geared at running desktop apps and not full-on, hardware-accelerated video games. Proton is incredible, and a ton of games run exactly as you’d expect that they would by just clicking play. But it isn’t compatible with 100% of the Steam library. So Valve has introduced a rating system that lets Deck owners know ahead of time if a game is verified to work on the Steam Deck or not. This goes from “verified,” implying that a game should “just work,” all the way down to “unsupported,” which means a game probably doesn’t work. Destiny 2 is a big example of an unsupported game, as its specific flavor of anti-cheat technology apparently doesn’t cooperate with running through a compatibility layer like Proton. By and large, the rankings will help you know exactly what you’re getting into before you buy or install. In practice, though, there’s a bit more going on here.

For starters, you’ll occasionally run into a verified Steam Deck game that doesn’t fully work. I’ve only encountered this myself with Dead or Alive 6, which ran extremely poorly upon first launch and had to be configured manually to run at the Steam Deck’s native resolution. On top of that, launching the story mode locks the game up at a black screen, forcing you to use the Steam interface to quit.

Then there’s the case of Outriders, a game that was listed as unsupported for months, but recently flipped to “playable” after a patch. As something of a reluctant Outriders fan, this was pretty exciting! But upon installing it, I was able to get the game to launch a couple of times as normal… but after that every subsequent launch just opens to a black screen.

On top of all that, a lot of games, new and old, have a question mark in the Steam Deck compatibility field, meaning they haven’t been tested yet. This, obviously, can go both ways. Ex-Zodiac runs perfectly for me. Capcom Arcade 2nd Stadium crashes immediately upon launch. One gets the feeling that Steam’s refund policy might be getting an extra workout as Steam Deck owners encounter occasional problems like these. But, as with many other things on the Steam Deck, even these examples I’ve giving here have a little catch.

This is a PC-ass PC. You can do whatever you want with it. It’s an open system, not a walled garden. So a community has sprung up around the Steam Deck to take on tasks related to documenting that compatibility in more detail than Valve’s system. Protondb.com is a great resource, whether you’re trying to see how well a game works before you buy it on the Deck or if you’re encountering issues with an existing game and want to see if there’s a workaround. Those workarounds come in various forms, from the ability to pick a specific version of Proton in case an older version somehow works better than the latest revision to going out and finding someone’s own custom version of Proton with additional fixes that Valve either hasn’t implemented yet or potentially can’t implement directly due to the use of closed-source solutions. The most popular of these is known as Proton GE. Once installed, a version of Proton GE integrates right into Valve’s own menus for picking a specific Proton version. Halo Infinite, which reports as unsupported by Valve’s standards, runs surprisingly well once you force it to run with Proton GE. Cut-scenes that didn’t play before, like Dead or Alive 6’s story mode, spring to life when run on top of GE. Mortal Kombat 11 fires right up. Destiny 2, however, remains locked out. Hey, maybe they’ll get there someday.

As someone who loves to tinker and has been using Linux on a command line off and on ever since I first got access to the internet back in 1993 or so, being able to really get in there and fuck around has been extremely fun. You can sudo your ass off! That said, having to do this at all sort of disqualifies the Steam Deck from being a truly mainstream device. I just think the support questions—be those questions to Valve or questions to you from the cousin you convinced to buy a Steam Deck who has no idea what a “Linux” even is—would be too frequent. Said cousin doesn’t want to hear “oh, yeah, Destiny 2 doesn’t run at all” and wouldn’t be able to process “OK, here’s how you drop to desktop mode, launch the Discover app, and install ProtonUp-Qt so you can grab the latest version of Proton GE so you can configure the game to use it so it’ll launch as expected.” It might look like a friendly, consolized experience, but I don’t think it’s something that I’d recommend to just anyone just yet.

In-game, the Steam Deck is an impressive device that feels quite powerful. It’s easy to get a lot of games running great on it with minimal to no configuration at all, largely because the system’s 1200x800 screen is low-res enough to keep frame rates high but high-res enough to keep games looking sharp on the screen itself while you play. It’s really a sight to behold, and half the fun I’ve had with it so far has come from being nicely impressed by just how damned good some games run on it. Also, its open nature provides a lot of fun for people who are willing to go deeper.

It’s almost trivially easy to install a host of emulators onto a Steam Deck and use them to play games that span decades of gaming history. A script called EmuDeck can do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to installing and configuring those emulators, leaving you to just provide the games, BIOS files, and, in some cases, decryption keys. I’ve been looking for a great handheld emulation device that cuts as few corners as possible for as many systems as possible, and having something like this, which chews through Dreamcast games quite well and, heck, can even run PlayStation 3 games reasonably well, is precisely what I’ve wanted ever since I decided to hack a Switch to see how well it could run RetroArch.

The downside of all this power, naturally, is battery life. I’m not Stopwatch Jones over here with times and wattage, but I will say that the Steam Deck drains like a laptop. You’ll get a handful of hours out of it at maximum power. It’s nice, then, that you can dig into the menus and limit games to lower frame rates and clock speeds, which is cool if you’re trying to get from point A to point B on a single charge. For most serious travelers, I’d probably recommend some kind of external power bank to help keep things going for as long as possible.

The Steam Deck is an incredible device and I’m having just as much fun tinkering around with games as I am actually playing them. But right now, there are aspects of the device’s interface and compatibility that make it feel a bit like it’s in Early Access. But most of my main issues with the Steam Deck exist on the software side, so as that part keeps getting revised and improved—and it sounds like the experience today is leaps and bounds ahead of what the Steam Deck was like just a few months ago—the entire thing will probably get easier to recommend.

Right now, though, I think it’s best suited for people who are OK with encountering compatibility issues and seeing what they can do to work around them. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to be some kind of Linux commando to get your money’s worth out of Valve’s handheld—my Linux experience is basic at best—but if you’re willing to hit some web pages and message boards you’ll find that you can play a lot more games on this thing than Valve’s current “verified” list claims. It even sorta runs SiN! I can’t wait see where it all goes from here.