Motor Town, because I love Motor Town, it just has such good driving feel that it is hard to make a serious argument for another racing/driving game when I can open Motor Town, pick up a taxi passenger and start racing with zero thought or decisions having to be made. It is FANTASTIC as a relaxation and meditation tool, especially since you can either a) just suspend the Steam Deck and come back to your race or b) put the vehicle into autopilot and let it drive itself which fits the mobile, multitasking nature of the Steam Deck experience perfectly.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1369670/Motor_Town_Behind_The_Wheel/

I have been playing a lot of new games but one that particularly stood out to me on the steamdeck was the Descent spiritual successor Overload. WOW DOES THIS GAME FEEL GOOD with Steam Deck joysticks and if you mix a bit of gyro aim into it and bam you really can actually see deep into the future potential of the Switch/Steam Deck hardware form. Very very very quickly you can get locked in when using joysticks and gyro in this game and it is just a blast to zip around the environments using a totally new form of control that the original game that inspired it could never have dreamt of.

https://isthereanydeal.com/game/overload/info/

I had a big sailing rant on a sailing thread recently and admittedly some people were taken aback by how hilariously imbalanced my hyperfocus is, but the sailing game that I have kept playing the most and am most interested in following development of is definitely Sailwind which is like a relatively dry space trading open world game if space flight mechanics were actually deep and organic feeling in control.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1764530/Sailwind/

Also, honestly I think a lot of people just look at me weird for this but I play plenty of competitive shooters on the deck with joysticks + gyro and I love it. I used to play Battlebit, but I think the devs really lost their way with game balance. One game I have actually really been liking the realism/fun balance with is Operation Harsh Doorstep which is a free multiplayer realistic moddable shooter on the Unreal engine. It is in the process of adding vehicles and the gun mechanics are really good. More importantly, it feels like the kind of game where being hyper aggressive and rushing can be super powerful (as you can hip shoot an assault rifle accurately enough at close range to make a rush work if you are willing to empty your magazine) but also creeping around, being stealthy and projecting powerful kill angles with scoped weapons also feels similarly powerful. That balance is actually really hard to nail, even in a realistic game where you would think you could just fall back on modelling everything as realistically as possible and just hope the actual in optimal in game tactics end up being similar.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/736590/Operation_Harsh_Doorstop/

What I really appreciate About Operation Harsh Doorstop is that movement mechanics feel slick, it doesn’t feel like playing Arma 3 in the slightest, but that weapon handling feels very realistic so long as you pretend you are a super human with impossibly buff arms to hold your scoped long rifle aim steady at a target while standing lol.

You have to turn the settings WAYYY down on Operation Harsh Doorstop and I honestly just limit the frames to like 45 fps, but super realistic body cam shooters are all the rage these days… isn’t this kind of just like a lofi, Steam Deck equivalent? Why go through the process of simulating all the grit and haze, embrace the pixels lol. This game is built on the Unreal Engine and you can tell there is a lot of equipment built into the Unreal Engine particularly focused on making games able to scale down for potato gaming devices like the Steam Deck (as a AAA 3d game engine meant for shooters and action games fundamentally should in my opinion…) .

I will upload bindings for Operation Harsh Doorstep for the Steam Deck at some point, really the only thing I have changed currently is to create a toggle for gyro aim and to bind crouch, prone, and left/right lean buttons to the rear four buttons of the deck but the game deserves some good Steam Deck Bindings because it is genuinely a community project focused on creating lots of new opportunities for other developers and gaming communities to form ontop of the path it forges. It hurt to live through EA abandoning the wonderful wacky world of the Battlefield modding community and I honestly think it set vehicle based multiplayer shooters back a decade but that is a separate rant…

Edit a final fun note about Operation Harsh Doorstep is that the guy at the head of the project is very active on youtube and regularly covers similar games. I don’t know much about this guy, I am not a huge fan of his or anything, but what I can say is that he often gives a lot of air time to cool interesting indie developed shooter fps games, and he is very generous with his compliments to independent developers when he does give them the spotlight.

https://www.youtube.com/@Bluedrake42