Top 20 games played on Steam Deck in the April 2024, sorted by playtime
The biggest surprise is fallout 76. I thought it was universally disliked? Is it the fallout TV show causing it?
The TV show for sure helps. But people are playing it because they like it. There was a ton of work put into the game since its original release.
Considering every Fallout game from the last two decades made top 20, I’d say yeah it’s probably the show lol.
It has a really bad release. A few patches in, it turned into a good enough game. It’s still nowhere near as good as the heyday of Fallout with 2 and Tactics, but it’s a good enough game.
Does it feel like a Fallout game yet? I remember playing it and kind of hoped it would feel like a co-op Fallout, but it’s just another survival and crafting game.
To be fair, most Fallout games at this point don’t feel like “Fallout.”
I tried playing it, at least a year after release? And within minutes I had no idea what I was supposed to “do” to where to “go” - it just dropped you. I mean to a point that’s “open world”, a genre I enjoy, but something was just missing.
how did u miss the quest to look for the overseer? or at least the wayward quest
Must be, FO3, FO4, and FO:NV are all present too
FO4 also got an update to add an Enclave mission.
I bought it on sale for like 5 or 10 bucks. Play it on my deck. After they added some npc quest lines, and if you don’t mind being pay locked out of some customizations, it is an ok game.
I love the fallout universe and getting to experience some lore from so close to the bombs falling. But it is my least favorite out of all of the games. I even enjoy 4 better than it.
I’ve noticed that the games that dominate this list every month are very long games designed to suck players into their gameplay loops for hundreds of hours. Nothing wrong with that, but it makes me wonder if there are short games that are very popular, yet get left off of this list just because they end in 10 hours. I would like to see a top 20 list sorted by number of players rather than playtime.
So far I have a habit of playing the same game for longer when I play in short bursts on the train and sometimes bus to work. Games like those probably just work really well for commuting.
Surprised to see The Witcher 3 still on that list. And the fact that Stardew Valley is number one also is surprising to me.
It would have been interesting to see the actual total hours for each game as well.
Stardew Valley just got a huge update recently, I don’t find it that surprising! It’s a great update.
Stardew Valley just got a huge update recently, I don’t find it that surprising! It’s a great update.
Ah okay. I just assumed it was the next Minecraft for kids and that’s why it’s population/popularity was hanging on at a high level.
I have like 2k hours in that game. It’s insanely deep with a chill gameplay loop. I’ve exclusively played single-player.
It’s insanely deep with a chill gameplay loop. I’ve exclusively played single-player.
I’ll have to get off my ass and try playing it, been seeing it around forever.
Stardew valley released a new version recently and there are a lot of mods for it
I played the entire game through on the deck. It played excellently.
I played the entire game through on the deck. It played excellently.
Nice! I’ve been meaning to give it a try, but I never get around to doing it. I’ll have to make more of an effort.
Yeah it was a blast, like, incredibly pleasurable to play.
The controller layout and the steam deck layout just mapped excellently. Everything felt incredibly organic, almost as if the game was designed for the deck.
I’m on BG3 now and its not nearly as good of an experience. The graphics feel lacking compared to W3. I’m not sure I’ve got it tuned correctly. The key mapping is ‘so so’; I play city skylines and its way better mapping for a mouse based click and do stuff game.
The key mapping / controller layout and zoom / perspective questions are the make it or break it for any game on deck. I really like the steam deck controller set up (in-spite of the fact that before the deck, I’m almost exclusively a keyboard and mouse gamer). I like how flexible the set up is, but I feel like not enough games are taking advantage of the options and the community layouts are hit and miss.
Witcher 3 player here, was on my to play list for a long time, plays really nicely on the deck and is a long play
Hades and Isaac are surprising. They’re both old enough that I would have thought they wouldn’t be flush with players right now. The fallout stuff makes sense, given its fanbase and the show’s influence. I wonder if I should go back and try to 100% either of them now…
I think news of Hades 2 development might be sparking some interest
Isaac was the first game downloaded on my deck and is still a daily comfort game.
I know I went back to some older lighter titles on the steamdeck. People might just be wanting to experience Hades and Isaac on a handheld.
Some of those Hades hours were from me. Just have two achievements left but one of them will require skilling up a bit.
Balatro made me have a 7/4 rhythm playing in my head 24/7
Balatro is a legal drugs.
I got Balatro but I didn’t get the hype, can you offer some advice on how to enjoy it?
Edit: from the replies I have gathered I just nerd to play it more, thanks all!
It’s kinda complicated I also didn’t get it at first playthorugh. But more I play more I get hooked.
I don’t think it clicked big time until about 10 hours in for me. I feel like I’m finally mastering it at 40 hours, but I’m sure I haven’t discovered every play style yet.
My advice would probably be to try every wild idea for a deck. It’s easy to find one deck build that basically works and try to recreate it each run, but that’s pretty boring. Make yourself pick up a joker you wouldn’t normally use and try to make it work. Also go for planet cards early in the run, the boost they give often moves the hand up like 4 places on the score list, making it more viable and fun to do something other than just chasing the regular high scoring hands.
There’s a degree of meta progression to the enjoyable part of the game which is creating crazy joker combos, unlocking interesting decks, and watching the numbers go up. It only happens a little while into the game after what is essentially an extended tutorial. At first I thought it was too hard and kinda sucked until I unlocked more stuff and it clicked, now I have 60 hours in the game.
@Amanduh I bounced off of Balatro the first few times I tried it too. I was a little confused about what I was doing and what my end goal was. I’m honest;y not sure what clicked, but I’ve been hooked ever since.
This is only because they exclude me as an outlier putting in ten thousand hours of Project Zomboid on the Deck.
Do you really have 10000 hours playing PZ on the deck or just overall playing the game? I mean, the deck came out two years ago, seems highly unlikely you put all those hours on the deck specifically.
I’m exaggerating for comedic effect. I have ~300 hours in PZ all on the Steam Deck. Not the game I was expecting to play on it but it works pretty well.
Yeah, from what I played of it back in the day it does not strike me as deck friendly but good to know it works well on the deck
I’ve also played a fair bit of it on my Deck. I’d say it plays pretty nicely, though using the console based controls just felt so unintuituve to me so I’m just using the regular PC controls + some custom bindings.
It’s still a little clunky with a controller but the touch screen really helps to fill in the gaps. I also map the paddle buttons to zoom in and out since that’s really important.
It wouldn’t take much to make it much more controller friendly. Maybe another ten years of development time. 😀
If you only sleep 8 hours a day, you could get 10,000 hours in a year. That doesn’t account for working, bathing, or other tasks that may interfere with Precious.
No, you can’t. A year has 8760 hours
Yeah, that should have said two years.
(24-8)*365 = 5840
Helldivers 2 on higher difficulties has me hitting 15fps sometimes. It’s so damn tough to play on steam deck because of the quality, but it’s honestly amazing it runs half decent at all.
You tried these? Works a treat for me:
I only play on 5 and below on the Deck.
This list is badly missing Rimworld.
Kinda awkward on steamdeck no? Small screen and all
Not at all. I heard mixed things about Rimworld on the deck. Most of it was about the controller schema.
Reality is (for me) that it plays great. The controls by default are well assigned and it works well.
The screen size isn’t an issue for me either. It’s mostly subjective but for me it’s a knock out.
They’ve made a steam deck friendly version of the UI iirc
Hmm that’s weird, emulation station is missing :)
I’ve been gaming fairly strictly on deck for everything, even if I have to trial and error a custom control scheme. That said, I’m switching to desktop for bg3. I keep missing details that actually have visual cues I didn’t know about until someone actually pointed them out to me.
I’m surprised by Helldivers. I can’t imagine that it runs very well.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has been on this list since the release of the steam deck because the 3 people still trying to play that game on the deck haven’t finished loading the world yet
That one really surprised me, does it have something like a render scale slider? Unless there’s a baked-in way to achieve ultra potato graphics, I just can’t imagine it’s playable.
But shit man, the numbers are right there! There’s gotta be something to it. Maybe people are just putting up with ~20fps averages or some shit.
I definitely put up with shit graphics and potato framerate for Baldur’s Gate 3
Man I’d render at fucken 800x600 if it got me like a solid 50 fps
It runs great! Granted I turned all the graphics to minimum, but the game still looks good and runs great. Only problem is if there’s just an absurd amount of particle effects it can get a little frame-y, but I play at the second-highest difficulty (so lots of enemies) and frames only happen every 20 matches or so at most
Ok, what am I doing wrong that Fallout 3 isn’t working? It just crashes on start.
Honestly, if you own new Vegas have a look at tale of two wastelands. It ports over all of fallout 3 into the new Vegas engine, and with it brings all the upgrades that the nv engine has, like stability (after installing the 20 or so mods needed), iron sights, and all the increased mod support fnv has.
When I got the Steam Deck I had to install and set up FNV. Once I did that, F3 would work. I would have assumed they had fixed that since then but maybe not? Worth a try.
It seemed to be because the pre-launch scripts weren’t executing. Installing the other game ran similar scripts which fixed it somehow.
FNV worked OOTB.
They are saying that once Fallout New Vegas was installed FO3 also installed fine
Maybe you find some hints here: https://www.protondb.com/app/22300?device=steamDeck (Fallout 3 user reports for Steam Deck) or https://www.protondb.com/app/22370?device=steamDeck (Fallout 3 Game of the Year Edition user reports for Steam Deck)
Definitely gonna have to install NV on my deck that finally arrived yesterday and see how good it is on deck… even though I am still nowhere near done with my melee build on my desktop and will need to copy all my bug fixing mods and settings from there as well.
Maybe I’ll do an unarmed build where I side with Yes Man while taking out as many factions as possible.
Never played FNV before and just killed Vulpes Inculta in Nipton and the game got so hard after this. I wouldn’t have played FNV if it wasn’'t for the Steam Deck, but it’s great so far.
Pissing off the legion is one of my favorite things to do in every playthrough. I’ll take the chance to shoot those jerks every single chance I get.
It’s so much fun to randomly get ganked because a group of legionaries pops out of the trees. You’d think my followers would be a good distraction, but they really gun for you after you brain Volpes and [redacted].
Laughs in ED-E/Boone overwatch squad
Those two will drop incoming Legion goons from outside of render range. Boone will jump-scare me with sudden camera pans to exploding Legion heads while I didn’t even know combat was happening.
Haven’t gotten ed-e yet in my current play through, but Boone and the dog aren’t the best combo for protection IME.
NV is great on the deck! I started up a fresh file a year ago on the deck as a psycho addicted knife wielding charismatic serial killer. Probably my favorite fallout.
It’s the same games for the most part.
