Slay the Spire is a deck mainstay for me. A good run is 40 minutes to an hour.
It is also pretty easy on battery
Stardew valley can get like 5-6 hours of battery easy on the steam deck
How about SNES or GBA emulation? For what it’s worth, many flights now have a power outlet between the seats
Seconding the emulation idea. Plenty of outstanding SNES games out there.
Emulating Gamecube games is pretty low-spec if you compile the shaders beforehand. Battery life nets 2-3 hours on flights for me (Steam Deck). I have nearly 2000 hours of Animal Crossing GC combined, pls don't judge me 😅.
Chained Echoes. 16 bit RPG with great art and gameplay, but it's not hard on the battery and it has modern day QOL features.
100% support this. Feels like it was made for the deck. Gives me super big Game Gear vibes but like you said, with 2023 qol.
Tunic, hades, dead cells, some old rpg like fallout nev vegas or fable
can't recommend Tunic enough. Such an amazing game with extremely deep lore.
The Golden Path is probably one of the coolest puzzles I've done in a game, ever.
Check out Celeste if you haven’t already. For me it’s the perfect 2D platformer and works really well on the deck. Think I clocked around 100 hours on it just on it alone!
Pizza Tower is fun.
Stardew Valley would be my pick.
Hades was practically made for Steam Deck
Hades is great, but it's not very battery friendly for a 2d game in my experience.
You can turn on practically all the power saving features and it still runs great. I haven't timed it, but it can go on pretty long.
Play some factorio. You'll play it forever.
The factory must grow
I'm not.OP, but will also be on a long flight with steam deck soon. I keep hearing about Factorio and I think it's time to push the button.
Controls are more mouse/kb oriented, but there are a LOT of players that game on steam deck.
The factory must grow
I first played on kb/m, and was skeptical about using a controller. It works great though.
Most planes nowadays have a charging port where you can plug in your phone for the duration of the flight. Therefore, I recommend getting an emulator on your phone and playing games on it. Usually if I want something casual, I get an NDS emulator and play Pokemon Platinum or HGSS. Other recommendations are FFIV, Etrian Odyssey III, Shin Megami Tensei, DQ4, some of these are ports but they run well on DS emulator.
Bastion, Celeste, Hollow Knight, and Tunic are all great. I also really like emulation. I've been playing Tears of the Kingdom more on my Steam Deck than on my switch!
Baba is You can last for over 6 and a half hours - the longest battery life I've ever seen on my Deck. You just need to enable the minimum TDP limit.
I also believe Brotato lasts a lot, Pixross too.
Dead cells
If you prefer some story-heavy games, you can try Eastward. It has gorgeous art style and controls and UI are a great fit for handheld devices such as Deck and Switch. It takes ~15% battery a hour and can be completed in 10 to 15 hours.
If you're fine with longer games which will take 45-70 hours total, try some 2D JRPGs like Trails in the Sky FC (which also has nice touch input in menus!), Trails from Zero and Chained Echoes. All tree aren't battery-heavy at all.
Star Traders: Frontiers on Android. Space trading rpg with depth and story. A bit grindy bit there's so many paths to take it can suck up hours (mind you it's difficult and you will die permadeths with many characters, it's mind boggling how many ways there are to succeed, just many more ways to fail too. Great way to spend a five hour flight.
If you're flying commercial, you should be able to charge your steam deck while you fly.
Portal!
If you're into 2D platformers.
Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom.
If you like 2d platformers, I can recommend Swordigo for android. It's old and free and it is long enough that a 6 hour flight will only get you halfway through. It has some challenging but not impossible boss fights and trick jumps.
I don't know how draining Celeste was, but it can't be too much. Most indie games probably work.
Dunno if it's your jam, but I just picked up Dead Cells and it's super light weight power wise. Also, retro emulation is usually pretty good on the battery. Get Emudeck going and some GB or GBA games and have a blast.
I found civ5 was great to play when i when on a 4 hour flight.
Terraria plays really well IMO
FTL, Into the Breach, and Slay the Spire are mostly puzzle games -- but since they're roguelikes they have a little depth. Depends on what you mean.
I find them very replayable but I like puzzle games because I have bad hands and game controllers are not an option.
Tough to give anything concrete without preferences but I'll toss out a few. Chronicon is a great ARPG that's easy on the battery due to simple graphics (don't let them fool you). Voxelgram is 3d picross, if that happens to be your thing. Dicey Dungeons is a dice based roguelite that's totally full of charm.
Cat quest will take you about 5 hours to beat and is light to run. Streets of Rogue is good too.
Rogue Legacy. Good game, replayability, doesn't drain the batt
Dredge Dredge Dredge!!!! GOTY for me personally. And I'm normally a desktop pc gamer.
Zomboid or RimWorld. Both don't drain the battery too much and you won't even notice the time flying by.
Wall World
Emulated systems such as GameCube or psx work well on a long flight and you can have a lot of roms to suit the mood and can keep the tdp fairly low. Like 5 or 6
Wizard of Legend
I have no idea how well it performs on Deck but I need to get someone else to play this game
A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
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[Help] - A request for help or support.
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[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
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[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
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[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
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