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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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!
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.
