Welcome to this week’s long edition of the Steam Deck Weekly. I’ve been playing quite a few games on Steam Deck over the last few weeks, and have finally gotten around to re-testing a few I wanted to review before but held off on covering for some reason or another. This week, I’ve done a few reviews and Steam Deck gameplay impressions before we get into the many interesting Steam Deck Verified games including a few unreleased ones, EVO Japan 2024 news, and more.
Steam Deck Game Reviews & Impressions
The remake of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons was finally updated and fixed for Steam Deck a bit after launch with it now being Steam Deck Verified. I was planning on reviewing it this week regardless after the update, but Valve’s Steam Deck Verification definitely is timed well. I also have been enjoying Another Crab’s Treasure (On Steam Deck and PS5), ENDER MAGNOLIA’s early access release, trying out a new indie idle game, and more for today’s article.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake Steam Deck Review
The original Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a legendary game that I’ve gifted to many friends over the years. I’ve played it on just about every system, and I always thought it aged brilliantly. When Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake was announced, I was very confused. I thought it just needed a remaster or enhanced port for modern systems, but didn’t think it needed a full remake. When I got it to review around launch, I saw the value in the remake, but it had issues. Fast forward to today, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake has been optimized quite a bit for PC, and it is even Steam Deck Verified.
Revisiting Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons through this remake has been really interesting. I initially thought just a few things changed as I played the game, but comparing it with the original side by side showed how much has improved in the remake. The team almost perfectly matched what I had in my memory of the original, and that’s one of the best things a remake or remaster can do as far as I’m concerned. The dual analog gameplay feels innovative even today, and I still think the puzzles are great. If you’re new to this game, you’re in for a treat with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake. The new arrangements in the soundtrack were good enough to get me to buy it on Steam as well.
At launch, you could adjust some graphics settings for Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake on Steam Deck to try and get it to run fine on the handheld. With a recent update bringing Steam Deck-specific optimizations, the game now defaults to a specific preset for Steam Deck, but you can opt for custom settings as well. The auto-detected preset includes mostly low and medium settings for detail and quality with FSR set to performance. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake supports HDR on Steam Deck OLED as well, and it looks very good.
On Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED, if you want to use the default preset in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake, I recommend capping it to 30fps to play with as stable an experience as possible. I left it on that and played the game, and even invited a friend using Steam Remote Play Together to try out the new co-op mode. It works fine in the testing I did.
When it comes to accessibility options, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake has highlight and silhouette effect options, colorblind options, screen shake options, and the ability to invert specifically old or young brother camera movement for the X and Y axes.
My only complaints are some visual elements don’t work as well for me like the characters’ faces. These aren’t bad, but I was hoping for something better.
If you already played Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, this remake isn’t really worth buying at full price. If you’re new to the game, I recommend this remake as your first experience. After a few updates and improvements on Steam Deck, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake is definitely worth grabbing. I’ve enjoyed revisiting it after many years, and the co-op feature has been a nice surprise, though I still think it works best as a solo experience.
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake Steam Deck Review Score: 4/5
Rusty’s Retirement Steam Deck Review
If you look up what Rusty’s Retirement is going for, you’re probably wondering why anyone would even play it on Steam Deck. Rusty’s Retirement is an idle farming simulator that has been designed to be played on the bottom of your screen. You can look at it as either a productivity killer or something designed to keep you occupied while you wait for something to load or while you’re doing something else. A few updates in, Rusty’s Retirement is superb at what it sets out to be, but how is it on Steam Deck? I’m going to cover that here.
Rusty’s Retirement has you growing crops, producing biofuel, automating things, and more while you’re doing something else in real life on your computer. It works best on PC or Mac, though the latter needs a bit of work. You do everything through clicking or keyboard shortcuts, and Rusty’s Retirement has lovely pixel art and relaxing music. It really is a game I’d love to see hit iOS at some point.
On Steam Deck, Rusty’s Retirement works out of the box, but you need to use a layout meant for WASD and mouse. Aside from that, the “sitting on the bottom of your screen” doesn’t work too well. You could try and tweak things like the position and zoom to play on Steam Deck, but you’re really going to have to settle for playing it with the top half of your screen black. I tested this in desktop mode and it didn’t seem to work correctly with part of the game blacked out. If this does get resolved, I’ll post about it. I modified the WASD and mouse Steam Input layout to add buttons for zooming in and out. Once I got used to this, Rusty’s Retirement felt a lot better.
If you do want to grab Rusty’s Retirement to play on Steam Deck, I recommend using a combination of touch controls for a virtual mouse and the layout to get the best experience. On my MacBook Air, I set the Taskbar to 160 px so it was above the dock when I played it there. This is useful if you want to play using the horizontal or vertical option as you can use the Taskbar or Sidebar buffer options in the game settings to move it so it isn’t overlapping with the dock. I also like the focus option included.
While Rusty’s Retirement is definitely better suited to playing on PC or Mac (this has its own issues), I’ve enjoyed dipping into it on Steam Deck. I hope it eventually gets proper Steam Deck support letting you play it like a normal idle game rather than one that’s designed to be played at the bottom of your screen. This may go against what it was designed for, but that’s the only path I see forward for it on Steam Deck. As for what it aims to do, Rusty’s Retirement is excellent and definitely worth buying right now. It is a few small updates away from being perfect right now.
Rusty’s Retirement Steam Deck Review Score: 4/5
Another Crab’s Treasure Steam Deck Review
When Another Crab’s Treasure was announced, I wrote it off as one of those games that might be funny for an hour or so without thinking much about it since. Fast forward to its newest trailers and the recent launch, I’m happy to have been completely wrong. Not only is Another Crab’s Treasure excellent and challenging almost all the way, but it also looks, feels, and sounds great on Steam Deck. I’ve been playing Another Crab’s Treasure on consoles as well, and I’ll also cover how it feels on Nintendo Switch and PS5 in this Steam Deck-focused review.
Another Crab’s Treasure is a soulslike that blends humor, challenge, and more together to be one of the best surprises of the year so far. It is a very self-aware game with how it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and also how it references FromSoftware’s games both in gameplay and in text. Another Crab’s Treasure also manages to bring its own charm into the action with its designs, voice acting, and excellent soundtrack. I initially thought it might be a lot shorter when I was in one large area and thought it would be over, but it wasn’t even halfway done by then, and I loved everything that followed from there through bosses and platforming.
As a soulslike, Another Crab’s Treasure has bonfires, souls, challenging enemies, hard bosses, and a lot of freedom with exploration. When I played Lies of P last year and loved it, I didn’t think we’d get a soulslike I enjoyed as much this soon, but here we are. This game needs a physical release on console (once the Switch port gets fixed). In addition to collecting shells, upgrading, and more, you can also unlock or find cosmetics to use, and some of them are hilarious. There’s even one obvious reference that I unlocked as soon as I could.
The humor in Another Crab’s Treasure also extends to the accessibility options. I didn’t look at these initially, but when a friend told me you can literally equip a gun, I had to check these out. You can make the game much easier and even use the gun as a shell making things a cakewalk, but I think this mode needs a bit of tweaking for the gun taking up a lot of the screen real estate. An FOV increase would’ve helped here for those who use that assist option. I recommend looking at the assist options for dodge, parry, durability and damage options. You can even change the game speed to make it easier or recover your microplastic (souls) here.
At launch, I ran into a few issues in Another Crab’s Treasure on Steam Deck, but it has since improved quite a bit. It is officially Steam Deck Verified now as well. The PC version of Another Crab’s Treasure on Steam Deck lets you adjust resolution (with 800p and 16:10 support on Deck), display mode (borderless, fullscreen, windowed), graphics quality (low, medium, high), texture quality (lowest, low, medium, high, highest) and toggle the following settings: motion blur, ambient occlusion, text effects, sun shafts, bloom, anti-aliasing, and v-sync. After playing it on Steam Deck over the last week daily, I’ve settled for aiming for the best visual quality with a 30fps target. This frame rate really dipped only while touching a Moon Snail Shell (bonfire) with the particle effects or when entering a new area as a minor hitch. If you want to aim for 60fps, I noticed it doesn’t hold that 100%, but you can turn things to low and play with a 60fps cap.
Another Crab’s Treasure on Switch has been quite miserable to the point where I gifted my friend who bought it on Switch the game on Steam after just an hour playing it. I do not recommend touching the Switch version right now. Another Crab’s Treasure on PS5 has been mostly perfect. I only had some hitching loading into a new area. Other than that it felt great and has decent DualSense haptics. It loads much faster than Steam Deck and Switch as expected and has PS5 Activity Cards support.
Aside from a few collision or clipping issues and two instances where I got stuck under something with no way out except the “die instantly” option that I could see, I have no real complaints with Another Crab’s Treasure on Steam Deck. It is gorgeous on the Steam Deck OLED and is a perfect handheld game to play without visual compromise on Steam Deck.
Another Crab’s Treasure is superb. It has a few polish issues holding some areas of it back, but I can’t recommend it enough at its asking price right now. I’ve already spent nearly 25 hours with it across platforms, and can’t wait to keep doing more as I play it on Steam Deck and PS5. Just avoid the Switch version for now. Another Crab’s Treasure feels like this year’s Lies of P at a smaller scale, and that’s about the best compliment I can give a soulslike right now.
Another Crab’s Treasure Steam Deck Review Score: 4.5/5
ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist Steam Deck Early Access Review
I adored Ender Lilies when I played it on basically every platform. When ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist was announced, I kept thinking about possible areas the team could build on the original, but I also just wanted more of what I could in Ender Lilies. Fast forward to this week and I’ve finally played the current early access version of ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist. Right now, this feels like more of an enhanced and lengthy demo than an early access release though, but for the initial version, it is sufficient. With that caveat out of the way, ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist gave me the same feeling as the Hades II Technical Test where I can’t believe how polished and fun the sequel feels.
If you’ve not played the prior release, ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist is a metroidvania action RPG where you aim to save humans and homunculi. You take control of Lilac who is an attuner who can save Homunculi. After waking up underground and trying to find anything outside of the enemies trying to attack you during the tutorial, you come across your first ray of hope, and this takes you to the save spot after which the real game begins. ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist combat feels great even from the early parts of the game. Right now, you get access to a few main areas with boss fights, enemies, and more included. It took me just over 3 hours to experience what I think this has to offer so far.
Visually, ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist is mostly great with some aspects I thought were lacking compared to Ender Lilies. It is possible these will change through updates, but I’ll say the art in this early access version has some higher highs but also some lower lows than Ender Lilies right now. Animation work and character designs are excellent as expected from this team.
I was so happy that ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist features new music from Mili, one of my favorite groups out there. I’ve even been enjoying their music in Library of Ruina as I work my way through the Switch and PS4 versions. Aside from the music, the audio in general is very good. ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist feels very polished for an initial early access release.
On my Steam Deck OLED, I left the game on its default preset and it looked incredible while running with the 90fps target. It fully supports 16:10 and 800p on Deck, but also has ultrawide aspect ratios included. For graphics and display options, you can adjust resolution scale, toggle v-sync, enable or disable a frame rate limit, use anti-aliasing (FXAA or MSAA), adjust AA quality, effects quality, and post-processing quality. I didn’t change anything and just stuck to the default to play at 90fps with native resolution. I didn’t test playing on my 1440p 144hz monitor yet, but I will do that when I revisit the game in the future.
ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist also properly shows DualSense button prompts when I plugged in my DualSense controller. There seems to be keyboard support as well going by the options, but I didn’t test this.
In its current state, ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist in Steam Early Access feels more like a lengthy demo. What I’ve played is amazing and it absolutely shines on the Steam Deck OLED right from day one. I cannot wait to play more of it and see how it evolves through updates in the early access period. If you enjoyed Ender Lilies, ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist is essential already as long as you’re ok with the content included in the early access version so far.
ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist Steam Deck Review Score: TBA/Early Access
Armed and Gelatinous: Couch Edition Steam Deck Impressions
Armed and Gelatinous: Couch Edition from Three Flip Studios hit Steam and consoles this week. Shaun is doing a review of the game, but I wanted to briefly cover how it feels on Steam Deck. Armed and Gelatinous: Couch Edition is a new enhanced version of an arcade game that blends party game mechanics, sports, and more together for mini-games playable solo or with others online and offline. Out of the box, it includes quite a few options available, and you can even fill up the remaining player slots with different CPU players of varying difficulties if you want.
On Steam Deck, Armed and Gelatinous: Couch Edition doesn’t work without swapping to another Proton version. I immediately tried Proton Experimental (bleeding edge) and it booted up fine. After that, it just works fine at 800p 90hz without needing any more tweaks. It even supports Steam Remote Play Together, but I couldn’t properly test that with more than 1 person right now. For some reason, my friend took over 2 controllers at once over Remote Play Together when I tried on different occasions. Hopefully this can be fixed.
If you were considering Armed and Gelatinous: Couch Edition to play on Steam Deck, I can safely say that it looks and plays well on the handheld, but stay tuned for Shaun’s review of the game in the future.
News and Trailers
The major news of the week comes from EVO Japan 2024 with new trailers, DLC dates, and more. Let’s get into it. At EVO Japan, SNK revealed that Marco Rodrigues, assistant instructor of Kyokugen Karate, will be joining the roster of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. The game is in development for an early 2025 release, and it continues to look incredible. Watch the new character trailer below:
For Street fighter 6, Capcom took to EVO Japan 2024 revealed that Akuma, the final character of the Year 1 Pass, joins the game on May 22nd with an incredible trailer. If you have the Deluxe or Ultimate Edition, Akuma will be available at no additional cost. He will be available as a standalone DLC as well. Watch Akuma’s trailer below:
Bandai Namco Entertainment on the other hand revealed not only a new DLC character for Tekken 8, but a roadmap as well. Lidia Sobieski will be joining the game as the second DLC character of the current season. The roadmap revealed that new story mode content in the works for the game with adjustments to the battle system coming this spring. A new free update is coming including the Seaside Resort stage and a photo mode in spring as well. Eddy’s story mode will be added in autumn. Watch the Lidia and Season 1 roadmap trailer below:
The final notable reveal from EVO Japan is Guilty Gear Strive Season 3’s final DLC character, Slayer, who will be joining the game on May 30th for PS5, Xbox Series X, PS4, Xbox One, and Steam. Slayer looks amazing as expected for DLC characters in Strive, but I’m more excited about his theme. Watch the Guilty Gear Strive Slayer DLC character trailer below:
We are finally just over a month away from Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance, one of my most anticipated RPG releases of the year, and Atlus continues to reveal more about the upcoming enhanced release. I’m also excited to listen to the 89 new tracks in the Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance soundtrack. Watch the new trailer for a taste of the soundtrack and more story and gameplay moments below:
D3Publisher finally announced that Earth Defense Force 6, the newest main game in the series, arrives on July 25th in the West for Steam, PS5, and PS4 with a standard and deluxe edition planned. Steam pre-orders go live next month. I’ll be playing this on both Steam Deck and PS5 for sure. Watch the Earth Defense Force 6 release date trailer below:
Devil Blade Reboot, a reboot of a 1996-released Japan-only shmup is finally releasing worldwide on May 24th by Shigatake who has worked on notable games from Vanillaware that I love. Devil Blade Reboot looks sublime in its newest trailer with its gorgeous art and gameplay. Watch it below:
This week, Bandai Namco Entertainment also showcased a new DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO trailer ahead of its launch for current platforms. This trailer highlights more of the game’s roster, character abilities, new features, and combat coming. DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO is the sequel to the DRAGON BALL Z: BUDOKAI TENKAICHI series. Watch the new DRAGON BALL: Sparking! ZERO trailer below:
Playism announced that The Detective Reaper from solo developer SHIZU KANO UMI will be launching worldwide for Steam on May 25th. It includes bits of roguelites, deck building card games, and logic puzzles together for a unique deduction adventure game. I love the aesthetic and will definitely check it out later this month. Watch the The Detective Reaper trailer from Playism below:
After a few delays, Paradox Interactive is finally launching its simulation game Life By You on Steam Early Access next month on June 4th. Check it out on Steam here. I hope it ends up being a great take on The Sims formula and that Paradox supports it for a long time.
SEGA’s Total War: Pharaoh is getting a huge free campaign map update with reworked gameplay, new content, and more for the Bronze-Age collapse. New regions will also be added with the playable factions of Babylon, Assyria, Mycenae, and Troy. A release date has not been announced for this update. Creative Assembly also launched a new DLC for Total War: WARHAMMER III this week in Thrones of Decay with loads of new content alongside a free update for the game. Watch the launch trailer below:
The final notable news from the week is from Valve. Valve released Proton 9 to the public with additional game support and fixes for specific titles. GamingOnLinux has the full list and details on how to ensure you are up to date with Proton if you were on a beta or something else.
New Steam Deck Verified & Playable games for the week
#BLUD, Braid Anniversary Edition, and Hades II get Steam Deck ratings ahead of their launches alongside notable games I’ve been playing like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Brothers: A Tale of Two Suns Remake, and ENDER MAGNOLIA getting Steam Deck Verified this week. Check out the full list of notable Steam Deck Verified and Playable games below:
- 1000xRESIST – Playable
- #BLUD – Playable
- Bendy: Secrets of the Machine – Verified
- BIOMORPH – Playable
- Braid, Anniversary Edition – Verified
- Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Remake – Verified
- Dungeons 4 – Verified
- ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist – Verified
- Hades II – Verified
- Lorelei and the Laser Eyes – Verified
- MUSICUS! – Verified
- The Game of Sisyphus – Playable
- World’s End Club – Verified
- Yars: Recharged – Playable
Steam Deck Game Sales & Discounts
There are quite a few sales right now on Steam through publisher specific ones and general themed discounts across the store. Highlights include the new EA publisher sale (make sure to properly check if a game that uses EA’s app works on Steam Deck before buying), the Farming Fest 2024, Total War Franchise Sale, Star Wars day sale, Playstack publisher sale (Grab Golden Idol for sure and 10% off Balatro), and 66% off on Hades ahead of Hades II’s Early Access release date.
That’s all for this week’s longer edition of the Steam Deck Weekly. As usual, you can read all our past and future Steam Deck coverage here. If you have any feedback for this feature or what else you’d like to see us do around the Steam Deck, let us know in the comments below. I hope you all have a great day, and thanks for reading.