2023 was a pretty amazing year for games, but I’m also interested to hear what didn’t meet expectations or didn’t run as well as you expected it to.

  • My most pleasant surprise on the Deck this year has been Shadow of War. It plays on high settings at a smooth, consistent 60FPS, even in big battles. As a fan of its predecessor, Shadow of Mordor, I’ve been loving it!

    Worst was definitely American Truck Simulator. I’d been interested in the game for a long while, and finally decided to buy it when it was only $5. I got about halfway through the tutorial before I refunded it and added it to my Ignore list.

    • Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War are both on my deck backlog, I bought the first one years ago and couldn’t get it to run on my computer at the time, and got the second one from a recent bundle.

      One of these days I’ll finish my installed games and play through them.

      • The UI was immediately very off-putting, feeling like a 90s sim game, and not in a good way. Definitely didn’t translate well to Steam Deck.

        Additionally, the lack of any direction whatsoever was very unappealing to me.

        Maybe I just don’t like sim games. It’s been decades since I was really into them, after all.