Been playing the demo for Final Fantasy Resonance!

It’s a beefy demo, with about 7 hours of content, and the save data transfers over.

I played the heck out of Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, which is where most of this games assets come from. But this is a non-gacha game reimagining of it in 3D 2D, like octopath. So I’m really excited for it. Probably won’t pick it up on Day 1 for 50 USD, but it’s the first launch day game I’ve been tempted to grab for full price in a long time.

Steam Deck here:

• No Man’s Sky. The new update is great, and the expedition is just moving. Hard to believe it’s been 10 years since the game release. So much has happened since, and now I can enjoy the universe, in the palms of my hands. I’ve tried playing at the lower settings at 30 FPS for better battery life and less noise, and it’s actually pretty decent and more relaxing that way.
• ARC Raiders. Again, 30 FPS. 40 FPS is definitely doable here, but I think the visual fidelity can degrade so far this way that it can be too difficult to roam the more open areas and properly respond to threats: you may simply not see them because of the lower resolution you’ll have to run it at to keep that 40 FPS stable. And the new update is amazing, too.
• THE FINALS. I will probably wait until 2026-10-20 with this one, when Season 12 arrives. Used to play it with gyro, but the AI that Embark Studios has been using to look for cheating behavior signals has been issuing bans to such players. so I’d rather cut down on competitiveness and not risk an account suspension for months (if that).
• Allumeria. Great mix of Terraria and Minecraft, one I’d been waiting for for years. Can’t stop building!
• Ballionaire. Like Balatro, but with pachinko machines and different boards that add their quirks. Really fun in its style, too!
• Pumpkin Jack. It is Spooktober after all! Started it last year, planning to beat it now if I don’t get carried away by No Man’s Sky and "ARC Raiders* and THE FINALS again (so probably not beating it this year either).
• DERELIKT demo. The game’s supposed to be out this year, but I just want to experience them retro System Shock + Doom 3 vibes already, 'tis the season. I really enjoy the visual identity of Hypestrange games.

Mainly Beat Saber. I tried out a couple flat rougelikes (I think Brotato and Deep Rock Galactic Survivor), and they worked fine.

I also tried PolyCube, but it did not work in VR mode. It would launch and I could see my controllers, but pressing buttons did nothing. I could not even navigate the in-game menu to start playing a session. Perhaps if I connected a standard Xbox controller or something, that would work. I know that a standard controller is recommended for that game, and from my own experience years back with older generation VR controllers that lacked traditional face buttons, that surely was preferable. But I was expecting that the Frame controllers would suffice. Unfortunately, this game was abandoned by its developer, so I doubt it will ever be patched to make the Frame controllers work properly. Perhaps an update to the Frame itself will fix whatever the issue is. Everything works fine if you launch the game not in VR mode, though. The VR controllers work just as well as an Xbox controller or something thanks to the fact that they actually have face buttons unlike most VR controllers when the game was originally made.

Lastly, I keep trying to figure out how to make the mouse pointer appear. It seems like Valve disabled it because they want to just use the laser pointer thing that appears when you point your VR controller. But that means that when you connect a literal mouse to use in desktop mode, you can’t tell where you’re pointing. I am sure there is some way to revert whatever Valve had disabled, but I am not finding anything relevant in the KDE settings.

All of this is standalone. I have not tried streaming.

Mostly Brotato

Morrowind for me, Just Good Morrowind runs pretty well on the deck, openmw does support controller pretty well (similar to the Xbox morrowind if anyone else rembers playing that), but I use a community config that works really well.

Restarted my last run because there were a bunch of mod changes between then and now. Found my oblivion disks cleaning up this year so super tempted to get that going as well, would like some qol mods though.

Anyone have recommendations for Skyrim on the deck? Found it chugs a bit with the default settings.

Downloaded the Witcher 3 last night after the free dlc remaster news. For some reason it had to update the entire install again today. I’ve had it for a little while but never put much time in it. I’m dedicating myself to getting through it this time.

Started Dishonored 2 on Deck. It flows better than 1, maybe because I know what to expect and how the game plays. Kind of dived into 1 with the expectation of playing it like a FPS. Waiting for my Frame, am on the reservation queue since the lottery. Having daydreams of playing the game in VR, that would be so cool, seems like a perfect VR game. Theoratically, there could be a way, but Linux support and especially Frame support doesn’t seem to be there yet. But as long as I can’t buy the Frame I keep daydreaming anyways.

Treasure Hunter Claire… It was on sale…

Lately I’ve been playing Trails in the Sky 2nd chapter. I had never played the trails series before 1st chapter’s remake last year, and they’re pretty fantastic, highly recommended for JRPG fans.

I also played Onimusha: Way of the Sword. Really fun, and had a good time with it. My only real complaint is that the difficulty scaling felt kinda off, especially at the beginning everything was far too easy, and then the difficulty ramps up kinda unevenly. Still really fun though, all the boss fights especially were great.

But what about us “only have Steam Controller” people? :(
We wanna be in the club and asked too.

I’ve been vaguely replaying Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2: Yuri’s Revenge. Pretty cosy, if a bit crashy. Also the performance is comparable to when I played it back on my 400 MHz Pentium II. I’ve never understood why it runs so poorly under Wine or virtualization.

Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!

It’s such a good dating sim.

Control! Resisting the urge to buy Resonant by playing the original. It’s really awesome still and it’s much nicer on the Steam Machine than my old Xbox.

I’ve been playing a lot of Arknights Endfield on Deck. I had to waver between installing via Heroic / Epicstore, and Twintail Launcher due to validation issues. Might be nicer if it was in Steam, but I’m happy I have it working.

Finishing up onimusha on my steamdeck. Well … Streaming from my PC to my steamdeck so I can hang with the gf around the house. Forza horizon 6 has been fun too