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Deus Ex is great but 55 hours of having nothing to do but Deus Ex sounds overwhelming. Grab UFO 50 as well so you have some low-commitment alternatives to fall back on.
Thanks! I have about 750gb of space for games, so I’m going to make sure I’m loaded with options.
There’s like an emotional component to it, though. Having lots of options doesn’t necessarily feel like lots of options. Deus Ex and hundreds of gigs of not Deus Ex feels like a yes or no decision, trying one of the multitude of other options being psychically equivalent just turning the machine off. At least in my experience.
Hence the suggestion of a compilation. Multiple other games but connected to each other to form a greater whole. Five minutes of Balatro and five minutes of One Way Heroics feels like ten minutes of not playing Deus Ex, whereas five minutes of Magic Garden and five minutes of Mortol feels like ten minutes of UFO 50.
I have 600 hours in Slay the Spire and still want to play more. Heck, why not play a run right now...
This is me every flight. Got a Switch with lots of stuff, ebooks, music and whatnot. Always end up playing Slay the Spire on my phone.
This is the way :). I sadly lost my previous run. Was good enough to get to the boss of act 3, but Time Eater decided that was enough.
Stardew is always a good one and uses very little battery. Noita and Streets of Rogue have been fun too, and are also easy on the battery (pixel art roguelites).
I love the Deus Ex series and Human Revolution is worth checking out; even if you haven’t played the prior ones. It’s been a while since I played through it but I remember being drawn to the story and liked the stealth aspects.
The new System Shock remake is also great and is decent on my Steam Deck battery.
at the risk of being "guy who pretty much only plays Factorio recommends you play Factorio..."
you can easily put 50+ hours into a single savefile, especially with the Space Age expansion
The problem is that it's probably going to be hard to play without the internet to look things up
Could always just download the wiki…
CDDA is great for when you're trying to game without heavy battery drain.
https://cataclysmdda.org/ it's a procedurally generated survival adventure game.
I love CDDA, but I don't know if I'd call it light on a battery. It won't hammer a GPU, but it actually does use a fair bit of CPU time for the simulation. Also, every time it redraws a frame, it does so via recomputing the world lighting and such, so it's actually surprisingly heavyweight.
Rimworld is the answer.
I actually have that game and have never even finished the tutorial. Would you recommend I just go blind or do I need to watch some How to video to get started?
You probably want to watch a "beginners guide" video or two. There are tons of amazing mods as well, but you probably want to just play vanilla first to learn the basics.
It can provide literally endless hours of entertainment. The game itself is a "story generator", and every single game will be wildly different than the last, forever. That's not even an exaggeration, it's kind of ridiculous actually lol.
And they are good stories for the most part too, is can still remember some of my storylines from a decade ago.
I loved Deus Ex Human Revolution, it was my intro to the series and still one of my favs. I woild also recommend something a little more sandbox, like Minecraft or Lightyear Frontier, just for the sheer time sink these games can be. Farming and building can make you lose track of hours at a time, great for travel.
I could also recommend something like Be my Hoard. Trying to get over an hour on a run is a fun way to burn an hour, if you like rouge-lite styles.
If you like driving, something like American Truck Simulator or Euro Truck Simulator is another great time sink.
Thanks! I’ve been meaning to try and figure out what Minecraft is about and I don’t even think about the truck simulators, I’ve been curious about them.
There's a similar, open-source game, Luanti (until recently, known as Minetest). It doesn't have as many mods in 2025 as Minecraft does, but you might also enjoy it.
I really want to get into Minecraft but every time I open it I don’t know what to do but dig a hole directly down into the ground. Is there some guide on how to play the game or something to understand it better?
If you play the OG deus ex, I highly recommend modding it with the revision overhaul, or GMDX. It's very clunky without one.
If you like stealth games, I'd recommend the first two thief games (with fan patches to run well on modern systems).
Thanks! I’ll do that. Even though I grew up with these old games, I’m spoiled by new ones.
If you want to be very sad or maybe inspired, spiritfarer was excellent. The two Oris are great time sinks. Horizon Zero Dawn ran fine on my deck but chews battery life.
I’d personally aim for something like Civ. Long play sessions, but can be put down if needed
Yeah! I’ll look into civ 7, but maybe I’ll just stick with civ 5 or 6
5 is older so uses less resources
What are your favorite genres? Or your favorite games?
I like most stuff, just hoping to find some hidden gems in the comments here.
Hmm… F.I.S.T: Forged in Shadow Torch is ~50 hour-ish—metroidvania with great combat.
Catherine is +100 hours if you go for 100%. Fantastic puzzle game.
Maybe check out Okami if you're into Zelda-likes.
Vanquish is probably the coolest 3rd-person shooter out there.
Signalis is one of the best survival horror indies.
Lastly, Prey if you're looking for more immersive sims.
Thanks for this list. I am interested to learn more about many of them.
I love Metroidvanias, I’ll check out fist tomorrow. Prey might be cool for a plane ride too.
The Deus Ex games are all great (YMMV with Invisible War tho). I'm currently going through the Dishonored series and at least the first one should be fairly nice on the SteamDeck battery, but that might be one imm-sim too many 😆
As an aside: how do you find using the SteamDeck while flying? I also have to do such long flights to go to my home country but for me the SteamDeck is just really uncomfortable after about 45 minutes of use.
I’ve never been on a long flight like this without charging outlets in the plane, so I don’t think it will be a problem.
Lucky. I just had 26h with no power outlets (well, there was a usb-a but that stopped working 😂).
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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