Just like the other commenter, the Outer Wilds main motif (travelers) makes me emotional because of how good the game was. Disco Elysium also has had an amazing soundtrack, with the main BGM faintly using sounds from the final song, which made it really cathartic for me.

Ultrakill deserves a lot of praise, especially for the P-2 music (https://youtu.be/MG5L-1pI8bI). It works perfectly for how intense the level is, and it’s absolutely nuts that the game still manages to up the ante after you’ve perfected every single other level. I’ve listened to this type of music quite often before, but I’ve never felt it in my blood and muscles before playing that level.

When judged on the music alone though, Hotline Miami (1) and Furi have to take the cake. Both soundtracks are just iconic, and easily stand out on their own.

Oh wow, I thought they were enby for the longest time.

Devil Daggers has amazing sound design, and it has hrtf, so I could aim at some enemies blindly.

It’s a small game though, and not for everyone.

I anti-second the controller - there’s no benefit to it, and as the other commenter said, you’re going to want to play with the d-pad anyway. Play with whatever you feel more comfortable with, there’s no difference between the two.

I don’t agree at all, I think it has to do everything with it being 3d.

For any game, I don’t want to look at the thing I’m controlling often - I need to feel where I am, and not see where I am. Many 3rd person games break that for me - the camera-object distance is not fixed for various reasons (speed indication, avoiding a wall, motion smoothing), and that immediately breaks the feeling of control for me. Not to mention anything that takes control of the camera.

With 1st person controls you always get perfect motion controls, a camera that cannot accidentally clip into walls, and motion smoothing does not exist. If a game is 1st person,you don’t need it to be desiged as a platforming game for its controls to be good for platforming - take a look at Minecraft or Counter Strike with their emergent gamemodes.

I might be biased from the hundreds of hours of cs surf though.

Having a quick look at how A Hat in a Time looks, I think I wouldn’t enjoy its platforming as well, as it seems to suffer from the same problems.

3D 3rd person platforming. Any flavour of it. It consistently either sucks (souls games) or is just plain boring (the uncharted series). I’m sure there are some games where it’s done reasonably well (probably some sonic or mario game), but I’ve never seen that.

Over the year I’ve finished Outer Wilds, Hades, PikuNiku, the second Ori game, and have been slowly getting through Elden Ring. Next is probably Tunic, but idk if it’s worth my time after playing through the first 2 hours.

Nowadays I can’t use any other controller than the deck, so I sometimes link it with the pc just for that - I just can’t live without the gyro and the back buttons

What are your comfy games? Maybe someone here can recommend something similar

Gaming wise it’s probably the best period I’ve had. I’ve finished a lot of smaller games, found absolute gems such as Outer Wilds (+ the perfect DLC) and Devil Daggers, P-ranked my way through Ultrakill and I’m slowly going through Elden Ring, which is just so awful on many fronts, that I don’t think I’ll be playing any other soulslikes ever. I’ve got a nice long rant about it brewing inside me.

Celeste got a massive, high quality community map pack recently, so I’m slowly chipping away at the maps, and I finally found a “main game” that I’ll probably be playing forever - Trackmania.

I don’t think I’ll be running out of stuff to play anytime soon.

I’d recomment Lutris over this, as it often does contain custom install scripts with workarounds.

Gaming works well for most Steam games, but if you go out of Steam it can be less nice. I’ve been linux-only for around two years now, and there’s been only a handful of games that I wanted to play that wouldn’t run on linux (but there’s only a handful of online games I play so ymmv)

I’ve had a good time with Elden Ring on the Deck, it runs without a hitch.