Looking for something that won’t kill my battey and has some depth. I have Vampire Survivor but that get stale after about 30 minutes.
Slay the Spire is a deck mainstay for me. A good run is 40 minutes to an hour.
It is also pretty easy on battery
Stardew valley can get like 5-6 hours of battery easy on the steam deck
How about SNES or GBA emulation? For what it’s worth, many flights now have a power outlet between the seats
Seconding the emulation idea. Plenty of outstanding SNES games out there.
Chained Echoes. 16 bit RPG with great art and gameplay, but it’s not hard on the battery and it has modern day QOL features.
100% support this. Feels like it was made for the deck. Gives me super big Game Gear vibes but like you said, with 2023 qol.
Emulating Gamecube games is pretty low-spec if you compile the shaders beforehand. Battery life nets 2-3 hours on flights for me (Steam Deck). I have nearly 2000 hours of Animal Crossing GC combined, pls don’t judge me 😅.
Tunic, hades, dead cells, some old rpg like fallout nev vegas or fable
can’t recommend Tunic enough. Such an amazing game with extremely deep lore.
The Golden Path is probably one of the coolest puzzles I’ve done in a game, ever.
Check out Celeste if you haven’t already. For me it’s the perfect 2D platformer and works really well on the deck. Think I clocked around 100 hours on it just on it alone!
Pizza Tower is fun.
Most planes nowadays have a charging port where you can plug in your phone for the duration of the flight. Therefore, I recommend getting an emulator on your phone and playing games on it. Usually if I want something casual, I get an NDS emulator and play Pokemon Platinum or HGSS. Other recommendations are FFIV, Etrian Odyssey III, Shin Megami Tensei, DQ4, some of these are ports but they run well on DS emulator.
My personal experience (US) is that most airplanes have chargers nowadays. However, the charger is very loose, and I could never make my charger fixed in the socket.
If OP could find a good socket, then this lucky person could enjoy 5 hour gaming with no interruption :)
I might be talking out of my arse, but you could bring a toothpick with you and try removing any fluff/grime from the socket before plugging in. Worked for my phone when the usbc charger wasn’t secure.
I haven’t tried this personally but maybe if you use a short extension cord it would work better? This should remove the weight of the DC adapter pulling on the connection to the outlet
An extension cord will be very helpful, to remove the force on the adapter.
However, the weight of my DC adapter itself was enough to pull the adapter out of the socket.
Baba is You can last for over 6 and a half hours - the longest battery life I’ve ever seen on my Deck. You just need to enable the minimum TDP limit.
I also believe Brotato lasts a lot, Pixross too.
Stardew Valley would be my pick.
Hades was practically made for Steam Deck
Hades is great, but it’s not very battery friendly for a 2d game in my experience.
You can turn on practically all the power saving features and it still runs great. I haven’t timed it, but it can go on pretty long.
Dead cells
Bastion, Celeste, Hollow Knight, and Tunic are all great. I also really like emulation. I’ve been playing Tears of the Kingdom more on my Steam Deck than on my switch!
If you prefer some story-heavy games, you can try Eastward. It has gorgeous art style and controls and UI are a great fit for handheld devices such as Deck and Switch. It takes ~15% battery a hour and can be completed in 10 to 15 hours.
If you’re fine with longer games which will take 45-70 hours total, try some 2D JRPGs like Trails in the Sky FC (which also has nice touch input in menus!), Trails from Zero and Chained Echoes. All tree aren’t battery-heavy at all.