8 nice video games on your Steam Deck from 2025

I performed a lot of video games on my Steam Deck this 12 months. It appeared like there was a endless listing of unimaginable indie video games to attempt — The Verge wrote about quite a lot of them! — and lots of labored brilliantly on Valve’s handheld gaming PC. Some greater video games made a splash on Steam Deck, too, and whereas they might not look pretty much as good as on a beefy PC, I’m often completely satisfied to take care of that just because I can play them on the sofa or out of the home.

If you’re unwrapping a Steam Deck for the vacations this 12 months, or have some Steam reward playing cards burning a gap in your pocket, listed here are a few of my suggestions of video games launched in 2025 that you just may need to try. (And if you need extra concepts, try my favorites from 2024.)

Ball x Pit blends components from video games like Breakout, Vampire Survivors, and metropolis builders into a pleasant, genre-blending roguelike. In the principle a part of the sport, you shoot balls towards an ever-advancing group of enemies, and after selecting up a bunch of gems and upgrades, you’ll finally flip right into a power of nature with balls flying everywhere in the display. After a run, you may construct up a base to enhance your stats and unlock characters — a few of that are fairly intelligent, like one which turns Ball x Pit right into a turn-based sport. And with runs often taking lower than quarter-hour or so, it’s a fantastic sport to select up and play in your Steam Deck.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Sandfall Interactive’s debut RPG floored me earlier this 12 months; it’s an impressive package deal with exhilarating turn-based battles, a fantastic parrying system, memorable characters, a gripping story, and music that I nonetheless come again to regardless that I completed the sport months in the past. On Steam Deck, the sport doesn’t look fairly pretty much as good because it does on my PS5, however it’s nonetheless playable and was lately verified for Valve’s handheld PC. Folks on ProtonDB even have some recommendations to tweak settings to make the visuals higher. If Steam Deck is your solely platform that may play the sport, it’s nonetheless an honest place to expertise The Game Awards’ Game of the Year.

I do know I put Hades II on my model of this listing final 12 months, however the roguelike obtained its massive 1.0 replace in September, and it’s rattling good. Supergiant Games builds on the primary Hades with a brand new protagonist, new boons to carry to battle, a bunch of recent characters to present ambrosia to, two new routes to discover, and one other banger-filled soundtrack. Supergiant even tweaked the ending to make it higher. Hades II is Supergiant on the prime of its sport, and similar to my colleague Ash Parrish stated in 2024, it’s the right Steam Deck sport.

After years of ready and lots of clown makeup, Hollow Knight’s sequel lastly launched in September, and fortunately, it was truly well worth the wait. Silksong doesn’t reinvent the wheel; it’s nonetheless an atmospheric Metroidvania with lovely bug creatures, tough-as-nails bosses, and a few bullshit. But I liked that system within the unique Hollow Knight, and it’s nonetheless wonderful in Silksong.

If you’re in search of some stress-free puzzles, pull up a chair with Is This Seat Taken?. In the sport, you’re liable for discovering seats for a bunch of lovely geometric shapes who’ve completely different wants. Some may need to sit subsequent to a window, or perhaps simply not subsequent to somebody who smells. But in case you can’t discover a seating association that works for everybody, you may simply transfer on to the following puzzle with none massive penalty; it retains the stakes low, and typically, some low-stakes puzzling is what matches the invoice.

I’ve very fond reminiscences of taking part in the unique Lumines: Puzzle Fusion on a PlayStation Portable, and greater than 20 years after the discharge of that sport, the Tetris Effect-like Lumines Arise captures that very same magic. The trance-y visuals, superb music, and absorbing Lumines puzzling sucked me in and briefly let me overlook about every part else on the earth; like my colleague Andrew Webster, I discovered Arise to be an nearly excellent zen puzzle sport.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

Earlier this 12 months, I wrote that Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo would really feel proper at residence in your Game Boy Advance — and that’s a part of what makes it such an excellent match for the Steam Deck. The sport is a top-down journey the place you battle enemies and discover the sport’s world with a magical yo-yo, and also you’ll get cool yo-yo tips like the power to “walk the dog” to cross our bodies of water. With wonderful pixel artwork and music stuffed with blaring horns, it appears like a non secular successor to the GBA video games I liked rising up.

The Drifter is impressed by the old-school LucasArts point-and-click journey sport system, however as a substitute of telling a foolish, Monkey Island-like story, it cleverly turns the format right into a darkish, gripping thriller. You can play with a mouse to level and click on, in fact, however if you wish to use the Steam Deck’s controls or a gamepad, The Drifter additionally provides a very sensible management scheme that makes use of each joysticks to allow you to stroll round and see what you may work together with. The story is stuffed with thrilling, mind-bending twists. And in case you’re something like me, it’s going to most likely maintain you up lengthy after your bedtime.