I’ve had my Steam Deck since late September this year and i have been trying out various games from my game library to see how they perform and obviously enjoy them on a proper handheld device for the first time ever.

Some of the most important factors that make a game “great to play on Steam Deck” for me are: At least least 3h of battery life on a full charge at full Screen Brightness at either a capped 30fps or 60fps with decent enough graphical fidelity.

Games that have met this criteria so far for me have been:

Hitman: Absolution Dying Light Fallout 3 Devil May Cry 4 Mini Ninjas Rocket League Sleeping Dogs

All of these have been a particularly enjoyable experience on Steam Deck but every one of them can be enjoyed just as well on my gaming PC.

Now what makes Just Cause 3 unique is that it somehow looks worse on my gaming PC than it does on my Steam Deck. Let me explain.

On my PC i am able to max out the settings at 1440p. Although some aspects of the game look amazing, a lot of it just feels off putting. Like the colors for example. Unlike Just Cause 2, Just cause 3 uses a lot of “Muddy Grey” for the cliffs and a very strong “Yellow” for the blooming flowers on top. This creates an overall very strange looking and somewhat uneasy(at least to me) color palette that is further amplified by my screen which has 100% sRGB coverage. Additionally, the mountains in the distance, especially the really big one in the middle, look god awful with lack of detail and virtually no shadows. Just looks like an ugly blob that i had to pretend isn’t there every time i turned the camera it’s way.

On Steam Deck however, the colors don’t pop nearly as much due to it only having ~63% sRGB coverage which helps unify the game’s overall color palette and make them less jarring. Furthermore, because the screen is only 7" compared to my PC’s 27" the flaws of the mountains in the distance just aren’t nearly as noticeable. So in fact that i can easily ignore them and just have them be part of the Vista rather than an eye sore.

I’ve only been playing for a couple of hours since transferring my save files over from my PC but i haven’t been able to stop thinking about picking up my Deck any opportunity i can find to play Just Cause 3 and spread mayhem across that beautiful landscape.

So here i have it, a game that i outright will not play on my substantially more powerful PC because it down right looks better on Steam Deck and i’m over the moon about it.

How about you ? Any similar discoveries ?