Best Control schmemes

[Zengu]

A friend gave me his steam deck. So now I am asking myself what to play with it. I am mostly interested in a good controll scheme then how graphical good a game is on the steam deck. Last time I did play with a gamepad was in the X-Box 360.

[Mahjik]

Take a look here: https://store.steampowered.com/greatondeck/

[Haruspex]

Depends on the game.

The most obvious and simplest will be any game with full controller support. These will be the most straightforward, pick up and play kind of experiences.

Of course if you just stick to "controller supported" games, you're arguably missing out on the most interesting parts of the Steam Deck's control options, and that's the touchpads, the gyro, and the back buttons. Most PC games are made not expecting these things to be present, so you either need to assign them to work yourself, or choose a community control profile. Feel free to experiment. A good start there is to just enable gyro aiming. See how that feels. Try assigning the back buttons to crouch, reload, or jump so you don't need to take your thumb on the right thumbstick or trackpad. That alone is a game changer.

Starting with "Deck Verified" games as Mahjik suggested is a great way to start too, since you'll be running games guaranteed to be a good experience, so you'll start off on the right foot and you'll start off with a good first impression. Remember, the Steam Deck is a Linux PC, using Proton to convert Windows/DirectX system calls into Linux/Vulkan system calls. This doesn't play well with kernel level anti cheat, meaning a few popular multiplayer games like the newer COD games or Madden will not work on it, so if you jump in hoping to play that, you're already off on the wrong foot, like if you bought a Super Nintendo hoping to play Sonic 2. You don't have to stick with only verified games, but until you get a feel for it, that's a good starting point.