I would probably get:

• Megabonk (£6.37/$8.61)
• Fallout 3 Game of the Year edition (£5.27/$7.12)
• A Game About Digging A Hole (£3.17/$4.28)
• Power Wash Simulator 2 (£16.99/$22.96) or Katamari Damacy REROLL (£15.99/$21.61)

Vampire survivors is a couple bucks and worth every penny. I got slay the spire balatro bundle for 13 bucks and would also recommend.

My favorites on the Steam Deck so far are Marvel Cosmic Invasion (arcade style Beat 'em Up) and Deep Rock Galactic Survivor.

Tactical Breach Wizards!!! Then save the other $40ish for the next sale.

Oxygen not included

Factorio

These two will consume your life for so long and they’re both on sale :D

Biy Sleeping Dogs, it plays great on the steam deck and its now 85% down to 3 euros.

Great story, graphics still hold up.

Furthermore consider Distance (Race like game), the precinct, hot brass, coromon.

This is 500+ hours of gameplay:

• Half-Life 2 ($2)
• Portal ($2)
• Portal 2 ($2)
• Psychonauts ($1.5)
• Psychonauts 2 ($9)
• Subnautica ($8)
• Hollow Knight ($8)
• Silksong ($16)
• Hades ($8)
• Disco Elysium ($4)
• The Witcher 3 ($3)
• Terraria ($5)
• Left4Dead 2 ($2)
• Kingdom Come ($5)
• Mass Effect 1, 2, 3 ($6)

For $50 I’d get (afaict current prices):

• Hades ($7.49)
• Pathfinder: Kingmaker ($2.99) (make sure to force-enable the Windows build on the Steam Deck, the Linux build has issues with gamepad input on the kingdom management screen)
• One Deck Dungeon ($1.99)
• Slay the Spire ($2.49)
• Wildermyth ($16.24)
• Against the Storm ($8.99)
• Terraformers ($7.99)

This totals now $48.18. If you have an additional dollar to spare, I’d also recommend to get something to scratch that retro-gaming itch:

• The Settlers 2 ($2.73 on GoG - needs DOSBox, for which I’ve written an install guide)

That’s now $50.91 in total.

Tomb Raider Survival Trilogy for $7.19

Shadow of Mordor/War for $6.99

Prodigal for $1.49 - Zelda plus date sim

Toem for $3.99 - gotta photograph em all

Crosscode for $5.99 - SPMMOOTY

Saint’s Row 4 $2.99

Vampire Survivors for $3.74 - everybody is legally required to have a copy

20 Small Mazes for $0 Doronko Wanko $0

My main recommendation is “don’t put all of your money into a bunch of PS5 AAA games”. PS5-ish games fit “if we turn all of the settings down, and render in 1/4 rez, and then AI upscale, and still your battery only lasts an hour”. It often isn’t a great experience here.

A strength of the Deck is in delivering an endless back catalog of PS4 and prior styles of games. Another is in bringing forward a ton of indie games that can’t win at “marketing”, can’t afford to develop PS5-level visuals, so they fight like hell on “mixing up new and interesting gameplay” and “price”.

If you’re on a budget, make sure to redeem the weekly free games from Epic and Amazon if you have Prime. You can play them all on your deck via Heroic Games Launcher.

Here are some extra “gift” games I have in my Steam inventory, mostly from the days when you could accumulate extra copies when buying bundles with games you already had. Message me (TheMinions, or anyone else, really) if you want to share your Steam id and have me send you some of them; I’m happy to give them all away. Note - it may be a few days, to give TheMinions first-come-first-serve, but I’ll send the rest to whomever requests (message me your steam account id and the specific games you want). I’ll likely delete this message when all are accounted for (many of these are likely cheap right now anyway).

The list (and how many copies I have):

Awesomenauts (w/ DLC) - 2x
Bastion - 2x
Contraption Maker - 1x
Dark Souls (not “Remastered” edition) - 1x
Defense Grid (w/ “Containment” DLC)- 1x
DiRT 2 - 1x
Frozen Synapse - 1x
FTL - 3x
Gunpoint - 1x
Hack n Slash - 1x
Half Life 2 Ep 1 - 1x
Just Cause 2 - 1x
Plants vs Zombies - 3x
Poker Night at the Inventory - 1x
Portal - 1x
The Walking Dead - 1x
Torchlight - 1x
Trine 2 - 1x
vvvvvv - 1x

Be sure to check out Steam’s own “great on deck” category in the store. Each game will also have an indication from Valve on the quality/playability with regard to the Steam Deck

Hades is a great roguelite and is on sale for $9.75CAD right now. If you like that then there’s also Hades 2. It has a really cool story built into it which at least at the time was more unique in the genre.

Try to find slightly older games and they’ll have steeper discounts.

Balatro and Slay the Spire both play great on the Deck and have amazing replayability.

I recommend getting some indie and pixel art style titles instead of just going for AAA. Reason being many of these are cheaper ($5-10, sometimes even less) so you can try different genres, and these titles also tend to sip battery so you will get lots of gameplay time.

Examples I have enjoyed, in no particular order-

Animal Well

Celeste

Stardew Valley

Vampire Survivors

Caveblazers

Balatro

Slay the Spire