Deus Ex is great but 55 hours of having nothing to do but Deus Ex sounds overwhelming. Grab UFO 50 as well so you have some low-commitment alternatives to fall back on.
There’s like an emotional component to it, though. Having lots of options doesn’t necessarily feel like lots of options. Deus Ex and hundreds of gigs of not Deus Ex feels like a yes or no decision, trying one of the multitude of other options being psychically equivalent just turning the machine off. At least in my experience.
Hence the suggestion of a compilation. Multiple other games but connected to each other to form a greater whole. Five minutes of Balatro and five minutes of One Way Heroics feels like ten minutes of not playing Deus Ex, whereas five minutes of Magic Garden and five minutes of Mortol feels like ten minutes of UFO 50.
Stardew is always a good one and uses very little battery. Noita and Streets of Rogue have been fun too, and are also easy on the battery (pixel art roguelites).
I love the Deus Ex series and Human Revolution is worth checking out; even if you haven’t played the prior ones. It’s been a while since I played through it but I remember being drawn to the story and liked the stealth aspects.
The new System Shock remake is also great and is decent on my Steam Deck battery.
I actually have that game and have never even finished the tutorial. Would you recommend I just go blind or do I need to watch some How to video to get started?
You probably want to watch a "beginners guide" video or two. There are tons of amazing mods as well, but you probably want to just play vanilla first to learn the basics.
It can provide literally endless hours of entertainment. The game itself is a "story generator", and every single game will be wildly different than the last, forever. That's not even an exaggeration, it's kind of ridiculous actually lol.
I love CDDA, but I don't know if I'd call it light on a battery. It won't hammer a GPU, but it actually does use a fair bit of CPU time for the simulation. Also, every time it redraws a frame, it does so via recomputing the world lighting and such, so it's actually surprisingly heavyweight.
I loved Deus Ex Human Revolution, it was my intro to the series and still one of my favs. I woild also recommend something a little more sandbox, like Minecraft or Lightyear Frontier, just for the sheer time sink these games can be. Farming and building can make you lose track of hours at a time, great for travel.
I could also recommend something like Be my Hoard. Trying to get over an hour on a run is a fun way to burn an hour, if you like rouge-lite styles.
If you like driving, something like American Truck Simulator or Euro Truck Simulator is another great time sink.
Thanks! I’ve been meaning to try and figure out what Minecraft is about and I don’t even think about the truck simulators, I’ve been curious about them.
There's a similar, open-source game, Luanti (until recently, known as Minetest). It doesn't have as many mods in 2025 as Minecraft does, but you might also enjoy it.
If you want to be very sad or maybe inspired, spiritfarer was excellent. The two Oris are great time sinks. Horizon Zero Dawn ran fine on my deck but chews battery life.
The Deus Ex games are all great (YMMV with Invisible War tho).
I'm currently going through the Dishonored series and at least the first one should be fairly nice on the SteamDeck battery, but that might be one imm-sim too many 😆
As an aside: how do you find using the SteamDeck while flying? I also have to do such long flights to go to my home country but for me the SteamDeck is just really uncomfortable after about 45 minutes of use.