Ask Lemmy

Recently played the hell out of SparkLite - $3 on sale right now, 1.5G of space required.

I'm going to go in a different, but important direction than everyone else: don't.

SSD's are constantly moving bits of data around to balance the amount of read/write each sector deals with, since that is what degrades the components.

The downside is that the swapping also counts as read/write cycles. Most of the time this is fine, because the SSD is doing relatively little data swapping compared to what it's optimizing.

This goes away when your drive is more than 90% full. Then your drive become one of those missing tile puzzles, and it starts shuffling lots of data around constantly to get things in their optimal place. This leads to the swaps drastically increasing the read/write cycles and killing the drive early.

If you really need to have a bunch of games saved on your Steam Deck, you're better off getting an SD card and using that for additional storage. While it's slower to load, it's not that much slower, and it's not noticable for smaller games

Throw in a 1TB SD card and load it with ROMs. Install your emulators of choice.

Would need a lot of control tweaking, both from Steam input and in game controls, but it looks like Mindustry might be less than a gig of storage. At least the free version you can get from either itch or github is.

Seems those versions are currently slightly less than 100mb for current non bleeding edge releases. I found the folder for my installed Steam version and it says it's nearly 160mb, so there's that. Didn't realize it was such a small game, but it's fun. Much better if you have a mouse and keyboard rather than just touch controls, coming from someone who started off playing it on mobile.

Only $9.99USD ( IDK what that would be in other currency ) on Steam to get steam supported things like workshop or seemless multiplayer, but if you are like me and only play single player campaign, the free versions are just as fine.

Sulfer is about 4GBs, it's an excellent indie looter shooter with gun crafting and charm.

Deep rock galactic is shockingly small

Im incredibly addicted to gambling rogue likes and a lot of them are quite small. Currently I'm really enjoying:

Raccoin Balatro Clover Pit Peglin Luck be a landlord

Celeste, the platformer, is one of my favorites, and it's super small.

Outer Wilds is 8GB, and the best puzzle/mystery game I have ever played. The less you know about the game up front, the better.

Balatro is tiny, like 150 MB tiny. And endlessly playable. If you like poker and/or rogue likes it's pound for pound one of the best deals out there both money and memory wise

Haven't seen anyone mention Slay the Spire yet. The original is under 600MB and the sequel (early-access) is 2GB. They're both good! The first one is maybe a little easier, if you've never played them.

Abiotic factor

10gb, half life themed survival game. Extremely solid. The combat itself isn't too crazy, I think you could pull it off on steamdeck

Balatro and Slay The Spire 2 are roguelikes that have a lot of replayability.

Trackmania, you can give it a shot with Nations Forever it's free on steam. Turbo/TM2 are graphically improved versions of it, 2020 is the newest one that most people play but has a lot of its features locked behind a yearly subscription. Go with the previous ones if offline play is a must.

Baba Is You is a real brain burner puzzle game that makes you think out of the box a lot of time.

If you havent yet played Portal / Portal 2, together they are about 20 Gigs, and are both very good, genre and generation defining games.

Minecraft (Java Edition, the standard).

About 0,3 GB, and needs no introduction. Endless box of fun in a tiny cross-platform package.

i'd grab a lot of old game roms for emulator. nes/snes/gba/mame stuff are tiny in filesize. there are tons of gems in nds/psp too. maybe gc/wii/3ds stuff too, but they're significantly larger.

Animal Well 35Mb

Factorio if you like building, optimizing and automating. Game is about 5 GB.

Genre/type of game you like most?

Lot of my picks have already been mentioned but if you like story-rich point and clicks:
The rusty lake series (~1GB each)
Strange Horticulture (1GB)

Or very chill adventure:
Slime rancher (1GB)

Rouge-lite/rogue-like:
Death Road to Canada (60MB)
Binding of Isaac (449 MB) - this is my all time favourite game and I'm surprised to see the base game is still under $20.

I have been playing Time Snatcher Handy recently, a roguelike centered around a time-stop mechanic, which only uses 44 MB. It is pretty good. Going through my steam library from the lowest up, here are the others i would recommend, stopping at one GB, because most of my games are under 20 GB and i tend to be relatively selective with what games i get so i consider most of them good also:

• TIS-100 (80 MB), programming puzzle game by Zachtronics
• Islanders (150 MB), minimalist city builder
• Enter the Gungeon (346 MB), bullet-hell roguelike
• Streets of Rogue (417 MB), roguelike which emphasizes having multiple possible approaches for how to get any given objective
• Opus Magnum (493 MB), another Zachtronics programming puzzle game
• Vault of the Void (554 MB), roguelike deckbuilder (one of my most played games, especially recommended)
• Backpack Hero (616 MB), roguelike focused on maximizing adjacency bonuses on your inventory grid
• Urbek City Builder (685 MB), city builder (obviously)
• Slipways (735 MB), a game about optimizing trade routes between planets
• Cassette Beasts (1 GB), similar to Pokemon, with the main differences being that you turn into the monsters instead of summoning them, type advantage/disadvantage giving unique status effects rather than just changing damage and battles generally being 2v2 instead of 1v1

My indie action platformer No More Mages is in early access (with a free demo) if you feel like taking a shot at a truly unknown game! More being added soon.

I enjoy unique story driven games. Two favourites are:

• Papers, please. <100MB
• Do not feed the monkeys. <1GB

Honorary mention to Not tonight. It's very papers-inspired, but unique enough.

Have you tried Inscryption

I love Skald Against the black priory, and I've also started The wandering Village. Both well under that limit!

Both Hades and Hades II are about 11GB. Either one will fit or you could increase your limit just a bit and fit both.

Fields of Mistria is a cute farming game like Stardew Valley, and it’s only like 800MB.