Steam Hardware

This is my exact setup at the moment. I've been playing a bunch of Rogue Driving, Elite Dangerous and Succubus Successor: Delilah's Juicy Journey.

I've been playing Final Fantasy XVI like this and it's been perfect. It just became Deck verified very recently but that's a stretch.

The answer is really just any game that is well suited to controller + TV. The aspect of streaming to the Deck is largely irrelevant since, as you mentioned, the experience feels so close to native.

I used this type of setup to pkay Harold Halibut, the Quantic Dream games (Detroit, Beyond Two Souls, Heavy Rain), Elden Ring (+ other soulsborne), and anything else that doesn’t run at its full potential directly on the Deck.

Here's a suggestion that doesn't even begin to address your question, have you considered a long HDMI cable to connect your TV in your lounge to your PC directly? Best of both worlds, comfortable seat in front of the TV, no input delay, play anything your PC can handle without middlemaning through the deck.

This is the first time I've thought about this, but you've made me think I should try this games like Kao or Bubsy4D or even just R&C Rift Apart.

The new star Wars racer would probably be dope, or one of the Redout games. You could see if Elden Ring will run with the full graphics instead of the fog version it usually plays at on the deck.

I streamed Expedition 33 to my deck when it was my shift during the night to look after our newborn whilst they were sleeping.

Honestly can't remember much of it since that period of time was a blur, but what I do know is the streaming worked great, although I had to change a couple of settings as games would sometimes freeze. I think it was something to do with the encoding and decoding, so you may have to look at that if you have the same issue.

Vampire Survivors

Slay the Spire

Children of Morta

Dead Cells

When I was injured civ 6 on a controller was a great time to just sit and play and enjoy.

Megabonk

Currently using sunshine/moonlight to my Rog Ally for Dawnwalker. I also use my Xbox with moonlight to stream occasionally. Just about any Unreal engine game runs rough on handhelds due to stuttering, so I use my desktop and stream it. The vast majority of the games I play work great with a controller.

In my time I have found that as long as the game isn't terrible controls, and isn't extremely latency dependent (you could try enabling Pyrowave codec in steams streaming or try Sunshine to bypass steams streaming) then the real limitation is being able to see the menus from the couch! Lots of modern games get this right, especially if they already have console ports, but sometimes you just can't read the stinking menus!

I was in your position. I have to say the ideal solution has been: I just put Bazzite on my PC and moved it to the lounge as a console PC. No streaming required.

If you're a first person shooter pro then you might want the PC at the desk for KB+M control. Otherwise for other games (like strategy games) it is better to stream from lounge to PC for those few games and have the native PC experience with the TV.

I mostly use my desk PC for work, and any cheap old PC can do this. I got a basic mini PC workstation pretty cheap, and this OS actually good enough to play most indie and emulated games natively at 144 FPS anyway. Something even older and cheaper would be perfectly fine for my workstation needs.

I don't play much, but if I do I pretty much exclusively use the deck or a controller... I don't think there are many games that don't support controllers, so I guess you could just check your favourite ones and see if they work well?

Games that I enjoyed on the couch more than on mobile or on the PC:

• tetris connected. It's tetris, all right, but with lights and sound! Works so much better on a large screen and a sound sound system.
• redout (2). It's a fast antigrav racer, bit like wip3out. Music of the first and sind effects and graphics of the second just work better in a home theater. Two stick controls are awesome.
• hellblade, if you have a surround sound system.

Apart from that, there are the usual suspects: 3rd person console ports (horizon, Batman etc) or couch coop games if you have some friends over (Bumerang fu, lovers in a dangerous space time etc).

This was the exact set up I used to play Death Stranding 2

weeeell... what games do you want to play?

Your TV might have the Steam Link app meaning you could stream directly without needing the deck in the loop. If the TV is connected via Ethernet then latency would be even better.