Loddlenaut
I played the demo of this in the last festival and really enjoyed it. I bought it pretty much immediately on release as it's such a nicely made, relaxing game. It's primarily a game about cleaning up the ocean floor using a variety of tools, but it also features little sea creatures called Loddles, which you clean, play with, feed, and find homes for. It's relatively simple all round, but it's clearly made with love and I found myself looking forward to playing it on the Deck each evening. There's also an upgrade tree which you buy using trash you clear up from the ocean.
Pros
- Generally it runs well on the Steam Deck
- Loddles are cute
- Relaxing
- Multiple interesting ways to clean stuff
- When you clean an object, it bursts out in coral and flowers
- Sometimes cleaned objects also emit oxygen
- There's an upgrade tree, bought with objects you find cleaning up
- There's also a cooking and toy station for Loddles
- As you reach certain thresholds while cleaning an area, the lighting and the murkiness of the sea visibly changes, which is quite satisfying
Cons
- The Steam Deck struggles a little when there are microplastic clouds nearby, or lots of trash on a scan
- Inventory management with a controller is really annoying. You need to unload everything you cleaned into trash collectors, which means: open the inventory, move the cursor to an object, moving it to the top row of the inventory, close the inventory, unload the item, picking up the Bit you get, open inventory, select the Bit, move Bit down from top row. Repeat about 15 times each time you come home