Over the past weekend, I had my first moment of natural bliss with my Steam Deck. I was sitting around bored on a Saturday and remembered that I’d been meaning to play Strange Horticulture, an murder-mystery game about running a plant shop. The only problem is that it’s exclusive to PC at the moment and I simply wanted to lay on my couch and relax. That’s when I remembered I now had a Steam Deck.
I booted the system up and found the game on the Steam store, keeping my fingers crossed that it had been verified for the device. Sure enough, I found some friendly green text on the game’s store page, letting me know it would work just fine as a handheld game. I was ecstatic as I bought the game on the device itself and cozied up on my couch as it downloaded. What a future I was living in!
Unfortunately, my utopian gaming moment quickly got a dose of reality. While the game ran smoothly on Steam Deck, it certainly hadn’t been optimized for it. That made me realize that Valve’s game verification process might not be as useful as it seems yet.
In Strange Horticulture, players run a plant shop while trying to solve an occult mystery. The core gameplay loop is that customers request specific plants and players need to correctly identify it from rows of unlabeled plants. To do so, they’ll have a few tools, like a plant guide with a page detailing each one’s properties. Once a plant has been identified correctly, players can attach a label to it and type in the correct name. On top of all that, there’s a puzzle element where players find locations on a map using a set of letters and clues they receive through the game.
It’s a fantastic deduction game, but one I wish I hadn’t played on Steam Deck. The text is ridiculously tiny across
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