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.

Animal Well 35Mb