Valve's Steam Deck brought PC gaming back into my life after fatherhood
I started using the Steam Deck to play games in the margins of my day. Picking it up for a few random battles in Final Fantasy IV after the baby fell asleep on my chest, doing a deep space cargo run in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw as I watched her nap on the baby monitor, or sneaking in a few puzzles in Baba is You before turning in for the night. Suddenly I was finishing games I never thought I would have time for.
The suspend trick even works with non-Steam games and older titles: I spent hours experimenting in Lutris, an alternative Linux game launcher, getting the year 2000’s Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force to run smoothly on Steam Deck. A week or two later, I finally finished a game I abandoned when I was 16 years old.