Similarly, the face buttons and bumpers all felt solid, and served me well through a few runs of Hades. The full-size thumbsticks felt precise, and while the D-pad wasn’t quite as clicky as I’d like, it was fully serviceable for rounding out some quarter-circles in Guilty Gear Strive.

As a result, it’s easy and natural for your thumbs to reach the Steam Deck’s face buttons, D-pad, and thumbsticks. However, as soon as I held it myself, the layout felt completely natural: the intuitive hand orientation when you grab the Steam Deck is more straight up and down, like holding the sides of a steering wheel, whereas with a controller your hands are at more of an angle. Primarily that’s because the thumbsticks are in-line with the D-pad and face buttons, which looks a bit odd when you’re used to the more staggered arrangement found on most controllers. When I first saw the hardware, I admit I was a bit thrown off by its control layout.