The game meets a real Steam Deck, and learns to use the whole screen

A Deck on the desk.

Until today the Steam Deck was a promise on paper. Since 1.6 there has been a Linux download, and a robot has been playing whole runs with a pretend controller at the Deck's resolution of 1280 by 800. Today the download went onto a real one. Started on its own, it ran straight away. Added to Steam as a non-Steam game it needed one launch option, and after that it also ran in game mode, the full-screen console mode of the Deck. Then came the real test: playing with nothing but the buttons, the way you would on a sofa. The game worked. It just did not feel like a game made for this machine, and that is what 1.9 is about.

Buttons that do what your thumbs expect.

In the old layout, X and Y opened information and your team, and booking a sprint meant steering to a button on screen first. Card games on a controller have settled on something better, so the game follows that now. On the playing field, A picks a card, X books the sprint, Y reprioritises, and B puts every card you picked back down. LB explains the combinations and colours, RB shows your team, and the menu button abandons the run. Everywhere else X and Y keep their old jobs. The right stick scrolls through anything long, like a window or the list of what you just unlocked. The legend at the bottom of the screen changes with the screen, so it always shows what the buttons do right there. The Deck's four back buttons are invisible to the game, but you can put them on LB and RB in Steam. And the tips for beginners now close with B, and say so.

Hold A to move.

With a mouse or a finger you can drag the cards in your hand into your own order, and do the same with your colleagues. With a controller you could not, and the order of your team matters. Now you can: hold A on a card or a colleague for a moment and it lifts out of its row with a dashed outline. The d-pad moves it one place at a time, and letting go of A puts it down. A short press is still just picking. It works in your hand, in your team on the playing field, and in your team at the drinks.

The whole screen.

The wide layout was designed for a laptop, and a Deck is a little wider than that for its height. On the Deck the game sat in the middle with empty bands on both sides, and some screens floated halfway down, as if they had been made for something smaller. Now the game takes the full width. On the playing field the cards in your hand keep their size, because the height is the limit there, and the extra width goes to your team, with larger letters. The scope bar sits at the very top of every screen during a run, in exactly the same place, and the rest fills the screen below it. The engagements on the map got bigger, and the drinks now fit exactly six offers. The combinations and the knowledge transfer open as wide windows in three columns instead of a list you had to scroll. The poster on the end screen no longer pushes the page down, and the settings put everything you see on the left and everything you hear on the right.

Checked on a screen of 1280 by 800.

A new check photographs every screen and window at the size of a Deck and reports anything that falls outside the picture or makes the page scroll. Of the sixteen, one still scrolls: the personnel file, which lists every colleague and certification in the game. That is a hundred and twenty-one lines, now in three columns, and the right stick scrolls it. The same check runs at four other screen sizes, from a small laptop to a full HD monitor. The controller robot then played three complete Platinum runs, two rounds each, and found no errors. One honest footnote: while writing this, it turned out that the robot had been ignoring the seed it was given, so earlier "different" runs had all been the same game. That is fixed as well, and the three runs above really were three different games.