The role-players that play best on Valve's gaming handheld.
The superlative detective game runs perfectly well on the Deck, and works great with a controller, too. In fact, there's an excuse to play around with the touch screen here as well if you fancy.
A controller-friendly RPG that runs smoothly owing to its simple graphics. Long sessions won't eat into your battery much, while the 3GB install leaves you lots of space for other games.
We spent a while testing whether Elden Ring works on the Steam Deck, and can confirm that devs have deployed a version of Proton that cuts most of the frame drops. That makes this FromSoftware classic a must-play Deck experience.
This open world epic is tiny next to the install sizes of modern RPGs. Skyrim has always been great with a controller, which makes it particularly well suited to the Steam Deck.
It's a little larger than some of the games on this list, but Divinity: Original Sin 2 is fully verified for the Deck. The system requirements are minimal, so it runs pretty smoothly.
Say what you will about NMS, the fact it runs without Proton and has an official controller layout gives it a great advantage. It's also transformatively better than when it was first released.