 Let me tell you a story. When I was 12 years old, I got my first Nintendo Game Boy. It was a big gray brick. It only showed four colors of green on the screen, had a mono speaker. The cartridges didn't always work when you plugged them in. Sometimes you had to blow on them. Actually, that's a myth. Please do not blow on your cartridges. It'll make it worse. But I remember sitting in the back of the car, and I could not believe that I was playing Mario on the go. I couldn't believe games fit in this thing. Why do I bring this up? The $400 Steam Deck makes me feel the same way. I can't believe they actually made PC gaming portable. But they did. I am holding in my hands a computer that can capably play games released this year, and games dating back decades. Games that were designed for mice and keyboards, and dedicated graphics cards. And I can play them, because this is a gyroscopic aiming system, and this is a virtual mouse. And 22 of the Deck's 27 different controls can be customized for so many play styles it boggles the mind. I can play them smoothly, because the most powerful integrated graphics in a handheld yet are right here. I can change their graphical settings six ways from Sunday, load mods, even command line arguments if I want. In fact, Valve gives you more to tweak here than on your typical PC. This glorious overlay helps you find to not only the performance, but the battery life of the Deck in real time. Showing you how quickly you're draining the pack, and letting you change settings to gobble down less juice. My favorite part though is I can pause my games at any moment, right in the middle of a huge fight. Or in my case, as a parent with two kids, I can finally complete games one bite-sized session at a time, like I did with my Nintendo Switch. I can plug in a mountain of peripherals, fire up a web browser, even do my job from here. I wrote a popular Verge story on this thing, and watched a whole lot of Netflix. After firing up GameCube games on this thing via the Dolphin emulator, I'm convinced it's going to be an incredible retro portable too. It's the most fun I've ever had beta testing a piece of hardware. Oh, did I forget to mention the Steam Deck can be an unfinished, infuriating, unpredictable buggy mess? To give you a better idea, first I need to show you the Steam Deck UI, which we've never been able to show you before. Here's a quick tour. So here's the main home screen for the Steam Deck. It's got a horizontally scrolling list of titles, kind of like Netflix, even though it's still reminiscent of Steam. There's also your vertical scrolling menu over here, where you can access the library, store, media and downloads. It also doubles as an app switcher, which is something they just added the other day, if you want to run two apps at once. There's also a quick settings menu over here, where you can access brightness, audio, some of your advanced battery options. But you can't do everything from this portion of the menu. If you want to actually pair Bluetooth headphones or toggle auto-brightness, you have to go to this settings menu instead, where there's a lot of vestigial Steam stuff that I imagine is still getting figured out, hopefully in future revisions. Some of the transitions and animations can still be a bit jumpy, too. And when I'm using the controls, whether I'm using a touch screen or buttons or even a mouse, sometimes it's not quite clear when I've got the handles of the devices and when I'm actually able to toggle them on and off. I'm going to level with you, this is one of the hardest reviews I've ever done, because the system kept on changing out from under us the whole time. Valve kept releasing new updates every couple of days, introducing new bugs, fixing old bugs, sometimes generating entirely new features that changed how we evaluated the whole system on the fly. In fact, there are enough issues, I made a list of some of them here for you. Bluetooth audio pauses and lags. Deck wouldn't detect my external microphones. Friends could barely hear me in Discord. Forgot my Wi-Fi a handful of times and forgot to reconnect to my earbuds after waking up from sleep. That happens pretty often. Some games like Cyberpunk will be working one day, not working the next. Error messages, I've seen so many error messages and a handful of black screens. Require a reboot. Speaking of reboots, games magically disappear from the SD card until I reboot the system fairly often. Transferring games to SD can be slow and you're locked out while you do. Most of my Steam library went missing from the UI one day. UI elements missing or not scaling correctly, particularly when using external monitors. I've lost track of how many times I've had to reboot, re-wake, and reconnect and disconnect things to fix all these issues. And the entire time, Valve is pushing new updates to the system every couple days. Valve changed the entire way the frame limiter works, like three times in two weeks. There was a giant update halfway through the review period that unlocked new games. I'm happy to say Persona 4 Golden works. We couldn't browse the store of verified games until today, the day we're filming this video. Couldn't test Windows at all because we're still waiting on GPU drivers and earlier there were network drivers. We couldn't try the 64 gigabyte model which has slower onboard storage. Couldn't try the official dock. We couldn't try much cloud gaming because Google and Microsoft are still working on building support into their Linux browsers. Working with Valve on that. I was able to get Stadia working by emulating a mouse and keyboard, but still it's not quite there yet. When I spoke to Valve, the team candidly admitted it's not all going to be there by launch. The company will be shipping rapid fixes and features to early adopters for some time to come. I've got some faith in Valve. It never abandoned the Steam Controller or Steam Link HDMI streaming puck. Updated them long after it was clear they didn't meet Valve's sales expectations. But you should know going in, this is not a console that will flawlessly run every Steam game the moment you hit play. Though Valve's done some incredible work to make Windows games seamlessly work on Linux, it still doesn't run some of the biggest hits like PUBG, Destiny 2, GTA 5, and Fortnite due to conflicts over anti-cheat software. Other games won't launch at all and won't tell you why. Some will need you to mess with settings or spend time figuring out a custom control scheme that works. And while Valve and the Steam community have made things easier by verifying some games as deck compatible and preceding loads of old Steam Controller configurations, I still never know quite what to expect. Here's the original TIE Fighter, one of my favorite games ever made. It launches! The animations look great. Someone with the old Steam Controller even made a custom control scheme. But there's no cursor to navigate the menu, and this isn't really playable. Meanwhile Valve-certified Deathloop is a game that plays great on deck, but the joystick controls are all stuttery, you can't just swap in an emulated mouse because that doesn't play nice with the gamepad buttons, and if you emulate a mouse and keyboard, now the on-screen button prompts don't match up. Here's a list of games that actually worked on the Steam Deck for me, and a bunch that didn't, because some of them didn't have a good control scheme, or in many cases simply crashed immediately to desktop or through some other kind of random error when I tried to launch them via Proton. My very first day with the Steam Deck, I wanted to play Halo Infinite, Back 4 Blood, and Duck Game with my friends, but none of them run on the Deck. And when I tried streaming Halo from my desktop PC instead, I ran into a whole bunch of glitches. So that all sounds frustrating. And it is. And I'm still buying one. I'm paying $400 because I don't mind being an early adopter. I'm the kind of guy who spent an entire hour building the perfect custom configuration to play Destiny 2 via Stadia, a platform where I don't even own any games, and I don't regret it for a moment. Also the hardware is fantastic. The screen is good. I'm using the $650 version with the anti-glare display, which works. Oh, and it also soaks up fingerprint oil. The speakers are excellent, loud and clear without being shrill. And the controls almost all feel like they're in the exact right places, the 1.47 pound heft distributed nicely across my hands. I even appreciate the top-mounted USB-C port, because I always found the Nintendo Switch's bottom-mounted one getting in the way. And while some have complained about Valve's choice of a Wi-Fi 5 chip instead of Wi-Fi 6, I saw 580 megabit per second download speeds from gigabit fiber over a powerful Wi-Fi router. It'd be nice if the screen had smaller bezels and the Steam and quick settings buttons actually clicked in, but the only things I wish Valve would change hardware-wise are the battery and the seriously noisy fan. My old annoying hum. As iFixit showed in a teardown, that 40 watt-hour battery is not going to be trivial to swap out, and the Steam Deck hits it hard. It's easy to see the console drop 24 watts in scenes that really tax the GPU, which means less than two hours worst case on a charge. I saw just under two hours of control at 60 FPS in low settings, but I got more than four hours in less intensive games with the frame limiter set to 30 FPS. You should know Valve's taking pains to preserve that battery, too. It took me two hours 45 minutes to charge it from empty, and 15 of those minutes were just to get from 96% to full. And it doesn't charge any faster if you've got a more powerful adapter. The good news is I was able to suspend a game shortly before the console was about to die, I still had an hour to get home and plug it in, and the bundled 45 watt charger was powerful enough to charge and play at the same time. I was right back in my game. You should also know this is a big, beefy system that's not going to fit in pockets or even a midsize purse. Like that original Game Boy, I wound up carrying it in its own custom tote bag. Now a padded backpack might work. I am buying a Steam Deck because I actually like tweaking PCs, and I'm never too far from a charger or a beefy battery pack. It'll all but replace my Nintendo Switch, which my wife hasn't let out of her sight ever since the last Animal Crossing expansion. But if you were hoping for an experience where everything just works, you might want to wait for the next one. Valve says it's looking at this as a multi-generational product, which is a fancy way of saying that unless it flops, a Steam Deck 2 is in the cards. Even today, though, as half-baked as it might be, I already feel a lot of that original Game Boy magic. So you've read our Steam Deck review, you've watched our video. What do you still want to know? We're going to make an FAQ on theverge.com, and I'd love your input.