Gears of War: E-Day early scores: 10 - DayOne 9.5 - TechRaptor 9.5 - But Why Tho 9.5 - MondoXbox 9 - IGN 9 - CGM 9 - Voxel 9 - Nexus Hub 9 - Screen Rant 9 - Console Creatures 8.5 - XGN 8.5 - Areajugones 8 - VGC 8 - Slant 8 - GAMINGbible 8 - SteamDeckHQ 6 - The Guardian Metacritic is at 89. OpenCritic is at 87. The Guardian is the only real outlier.

Steam Deck owners can now make their handheld look like a PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox 360, PSP or even a PS2 thanks to unofficial community-made plugins. The new BenderThemes plugin lets users transform SteamOS Game Mode with interfaces inspired by consoles including the PS2, PS5, PSP, Xbox and Xbox 360. Users can switch between different designs, customize how their game library is displayed and even change how the Steam Store and collections are organized. There's also a separate Decky Xbox Dashboard plugin that recreates the Xbox Series X|S home screen, complete with tabs for games, the Store, Community and System.

Steam Deck OLED is getting HDR streaming back. Valve has re-enabled HDR in Steam Remote Play with the latest Steam Beta update, after temporarily disabling it earlier this month because of brightness issues that could make streamed games look overexposed. The update also adds a new HDR setting >Automatic, On or Off, “On” can also increase brightness when displaying SDR content >A brightness slider has been added to the streaming overlay >HDR capture now works through PipeWire on desktop Linux >HDR streaming from macOS is now supported >Android 15+ phones can stream HDR through the Steam Link Beta app

Steam is making it easier to run Windows games on Linux. Steam now automatically uses Proton when you add a non-Steam Windows game to your library. Before, you often had to enable it manually in the settings. Proton is Valve’s tool that lets many Windows games run on Linux, including Steam Deck. It’s a small but useful change that makes playing games from other launchers or outside Steam easier, the feature is currently in the Steam Client Beta.

Steam Deck has now booted its first PS5 game through the experimental SharpEmu emulator, with Astro’s Playroom running at 0,6 FPS SharpEmu managed to get the game running directly on Steam Deck through SteamOS, without Remote Play or cloud streaming. The performance is currently around 0.5–1 FPS, and the game only reaches the PlayStation Studios intro and loading screen. It’s obviously nowhere near playable yet but it’s something

Steam Deck OLED prices have increased again across several Asian markets, with South Korea seeing the biggest jump. The 1TB model now costs ₩1,578,000, up 51% from its previous price. Updated prices: - Japan – 512GB OLED: ¥137,980 | 1TB OLED: ¥167,980 - South Korea – 512GB OLED: ₩1,298,000 | 1TB OLED: ₩1,578,000 - Taiwan – 512GB OLED: NT$26,280 | 1TB OLED: NT$31,800 - Hong Kong – 512GB OLED: HK$6,488 | 1TB OLED: HK$7,788 The latest increases range from 38% to 51%, depending on the model and region. This follows an earlier round of price hikes in March 2026 linked to exchange rates.

The Steam Deck could get a serious memory boost from new Linux tech called CRAM thanks to Linux developers CRAM compresses data directly in RAM instead of relying on traditional ZRAM. In testing, it was up to 452x faster than ZRAM for memory reads, although the gains are much smaller with heavy writes. The boost is much smaller with write-heavy workloads, but one test with 20% writes still showed a 5.4x speedup.

One Steam Deck owner got so tired of family members using it and handing it back with a dead battery that they built a wild anti-theft case with a built-in taser. The setup also includes 3D-printed spikes, a Raspberry Pi that runs a camera, speaker and alarm, plus motion detection that warns anyone who gets too close. The creator says it did the trick, and now everyone asks before borrowing the handheld