Hi people, I currently have two friends who injured their dominant arm in unrelated accidents and mostly can’t do anything but sit around and watch movies.
I’d like to gift them some games to play with just one hand. Not the hentai variant, but something to keep them occupied with.
Both own a steam deck. One is more into cozy games like Dorfromantik and the other into RPGs like BG3.
One Finger Death Punch would be a good example as you can remap controls so you only need to press left and right on the D-Pad, but both of them don’t really like that game.
Do you know any games which can be played with one hand, preferably a controller or Steam deck? Using a mouse with your non dominant hand is annoying…
I don’t understand. You have two friends, each with a good arm, that’s two good arms. Tape your friends together and have them coordinate and BAM: two-handed gaming.
And they can play Brothers A Tale Of Two Sons.
Tape will come off when they sweat, better sew them together. And trim off those unnecessary arms, it’s just efficiency.
🚨👮♂️🚨yes officer it’s this person right here
Thank you citizen, you’re right! He’s got management written all over him!
sadly they live 80km apart from each other, and both are right handed, so they couldn’t face each other while playing. We’d need a pretty weird dual-monitor setup if we’d tape them together.
All I’m hearing is excuses over excuses!
That sounds like a good plot for an episode in a tv show. I sense potential here. Haha
My SO and I died this during a stream once. I don’t know why lol.
We played Hades. I was right, she was left. It started as a joke but we actually made it decently far lol.
You might be interested in the videos made by Champutee, a one-armed gamer who has done several experiments with both genres and controllers to continue enjoying gaming.
Balatro
Slay the Spire
Brotato
Vampire Survivor & ClonesI’m gonna say it.
I’m gonna say it.
Slice & Dice is better than Slay the Spire (not by much, to be fair, but… yeah).
You like it better, it isn’t objectively better.
I bounced off of SnD. I wanted to like it but just couldn’t for whatever reason.
How do I get into it? I’ve tried and it’s not really sticking, to be honest.
I think a fair amount of survivor games like Vampire Survivors and 20 minutes til dawn are intended for just one hand. Then there’s every turn based strat game like Civilization and stellaris, along with every turn based RPG out thete
Here’s a curator for one handed gaming as well. https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41112101-One-Handed-Gamer/
Balatro is turn-based and is easy enough to control. I myself play on mobile, but Steam Deck shouldn’t be very different.
XCom and XCom 2 can be played entirely with the mouse. Minor typing if you want to name your soldiers, but nothing requires quick reflexes. Everything is turn based.
There’s an older breakout style game on steam called Shatter that can be played entirely with the mouse and has a banger soundtrack and neat visual style.
Emulation opens up a lot of options for old school turn based games. RPGs, turn based strategy. Any of the Pokemon games gen 1-3 can be played one handed with some clever button mapping. Any game made to use just the Wii-mote as a pointer would also work, but I don’t know those off the top of my head.
You might want to look into one handed controllers, or something like the FLIR USB dongle that you can use to map IR TV remote signals to keyboard button presses. Just need to use a remote that doesn’t already control something.
If they have a keyboard and are into turn-based role playing games then I can recommend Caves of Qud. It has a bit of a learning curve but once you get the hang of it starts to open up and it’s just incredible!
When we are talking about turn-based RPGs, they could also give Stone Shard a look https://store.steampowered.com/app/625960/Stoneshard/
I think you should be able to play Organ Trail one-handed. It’s a zombie apocalypse version of Oregon Trail.
Organ Trail… What’s the objective?
I guess games like Monkey Island (1 to 3, and Return, the 3D ones would be harder) could work using the touch screen or touchpad working as a mouse
Just FYI, there are a number of controllers out there for people who only have the use of one hand that are relatively cheap. I don’t always have the use of both hands, and I can definitely say that it’s possible to learn to use regular controllers effectively one handed as well. Both the Logitech F710 and the 8Bitdo Pro 2 work really well in my opinion. People have laughed at me, but the 8bitdo Zero 2 surprisingly works really well too, but is much more limited for inputs and thus, more suited to retro games.
If this is a long term thing, you might consider a left handed gaming mouse with programmable side keys.
I hate to recommend Razer cuz their build quality has taken an absolute nose dive, but the only one I know of is the Razer Naga: https://www.razer.com/gaming-mice/razer-naga-left-handed-edition/rz01-03410100-r3m1
Setting some of the side keys as WASD and the usual surrounding support keys (Q, E, R F, G, X, C) and you can play almost any game one-handed.
The learning curve to get your brain to accept mouse movement and clicks with your left hand is annoying as fuck though.
For the friend who enjoys BG3, you can play Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous pretty much entirely with the mouse. The base game is 90% off on steam right now too.
Pathfinder has a massive learning curve compared to DnD 5e though, but that just means you can get an extra 50 hours of entertainment out of the game before you start the story, just by figuring out all the options when creating your character lol
Edit: whoops, seems like the steam spring sale just ended. The game is still absolutely worth it at full price though
WotR is so fucking good. But a quick PSA for anyone interested: Install the Bubble Buffs mod so you don’t have to spend 5 minutes casting your 37 buffs before every large fight.
You might want to check out this post : https://jlai.lu/post/16859633 Text is in French, but the picture shows a collection of 69 one-handed games on steam
Have they tried narrative games like the ones from Telltale, Dontnod, … ?
Divinity: Original Sin 2 is basically just more BG3 (though with less production quality) so that should be right up your RPG-loving friend’s alley. Turn based combat and click-to-move lets you play the whole thing with just your mouse I’m pretty sure.
