You should give it a shot. HN can be too negative at times. At least the YouTube vids seem to indicate that the deck can handle the games of that era just fine.

(author of the article here) Agreed. I'm just commenting on the hardware architecture. The deck is a pretty competent gaming device, given its ultraportable form factor and tight power constraints. You can find that out on any number of sites that have reviewed the Steam Deck from gaming experience perspective, so I didn't think it was necessary rehash that.

Don't let everyone get you down, I have one and it's extremely performant, even with games from the past few years. It'll work totally fine for stuff from that era.

I’ve been playing through my ARPG backlog on Steam Deck. Is there a particular game you’re curious about?

I’ve been very happy with mine playing games of all vintages and development budgets. Just this weekend I was playing Far Cry 4 and The Division 2 quite smoothly.

I've been playing Midnight Suns on mine, very recent game, and it works extremely well(if you lock to 30fps). I've played a good chunk of Elden Ring also completely locked to 30fps - no problem at all.

Someone said something about it before that makes sense to me - it's a portable PS4. If you are happy with playing games at the level a PS4 would play them, then it's a perfect device for you. If you expect proper next-gen games to run on it(Returnal) then you will be disappointed.