It’s a wonderfully flexible device, and extremely fun to tinker with - but the ergonomics are shockingly bad. I don’t know if it’s the size, weight or shape to blame, but it quite reliably gives me the worst hand/wrist pain I’ve ever experienced from a device like it. I’ve tried plenty of purported solutions - adjusting my grip to various positions, attaching grip tape to the handles, etc - and none of them have made any difference.

I played it for two hours last week and it gave me such severe hand cramp that I wasn’t able to fully close my fingers without pain for three days. The only way to fix the pain is to simply not use the console.

There are scattered accounts along these lines on places like /r/SteamDeck - I gather I’m not really unique in this respect.

It’s tremendously unfortunate, really - it’s excellent at what it does, but I expect I’ll have to just sell mine and hope that a future revision to the hardware makes it a little less painful to use.