Balatro is tiny, like 150 MB tiny. And endlessly playable. If you like poker and/or rogue likes it’s pound for pound one of the best deals out there both money and memory wise

Balatro and Slay The Spire 2 are roguelikes that have a lot of replayability.

Trackmania, you can give it a shot with Nations Forever it’s free on steam. Turbo/TM2 are graphically improved versions of it, 2020 is the newest one that most people play but has a lot of its features locked behind a yearly subscription. Go with the previous ones if offline play is a must.

Baba Is You is a real brain burner puzzle game that makes you think out of the box a lot of time.

Animal Well 35Mb

Genre/type of game you like most?

I enjoy unique story driven games. Two favourites are:

• Papers, please. <100MB
• Do not feed the monkeys. <1GB

Honorary mention to Not tonight. It’s very papers-inspired, but unique enough.

Have you tried Inscryption

My indie action platformer No More Mages is in early access (with a free demo) if you feel like taking a shot at a truly unknown game! More being added soon.

Minecraft (Java Edition, the standard).

About 0,3 GB, and needs no introduction. Endless box of fun in a tiny cross-platform package.

Both Hades and Hades II are about 11GB. Either one will fit or you could increase your limit just a bit and fit both.

Gotta plug my friends games, not that they’re unknown, just the first things that come to mind and they’re all small to small-ish in size (I think they might even be under 20gb for all combined).

Hotline Miami
Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number
Raft
Sea Salt
Post Void
Keep Driving

Deep rock galactic

I developed my taste in PC games before I had a graphics card, so…

• Baba Is You, a minimalist puzzle game with a Portal’s worth of perception bending
• Hypnospace Outlaw, a story-driven 90’s-styled computer/internet simulator with a shocking amount of good diegetic indie music. Like, more than one entire album.
• Celeste

I’ve already played these games to death and back so I haven’t really been playing them in the present tense

I’m going to go in a different, but important direction than everyone else: don’t.

SSD’s are constantly moving bits of data around to balance the amount of read/write each sector deals with, since that is what degrades the components.

The downside is that the swapping also counts as read/write cycles. Most of the time this is fine, because the SSD is doing relatively little data swapping compared to what it’s optimizing.

This goes away when your drive is more than 90% full. Then your drive become one of those missing tile puzzles, and it starts shuffling lots of data around constantly to get things in their optimal place. This leads to the swaps drastically increasing the read/write cycles and killing the drive early.

If you really need to have a bunch of games saved on your Steam Deck, you’re better off getting an SD card and using that for additional storage. While it’s slower to load, it’s not that much slower, and it’s not noticable for smaller games

I haven’t tried it yet, but Mina the Hollower just released and seems really cool. Should be way less than 20 GB.

Lot of my picks have already been mentioned but if you like story-rich point and clicks:
The rusty lake series (~1GB each)
Strange Horticulture (1GB)

Or very chill adventure:
Slime rancher (1GB)

Rouge-lite/rogue-like:
Death Road to Canada (60MB)
Binding of Isaac (449 MB) - this is my all time favourite game and I’m surprised to see the base game is still under $20.