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 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.
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/
Rafa Nadal is right handed and plays left handed. If someone has issues with a non-dominant hand then it’s time to start making the other one dominant.
for most games you need two hands though ;)
Try to read the post again, “having issues with an arm” doesn’t sound as simple as you might think…
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?
The objective is to make sure you have enough supplies to survive for as long as you can while making it across America to a place safe from zombies.
I believe the goal is ultimately to get to Canada (I haven’t played in a while) but I might be mixing it up with Death Road to Canada, which is similar in premise but probably not something you could play one-handed.
Super Mario Run was quite fun as a single-button Mario platformer. You could also try visual novels or point-and-click adventures, or even something just with simple controls like pokémon.
For the record, I use a mouse with my non-dominant hand and I can play even fast paced FPS games like Titanfall competently enough. I actually used to dominate on Splitgate for a while. It’s a skill that can be learned. I have the advantage of having done it my whole life and I fully acknowledge that’s hard to replicate, but I think that with some practice anyone should be able to get to the point where they can play slower, primarily mouse driven games like turn based RPGs. Real time with pause might also be doable if you bind the pause button to the mouse (a mouse with some extra bindable keys would really help here). Anyway, just a thought.
If those options don’t work, maybe look into games like Vampire Survivor, or Realm of The Mad God (though I think the latter does need some rapid mouse inputs when looting, so maybe not so good).
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
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.
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.
That sounds like a good plot for an episode in a tv show. I sense potential here. Haha
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!
And they can play Brothers A Tale Of Two Sons.
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!
They could easily solve the double right handed problem by sewing one to the other upside down.
Have they tried narrative games like the ones from Telltale, Dontnod, … ?
Atomic Heart
All the games. Every last one of them.
One handed controllers exist.
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.
I once played XCOM 2 with a stylus. Ended up adding a 6DOF mouse for thether hand because bouncing around the map without it was atrocious.
Gamepads rule. There are one-handed ones as well.
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.
I have a couple Nagas and they’re excellent!
Good to hear.
I’ve had 4 - the 1st was around 2012 I think, and it was fucking amazing.
The second was around 2016, and even before plugging it in, it felt cheap. Actually using it, problems started popping up like measles in a red state - one of the side buttons stopped working, scroll wheel was janky.
The 3rd was around 2016, after exchanging the second via RMA. The L-click button was super fucked up right out of the box - it’d do this annoying thing where you push it down once, and like multiple clicks would register (the internet called it the ‘double click issue’ but was was WAY more than double… happened when I was using some art software and I’d have to ctrl+z like 10 times to clear all the actions it registered from a single click).
4th was around 2016, after exchanging the third via RMA >_< it made it a couple weeks without incident, but just when I thought I was in the clear, the cursor started jumping upwards a shit-ton randomly, which was hell trying to click-and-drag on anything. Then the internal LEDs went out (oh well, don’t really care if it’s pretty, but did like being able to see it in the dark). Then the double click thing started again.
Dealt with that for a while cuz I couldn’t afford to replace it and was tired of dealing with Razer’s customer service.
Then I joined the Air Force and didn’t have any time at all to game, so kinda fall out of the scene for a bit.
Separated around 2020, got myself a Corsair Scimitar, and lived happily ever after. Doesn’t come in lefty though. :-/
