izigame.me

From the very first screenshot I saw, I fell in love with the artstyle - low-poly shapes, fantastic creatures, pastel colors and admittedly a bit much bloom lightning. The protagonist carries a staff, which is used for everything - surfing, flying, carrying light - and I really love the animations. The soundtrack is great as well, very calm..
The premise of the game is rather simple: You enter an area, unlock the map, and find at least 3 light orbs to open the path to the next area. To 100% complete an area, you need to find all the orbs, interact with all the creatures and find some hidden glyphs as well.
The game is divided into several biomes, and each biome unlocks another skill, for example surfing on your staff in the snowy areas. Later puzzles require combining the unlocked skills.
The puzzles aren't hard, but they still took me forever, because I suck at platformers. Apparently I took twice the average completionist time. A few puzzles were on a timer; those were my least favorites. Save and respawn points are plenty, so you can just yeet yourself over the edge repeatedly trying to get that jump right.
This is in no way a difficult game.
Achievements are mostly straightforward, but missable: Complete each area 100%, and in some do a special task like interacting with the creatures in a special way.
The story was... I don't know. I really didn't play this for the story. You're on a pilgrimage, following the footsteps of those who went before you, reading the notes they left.
It took me 8 hours to finish, half of which I probably spent running in circles and falling off cliffs. There's no real replay value, but I had a fun time.
In my experience, this game absolutely deserves to be deck verified; the reason for the badge merely being "playable" is listed as having to manually invoke the keyboard, but I never had to enter text.
Despite all my love for it, there's also some negative points:

No way to rebind controls (it's ok with controller, I wouldn't want to play it with keyboard)
Basically no settings at all, and while I love the bloom effect, I can imagine it's a bit much for others
No cloud saves
I had a few crashes, but I can't tell if that's because of the game or the steam deck

It does feel kinda like an early console game - straightforward, no options, no save slots, nothing. But we're not in the era of early consoles anymore, and I am glad I didn't pay full price for it. The general consensus about time to finish seems to be 3-5 hours, which is one more reason I'd only suggest picking it up in a sale.