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…
One Finger Death Punch and One Finger Death Punch 2
What more is there to say? The reason why that works perfectly is already in the title of the game.
Caution: this game is addictive
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
That sounds like a good plot for an episode in a tv show. I sense potential here. Haha
And they can play Brothers A Tale Of Two Sons.
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
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.
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. Once did a live stream specifically to show people what it’s like and how to do it. 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.
For the friend who enjoys BG3, you can play Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous pretty much entirely with the mouse. The base game is 90% off on steam right now too.
Pathfinder has a massive learning curve compared to DnD 5e though, but that just means you can get an extra 50 hours of entertainment out of the game before you start the story, just by figuring out all the options when creating your character lol
WotR is so fucking good. But a quick PSA for anyone interested: Install the Bubble Buffs mod so you don’t have to spend 5 minutes casting your 37 buffs before every large fight.
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. :-/
Pokemon Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee both support single hand mode.
So left hand only games… driving games should work(enjoying NFS heat, atm), turn based games and isometric RPGs (plenty of those, depends on preferences… Balatro, slay the spire, XCOM, disco Elysium, etc… I could make a list if needed).
Telltale games like the wolf among us and stuff
Vampire survivors and all the similar games (halls of torment, brotato, soulstone survivors, etc)
