It took me several hours to set up my Retroid Pocket 6 (RP6) with all the emulators and copies of 30+ year-old games. Then I downloaded an app called GameNative, and within minutes had access to over 2000ish of my games across Steam, Epic, Amazon (?!), and GOG. And it is seriously changing the way I look at games and how I play them.

Probably.

In the likely event you haven’t been watching RetroGameCorps or TechDweeb videos for the last year, the handheld gaming scene is having a Renaissance moment. The nostalgia mining element has always been there – “Here is a $80 GBA-looking thing that plays PlayStation 1 games!” – but there are only so many of those veins to go around. Then the Steam Deck came and kind of blew open the more premium tier of handheld devices. In the last year or so, though, there have been some serious developments on the software side of things that allow for Steam to more easily communicate on Android devices without a lot of workarounds. This includes automatically applying drivers and settings and tweaks to get games to function correctly.

I don’t know all the technical stuff, but as Todd Howard would say: it just works.

…for most games. The RP6 I own has a chipset which is the equivalent to a 1050ti graphics card, for example, and only 8 GB of RAM. I’m not going to be playing Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur’s Gate 3 on this thing. However, most of the games I have (by volume) aren’t AAA titles. Hell, I spent like 200+ hours in March playing Mewgenics and Slay the Spire 2. And guess what? Both games fully work on the RP6 and include cloud saves. Granted, Mewgenics isn’t as controller-friendly as I’d like, but still!

As mentioned earlier, all this is changing the way I look at games in general. For one thing, it has me reexamining my entire decade+ Steam/Epic/Amazon/GOG libraries to see if there are games that I may have otherwise ignored/missed that could be more fun by virtue of playing on a handheld.

For example, I just played through the entirety of Celeste on the RP6. Was it a better experience than just playing on my PC with a controller? Probably not. In fact, I ended up purchasing a separate grip for the RP6 because I was getting hand cramps after playing more than an hour straight with the RP6. Although that might be more due to Celeste’s control scheme and precision platforming. The fact remains that I did stick with it and beat Celeste in little 15-20 minute increments in-between meetings, while waiting for other games to load, and eventually just in straight-up long sessions. Celeste is certainly more amenable for this sort of gameplay experience than other games might be, but it’s a proof of concept for me. Plus, as an Android device, the software manages to perfectly (thus far) suspend the game at a moment’s notice if something were to come up.

After reviewing my existing catalog, I have begun to pay more attention to all those ancillary (bundle) sales that I may have hitherto ignored. Just this past week, I picked up Journey and Donut County for just over $3 apiece. I haven’t played Journey in just about 13 years and I would probably enjoy it more on a larger screen… but the fact that I could play it (natively!) on a handheld? Yes, please. As for Donut County, that looks precisely like the sort of goofy fun I wish to be able to conjure up to fill in the gaps between moments.

Not everything is sunshine and rainbows, of course. I was initially excited to finally have an excuse to play Rain World, but everything looks tiny on the RP6 and there aren’t any in-game graphical options to correct it. Slay the Spire 2 has controller support already, but not touchscreen support that I can tell. As mentioned, Mewgenics is playable, but there’s no way I’m going to move the mouse cursor around with a thumbstick the entire game when I just want to move a few squares. I anticipate many such idiosyncrasies as I load into various games.

Overall though, I’m finding GameNative to be a game-changer for me. In many ways, this functionality was what I was waiting for the Steam Machine for. The Retroid Pocket 6 has video out capability, so it technically fulfills that portion too, if I were so inclined. All that is left, really, is to check its MineCraft capability. And wouldn’t you know, MineCraft is on Android and this is an Android device.

So, my guess is: “pretty good.” Better than on Switch? We shall see.