What have you been playing
Jak and Daxter 2 via opengoal on Steam Deck. Such a clunky game, but it runs beautifully (except I had to stop right now because it crashed in the middle of the mission, but that’s one crash in several hours). This game feels like a sequence of levels that are just hard enough to be infuriating, but without feeling impossible. And the characters make it more interesting and easier to keep trying the same mission 20 times in a row.
Psychonauts 1 and 2.
Some of the most imaginative big budget games in existence, from themes to art style to level design