Steam Remote Play has come out of beta, and now allows any Steam user to stream games from their PC to their mobile phone and/or tablet. The service works admirably well, but the default touch controls left much to be desired.
This is why Valve has risen to the task of developing unique and personalized touch control schemes for over 100 of the most commonly desired Remote Play games. Players can now freely access these at their own behest.
While it’s clear that using touch controls is less than ideal, especially if you’ve got a gamepad at hand, it’s still good to have in a pinch. In this latest Remote Play update, Valve has focused on delivering fully-usable touch control schemes to action games first and foremost, and they’ve demonstrated the system on a few popular games.
Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch has fast travel buttons during normal gameplay, for example, which then disappear when the player enters combat. Stardew Valley offers a standard control scheme, though the majority of the screen also acts as a cursor trackpad for easy inventory management.
Even games as dynamic as the new Session skateboarding sim make good use of Valve’s implementation of touch controls: “The way that each foot is controlled by an Analog Stick gives it an intuitive feel on mobile, almost like playing with a Fingerboard,” they said. “Tricks are activated using various move combinations with both thumbs, just like controlling both feet. The placement of the X and A buttons let you naturally push off with the left or right foot, and leaning is done with the Left and Right Trigger buttons. In the future we’d like to experiment with leaning using the gyroscope so that we can steer while doing our goofy foot pop shuvits.”
If you’d like to give these a whirl, all you need to do is to enable Remote Play functionality and see if your Internet connection is up-to-par. The feature is free for all Steam users, as you’d expect.
