Pulling Zotac’s SN970 Steam Machine from its box, first impressions are good. Despite the garish Steam logo on top, its small white case with black side panels is pleasingly understated. It’s weighty, too—the “wow, this thing must be expensive!” kind of weighty that you’d hope for from a device that costs a substantial £900.

Despite being smaller than a PlayStation 4—and tiny compared to the hulking mass of an Xbox One—Zotac’s Steam Machine is far more powerful thanks to the Intel Core i5 processor and Nvidia GTX 960 graphics card inside. I was really quite eager to plug it in and play some games. Then the problems started.

The last time I used Steam OS was in 2014, back when it was still in beta, and everyone was falling over themselves to declare Valve’s latest invention the best thing to happen to video games since the d-pad. Since then, Steam Machines—the console-like PCs that ship with Steam OS—have been released… and the reviews haven’t been kind, to put it mildly. But I figured, how bad can it be? After all, we complain about Windows all the time and its constant need for updates and new graphics card drivers that can often make things worse rather than better. An OS designed to just get out of the way and let me play games? That can only be a good thing.