Vidjama Gmaes Work

The prologue for Alone In The Dark is here, and I figured what better time to whip out the old Steam Deck than now for a new video? Probably six months ago after I did my last Crap On Deck video, but hindsight is 20/20.

People want to know, how well does the prologue work on the Steam Deck? And the answer is not that great, at least not with the default settings. I’m assuming the game doesn’t actually check your computer’s specs like most other games do on first launch because everything started off set to epic and the game’s opening cutscene ran in the mid teens for framerate.

So I set the settings to high and it didn’t run much better. Pushing down to medium and you get a moderately reliable 30 frames as long as nothing is happening, and then bringing it down to low leaves you with a smoother 60 frames as long as nothing is going on. Otherwise it kicks down to the mid-teens pretty easily on any setting. It’s plainly obvious that the demo has not done a whole lot of optimizing. Also you can’t turn off motion blur or depth of field which is wholly unacceptable in today’s gaming space. There’s also barely any accessibility options. Maybe the full game will have these put, the only thing I can do now is judge on what we’ve been given.

The demo itself appears to be mostly a benchmarking tool, as it lasts less than 10 minutes and you don’t really get to do anything. I’m not entirely sure who this is supposed to be convincing to buy the full game, let alone pre-order it. It’s not that it’s bad, it just feels like a waste of time when for most people downloading and installing the thing is going to take longer than it takes to complete. I guess if you’re testing performance it’s worth it.

Honestly it felt like a waste of time and bandwidth.