Vidjama Gmaes Work

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I had a few options with The First Berserker. I could play it on Steam, on my Deck, on the PlayStation, or on the Xbox. So I of course downloaded it on the Steam Deck and the rest as they say is this video you’re watching right now. Unfortunately I didn’t get to record myself beating the second chapter boss on Deck, because OBS in its endless reliability decided that it would start cutting off the video feed in the middle of my fight. Also I haven’t beaten the second boss yet.

Editing Connor here, I took a small break from putting this video together and managed to kill the boss in one try.

But I’m here to talk about The First Berserker demo and how it runs on Steam Deck, because that’s probably what you’re here for too. And the good news is that First Berserker runs really well on the Steam Deck. The demo at least. Surprisingly or unsurprisingly given the art style and the fact that this was made by Neople, the Dungeon Fighter Online crew. During gameplay I found that the Steam Deck generally runs in the high 40s to mid 50s framerate, with occasional small dips in the middle. And then one or two cutscenes just murder the Steam Deck and knock it down to 10fps for a little bit.

GPU is doing the bulk of the work here. Default settings are at medium for most options with some at low. There isn’t much in the way of resolution options out of the box. I got the pretty decent framerate keeping the default settings.

If you’re thinking about playing with a keyboard and mouse, don’t. This genre is clearly meant to be played with a controller. First Berserker is a souls game at heart, but it doesn’t feel as cruel or punishing as other souls games. You notice pretty early on that combat is giving you a lot of stuff to work with. Chiefly your slain enemies drop gear hand over fist to the extent it feels like an ARPG at times. I stored a half dozen items in each gear slot by the end of the demo, occasionally duplicates of things I already had. It makes going back and farming enemies more fulfilling because they might drop useful gear in addition to the usual soul currency.

And yes, there’s soul currency that the game calls…ligma. You also have gold which doesn’t drop on death that has no use that I could find in the demo. There’s also upgrade materials that can be found for crafting that also had no use yet. And you get little knick-knacks and consumables that can help in battle like an item that grants you temporary flame elemental damage or one that actually gives a lot of health at the cost of some of your spirit.

But I wanted to circle back on how First Berserker is constantly giving you things, and talk about the bosses. Because I really liked the boss fight mechanics. Boss fights give you stuff, by which I mean even if you lose you’ll receive a stipend of ligma based on how far you got. After chapter 1 you open up a skill tree that gains experience separately by simply engaging in combat, so if you get railed by a boss ten times in a row, you’ve come out with a good payout of soul juice and experience and have unlocked a few more skills and gained more stats. You’re encouraged to keep fighting the boss to get better at its mechanics rather than going off and farming normal enemies for hours, but you can also do that if you prefer.

You kick off chapter 1 with dual wielded swords and over the course of the demo get your hands on broadsword and spear weapons. I was much better at throwing perfect blocks than I was dodges, but your mileage may vary. Toward the end of the demo on the final boss the skill kicked in and I suddenly got really good at perfect dodges.

My only complaint with the Steam Deck is that the small screen makes reading timing on blocks harder than a big television, although that can be fixed by hooking the Deck to a dock. First Berserker does look great on Steam Deck, thanks to the small screen and art style, and the performance remains steady enough that it never lagged during a fight, even during the big show-off boss fights.

I can only blame my own stupidity for those deaths. I will note that playing on the Steam Deck makes fluid gameplay a little harder. Moving your left thumb from the joystick to the d-pad to pop a potion during a tense fight adds some extra delay, although I could have easily fixed that by making use of the back bumpers. Again, my own stupidity. But if you’re looking for a demo to play, I highly recommend First Berserker. If you don’t like Souls games because of the difficulty, you might find this one more accommodating. On the other hand if you like Souls games because you’re a masochist, you might think this is on the easy side.

Either way you should like and subscribe for more Deck videos. I’m going to put up a compilation of my saved video cuts of the game so you can see longer bits in action.