Steamdeck experience (with Decky "dlss" framegen mod)

[FreeLuigi]

First of all, congratulations on a beautiful game. The art style, the gameplay feel, no microtransactions, playable offline ....there's a lot to love here, and I'll be sure to mention that in my review when I played some more.

But since I saw quite a few folks ask about Steamdeck performance, I wanted to share my experience so far.

I only played through the tutorial on hardcore, and arrived in Skylight. That's it. So this won't be a game review per se, but rather a take on the performance on the Steamdeck, with the Decky frame gen mod in use. I think this early point in the game suffices to assess performance, since Skylight, according to what I read so far, is one of the most taxing areas in the game, in terms of performance.

If you're not familiar with the Decky framegen mod, it's a mod / plugin that emulates DLSS (&frame generation) on the Steamdeck by taking FSR, and adding frame generation to it. It even works for some games that don't have native FSR support, but obviously it's a bit of a hack, so don't expect any official support for it.

If you want to give it a try, follow a Youtube guide, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nYwcfK9Xs8

(I won't provide any kind of support since I don't really know what I'm doing there myself).

With FSR 3.1 & frame generation enabled, (turn on "HUD fix" otherwise the HUD will flicker while moving) I can comfortably get 40-60 fps in Skylight, on medium setting in the game, and in 1920x1080p resolution, from desktop mode, on an external monitor.

I think that's quite impressive for a game like this, and I'm really happy with that.

However, I can't get the game to work properly in handheld mode. Is that a known bug?

Even if I disable the framegen plugin, and even if I manually set the resolution to 1280x720 before launching the game in handheld mode, it looks very weirdly stretched out, and it won't let me "acccept" any changes made in settings. I can't choose the "accept" button, I can't even click it if I force the mouse cursor (steam button + trackpad).

It's not a deal breaker for me, since I prefer playing in desktop mode. But how awesome it would be to also casually grab my deck, and play this game in bed, for example.

Any ideas or advice is appreciated, thanks for reading.