A question about how it is on Deck

[Worcanna]

I'm very tempted to buy this. A friend of mine streamed it and I'm a sucker for detective games, but seeing the small text warning does worry me, as well as performance questions.

Does anyone have a deck that plays this? :) Any info would be grand. Thank you.

[Rosemagwin]

Performance is a bit jank and despite the game having controller support, you still need to set up controls manually. I dont think they're an official or a good unofficial button layout out yet

[Dexter102900]

I play this game a lot on my deck. I personally haven't thought the text was too small but even if it is for you the most important text on the pin board can be resized and changed from handwritten to full text so I wouldn't say it should be a problem.

As far as performance I felt it's been pretty good. I can get 60 but often play at 30 frames to save battery. I've also tried the largest city size and it's still ran similarly. It can stutter and get a low frame rate sometimes but I also play on my PC and it can happen there too. From everyone's comments this seems to be just how the game is at the moment until it gets further along and optimized. Same goes for any other bugs I've seen but one, see below. So nothing really specific to the deck.

The controller setup for the game is like 90% there for me. That is the official steam deck controller layout too just the Xbox controller buttons mapped to the steam deck. There's a few things on the pin board that is just easier with a mouse but can be improved for controller. So for now I actually use a community layout using keyboard and mouse buttons by Summelar based on the controller layout called "better Gamepad controls using mouse and keyboard settings." This feels exactly like the controller layout just with a couple tweaks for the pin board using a trackpad as a mouse instead of two joysticks to pick and move things on the pin board. Also for my personal setup I added a layer to his layout that when touching the right stick the left touchpad is a touch menu of 1 through 0 for direct switching of items. I might share it to the community if people want it or I feel there's no more tweaks I could make.

When I started playing I started with proton 7.0-6. It did have a small graphical glitch during the tutorials where the example videos did not play. I later found out that the developer was aware of this and intended to fix it. By then I had switched to proton 8.0-1 and now proton 8.0-2 where for both it's fixed. This does show that the developer is concerned with steam deck compatibility though.

As far as my opinion on the game itself as a fellow Detective fan you can look at my steam review for details but in short I definitely recommend. As for specifically on the deck, I have a RTX 2060 and a i9-9980hk PC and I still choose to play on the deck or PC based on convenience, what controls I feel like playing with and when using remote play on the steam deck versus local, for battery life not performance. When on the deck and the Wi-Fi is too busy and I don't need a ton of battery life, I'll just play local and I don't feel I'm sacrificing any performance.

Hope that helps. Good luck luck out there gumshoe in the shadows of doubt.