ShadF0x
Published
If you can ignore the issues with the lighting system (and how it makes flashlights obsolete at anything below High), it's okay on Deck.
The game runs on Unreal Engine 5 and makes ample use of its Global Illumination system. What that means in practice is that with GI at High\Epic the Deck craps itself and runs at 20-25W, while at Low\Medium the game looks like it runs in fullbright mode but uses more sane 10-15W.
When running GI at Medium or below, you can safely set TDP\GPU to 8\800, it will hold stable 60 fps.
Capping the game at 40 Hz is possible, but introduces severe input lag. In-game you can only choose between 30 and 60 FPS locks.
Decreasing in-game rendering scale to 70-80% gives a performance bump without much loss of clarity (I guess at worst it affects readability of terminals, but there weren't that many of them in the demo).
Because of the way the terminal screens are rendered, it's might be difficult to read emails depending on the graphical settings. The menu\tutorial text is legible.
Bound L4 to left click, right stick to joystick mouse, A to Enter, X to Space, B to Escape
It's a RenPy game, so you can turn down TDP/GPU to 3/200. Runs at ~5W. Don't touch the FPS limiter - going under 60FPS makes mouse cursor movement feel like laggy molasses.
Some weird quirk of the engine - hovering cursor over "yes/no" selectors drops FPS down to 10-20FPS. Not critical at all, but it was very weird to see it for the first time.
The game also "drops" FPS to single digits when nothing is happening on the screen. Doesn't affect the experience in any way.
The game requires a bit of keyboard input, mostly in the beginning and near the end of the game. Virtual keyboard usually works, but in some cases covers the input area, so you can't see what you type. The game might also lose keyboard input when invoking the virtual keyboard, which can be fixed by closing and opening the keyboard again.
Disabled both trackpads since the game has proper gamepad support
It's a game made for PSP and WM2003 PDAs. Just turn TDP and GPU all the way down, the game doesn't need it, it barely punches above 5W.
The in-level logs' (like the tutorial terminals) text is a tad small, but the font is pretty legible and there isn't much to read.
Disabled anti-aliasing completely (default is MSAAx4).
Can run it at 60fps with TDP 9 and GPU 900, but it will eat up to 13W.
With 40fps lock you can push things down to TDP 6 and GPU 600, which gives 10-11W.
Can be pushed further down to ~8W if you drop the resolution scale to 80% (text gets a bit fuzzy) or use 960x600 with FSR (edges of objects start to shimmer).
It will still go up to 11W eventually due to sheer volume of later swarms.
Objective text, currency counters and options descriptions are on the smaller side. Perk cards are legible.
D-pad input is finicky, you have to press it twice before it registers. This is not a fault of my hardware, and the problem isn't present if you use left stick to navigate menus.
Drops from locked FPS (40-60, depending on your settings) to mid-20 because the swarm sizes make Crimsonland blush.
Max settings 800p@60fps
- Turn everything to max, except real-time reflections (turn them off);
- TDP: 9;
- GPU 900;
- Runs at 15W peak.
Power save config, 60fps
- Turn everything low or off, keep Anisotropic filtering on "Full" and Draw Distance on "Far";
- Switch Fullscreen off, set Resolution to 960x540, and enable Deck's FSR;
- TDP: 6;
- GPU: 600;
- Runs at 10W peak;
Tested on Campaign maps, custom maps may dip (not so) slightly, depending on complexity.
Max settings 800p@60fps
- Turn everything to max, except real-time reflections (turn them off);
- TDP: 9;
- GPU 900;
- Runs at 15W peak.
Power save config, 60fps
- Turn everything low or off, keep Anisotropic filtering on "Full" and Draw Distance on "Far";
- Switch Fullscreen off, set Resolution to 960x540, and enable Deck's FSR;
- TDP: 6;
- GPU: 600;
- Runs at 10W peak;
Tested on Campaign maps, custom maps may dip (not so) slightly, depending on complexity.
The HUD on car's back window and in-game "loading logs" during intros. Nothing terribly important.
Bound Tab to L4.
Switched every graphics setting to low and set both in-game and Deck's frame limits to 30FPS. TDP 6, GPU 600, runs at around 8-10W.
You can totally punch up the graphics all the way to Epic at stable 60FPS, but that will increase the power consumption to 20W.
The "project connectivity" percentage number is rather small and hard to see.
Works fine enough on Deck, but the controls kinda get in the way. The game is designed for mouse and keyboard, and using Deck's touchpad & triggers to route the wires gets tiring and crampy very quickly, even with the point-n-click option enabled (you still have to move the cursor over every tile individually).
Otherwise, it's alright, assuming you are content with only playing the turn-based mode.
By default, the game launches in 1080p, of all things. Switching to 720p in-game, I was able to get pretty consistent 60FPS with TDP\GPU set to 7\700, with peak power consumption at 13W. With the resolution set to 360p (it doesn't look all that bad here, trust me) and Ambient Occlusion & Anti-Aliasing disabled, I was able to bring power consumption down to 9W.
For whatever reason, the game didn't run with the default Proton for me. There was a launch option to "Run Proton Experimental" which did nothing, but after launching with Proton-GE once it seems to work... normal? Even after a full re-install. It's weird.
