Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter Demo Shows Solid Steam Deck Performance

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One of the genres that the Steam Deck feels perfect for is JRPGs, and one of my favorites is the Trails series. All of the entries have events that influence each other, and now that developer Nihon Falcom is remaking the first games in the series, there’s even more reason to get into it. Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter is incredible and a blast to play on the Steam Deck, and it’s an amazing way to be introduced to the world of Trails. Now, the remake of the sequel, Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter, is coming next month, and a new demo was just released to get us ready for the game. So, I decided to download it and see if the Steam Deck performance was going to be similar to the first game.

Now, it’s worth knowing that this is a demo and not the final build of the game. The fully released game may be better or worse in terms of performance, but this is a good indicator of what to expect.

So far, it seems to be on par with the 1st Chapter. The game defaults to the Medium quality preset, and we get a range of 40 to 50 FPS. There’s no upscaling or lowered render resolution with the default, so the game looks a bit sharp. However, it’s still definitely playable, and if the full game is similar to the performance of this demo, there’s gonna be no problem playing this on the go.

One thing I did notice that I really appreciate is that FSR 2.2 upscaling is now in the game. This was added in a post-launch patch for the 1st Chapter last month, and it makes some big visual improvements over just lowering the internal resolution. It does cost a bit more performance, but with the right settings, we can find a balance of better visuals and performance than what we would get by just lowering settings.

I’m not really surprised that it runs about the same as the previous game, but I am glad that it hasn’t changed too much. The aesthetics and style are almost identical, but I have seen other games like this where the sequel has worse performance. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, so I’m very much looking forward to playing through the full game on the go.

Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter can be wishlisted ahead of its September 17th release date.

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