Dark Envoy Gets Steam Deck Verified And Deserves The Badge

If you haven't yet, follow us on X (Twitter), Mastodon, or Bluesky to know when we post new articles, and join our Reddit or Subscribe to us on YouTube to check out our content and interact with our awesome community. Thank you for supporting us!

There is no shortage of great RPGs to play on the Steam Deck, and it may be time to add another one to the list. Dark Envoy is an intriguing cRPG with dynamic combat and some solid RPG systems that give us a lot of possible build opportunities. It isn't perfect, but it's got more enjoyable moments than not. However, when the game was initially released, it had some performance issues on the Deck, with some areas hitting under 30 FPS on extremely low settings. Well, it seems that is no longer an issue, and I am definitely seeing some improvements.

Yesterday, Dark Envoy got a new update that earned it the Steam Deck Verified badge. According to their Steam Community Post announcing the Verified badge, this came with the 1.8 patch, which optimized the controls, text, and graphical quality settings to get it up to par. It sounds fantastic, but with how the game was at launch, I wanted to see just how well it is running for myself. After playing for a bit in some areas I remember being quite hard to run, I am pleased to say it has definitely improved.

Going from Unsupported to Verified is a pretty big jump, but it seems to be very well justified. The default settings bring the areas that were running at 27 FPS up to between 36 and 45 FPS, and it looks a bit better than it used to. It's sharper and is much easier to see what's going on, so this is definitely a big improvement:

While I haven't played through the entire game with these changes, there are clearly some noticeable improvements that make it significantly better to play on the Deck. It seems to play quite well on the Deck, the gamepad works well, and the UI and text are very readable. There are some controls that are a little complicated, but I would say that's primarily a fault of the cRPG genre, and they can be complicated.

Because of these changes, I would say Dark Envoy deserves that Steam Deck Verified badge. There are many games that have the Verified badge but still have some performance issues, like Avowed, though I am happy to say this is not one of them. I will always welcome a new RPG to play on the go, and with this update, I am ready to dive back in and play through it again on the go.

Dark Envoy is on sale for $9.89 until August 18th.

If you enjoyed this article, check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that will help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got you covered!