Hades

Update 9/13/22: After speaking with the developer behind the Hephaistos mod, and after reading, they have clarified and rewrote the instructions on how to get the mod working. We included a small guide on how to get it working so you can utilize a full 1280x800 resolution.

Hades is...well for lack of any other term...an incredible game. As the son of Hades himself, you have decided to defy your destiny and escape hell. Using an assortment of powers and weapons, you will hack and slash your way across gorgeous landscapes while upgrading your skills and powers. As this is a roguelike game, each death makes you more powerful with new weapons to unlock and permanent upgrades that carry with you throughout your deaths. Paired with an immersive fully voice-acted story, this roguelike game is an essential to everyone's library. And it just so happens that Hades is also an essential game for your Steam Deck.

Hades Performance

Due to the art style, Hades is nowhere near intensive in the slightest. When opening the game for the first time, it will boot up at a solid 60 FPS with only 12W battery drain and sub 70c temps. If you ask me, this is pretty fantastic, though we can make it better! The game tends to drain a bit extra power than it really needs, so by just setting a TDP limit to 4 and GPU Clock Speed Frequency to 1100, we can dramatically lower the drain to 8.5W - 9W with sub 60c temps.

With no visual or stability difference, you can clearly see the temps and battery drain go down significantly with slight TDP changes.

This tends to bring the battery life up to 5.5 - 6 hours from 3.5 - 4 hours with no sacrifices to performance at all. This is especially helpful if you are going to be traveling, but even just playing at home, this can help significantly. Keeping temps down will increase the longevity of your Deck's hardware as it won't be getting so hot. And honestly, with a small tweak like that and no reduction in quality or performance, there really is no reason NOT to.

Resolution Oddity

Now if I had to point out one thing, it is the resolution options. In-game, it says it supports 1280x800, but it actually only displays 1280x720 as you can see from the black bars at the top and bottom in the screenshots. While there is a way to patch this using the Hephaistos patch, it doesn't really feel necessary. The game runs and looks beautiful and I felt no reason to change the resolution. I did try to use the mod itself, but the file wouldn't execute so I couldn't patch the game. I will continue trying though and update this review if necessary.

After speaking with the developers behind the Hephaistos mod, we got it up and running. To do this, you will have to download the hephaistos-linux.zip from the release page. Then, extract the file and put it in the directory of where Hades is installed (you can access it by going to properties > local files > "Browse Local Files". Once the file is placed in the directory, right click it and select "Run in Konsole". Then, press "1" 3 times, which will patch the game to the 1280x800 native resolution on the Deck! We noticed no performance difference with the native res.

Conclusion

There really isn't much more I can say about Hades other than it is one of the best games I have ever played. The artwork, gameplay loop, the fine-tuning, they all work together in such harmony that it is hard to look back and not love it. Supergiant Games outdid themselves and it makes me incredibly happy to know how amazing this game works on Deck. If you haven't yet, buy this game.

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Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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