Soulstice

The balance of the holy kingdom is compromised and now it is up to you to save it. In Soulstice, You play as Briar, someone granted superhuman strength and resilience with the help of Chimera. Explore a dark world brimming with mysteries and master a combat system filled with fast-paced action and grand boss fights that reeks of the inspiration from Devil May Cry and Bayonetta. With a unique arsenal of upgradable weapons that can be switched on the fly or insane combos, it is time to unleash and plow your way through this dark story to find out the truth behind it all.

Soulstice is an incredible looking game and I did enjoy the gameplay, but...it is not ready for Steam Deck. For the record, one of the developers, David Bruno, did warn me that it is not optimized for the Steam Deck at this moment, but it is playable with some massive compromises that we can't justify yet.

Soulstice will not be able to keep anything above a 30 FPS limit. It is very dependent on what is on the screen at any given moment, so there are some areas where it is actually possible to hit 60, but they are so far and few. Even when the game is at 30, there are still some stutters, especially in combat. This doesn't really affect gameplay as much and we didn't notice the drops since they only went down to 24 for a couple seconds. And to keep it at as stable of 30 as possible, we did have to set a high TDP limit of 12, which brought battery drain to around 20W (2 hours) with temps up to 82c, which is a bit too high for our liking.

We did also notice a weird thing with the settings where it wouldn't change unless we exited and restarted the game. There were no popups to signal we needed to do this, it was just what we figured out.

Overall, I really wanted to enjoy Soulstice on the Steam Deck. It feels like my type of game and I love the aesthetic. Unfortunately, it isn't ready just yet, but I wouldn't lose hope. DLSS is implemented, which means FSR 2.0 could be in the cards. I was also lucky enough to submit some questions for the dev team regarding Steam Deck support, which I will update the article here when I hear back. I am optimistic though, but until there are some more answers about the Deck support, I would wait to play this on Deck.

Screenshots:

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

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