Digimon Story Time Stranger's Demo Is Here And It Plays Great On Steam Deck

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In just a few short weeks, Digimon Story Time Stranger is due to release (October 2nd), and a demo of the game's first chapter dropped, complete with support for carrying over your save data to the full version of the game, so now's a great time to hop in and see if it's the kind of game you'll enjoy.

After playing a lot of Cyber Sleuth on the PS4, I was pretty interested to see how Time Stranger runs on the Steam Deck, and I wasn't disappointed.

Digimon Story Time Stranger (Demo) - Gameplay Impressions

Digimon games don't tend to shy away from being a bit grittier than Pokémon, and I enjoyed Cyber Sleuth's story. Time Stranger looks no different; it takes place during a war between Digimon and the human world trapped in between. As the name suggests, Time Stranger does include the dreaded time-traveling trope. Still, here at least, it's more a case of the prologue setting up a catastrophic event, and then being sent back in time to prevent it from recurring, rather than constantly shifting back and forth.

While I don't want to comment too much on the gameplay of Digimon Story Time Stranger in this article, I will say that the game feels really smooth. The movement is easy and responsive, the combat can be sped up so moves happen almost instantly, and weaker enemies can be defeated without going into battle. It all feels very streamlined, and I appreciate that as someone who isn't a fan of the "grind" in these games.

The battles themselves play similarly to previous Digimon Story titles in my experience; combat mechanics aren't changed too much, and the Digimon themselves will likely be familiar to any fans of the franchise, although there are still over 450 of them. Digimon games don't tend to reinvent the wheel in this regard, unlike Pokémon, with its new set of creatures in each region.

Digimon Story Time Stranger (Demo) - Steam Deck Performance Tested

Digimon Story Time Stranger supports 1280x800 as a resolution, and it's recommended to play the game on a gamepad, so we're off to a good start for the Steam Deck here.

There doesn't seem to be much difference between the graphical settings. The game defaulted to Medium settings for me, and I recommend sticking there. You should probably expect to play with a 40 FPS limit. Even on the "Very Low" preset, the game cannot hold 60 FPS.

That said, the game does look good on Medium, and the 40 FPS is pretty stable, so it's a nice overall experience.

I was worried about performance in battles, but the battle arenas themselves seem to be separate, optimized arenas, so your slowdown is most likely to occur when walking around the urban areas in free roam.

Power draw was around 12W-15W throughout, but we can see spikes of up to 20W in busy urban areas. We should expect a relatively low battery life here, around 3 hours on the Steam Deck OLED, probably around 2 hours on a Steam Deck LCD.

Final Thoughts

Digimon Story Time Stranger is looking to be a great time on the Steam Deck, judging by this demo. We expect a decent-looking game running at a relatively stable 40 FPS. Given how much headroom we have so far, we can likely expect the main game to be fully playable on the Steam Deck. It's a shame the battery life is so low right now.

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