Valor Mortis' Playtest Makes Me Hopeful For Steam Deck Playability

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Ever since Dark Souls popularized the genre, I have played tons of soulslikes. I have tried various different takes on the genre, from different environments and worlds to completely ridiculous stories that keep it feeling fresh. However, not many soulslikes have excited me like Valor Mortis. Not only does the world look haunting in a great setting as a soldier of Napoleon's army, but this is one of the few first-person soulslikes I have seen. And with it coming from developer One More Level, the creator of Ghostrunner, my excitement was through the roof.

Ahead of its release next year, the game got a playtest that started yesterday, and I finally got a chance to check the game out. I love it so far. The mix of the older, realistic weaponry from that era and magic works well together, and the mechanics seem to hold up swimmingly as well. This is a pre-alpha build, and there are some mishaps like blocking not always connecting, but I really enjoy the gory slicing and overall soulslike feel to it.

This playtest also gave me a chance to try the game out on the Steam Deck, and even though it is very early on, it can give us some hints on how well it may run on the go. Ultimately, it isn't enjoyable on the Deck just yet, but there are some signs that could indicate it being actually playable once a full release comes around.

Valor Mortis on the Steam Deck

With this being a pre-alpha playtest, I didn't go in expecting solid performance on the Steam Deck, and I was right. While the framerate stuck above 30 FPS a lot of the time, there were tons of stutters, drops, freezes, and it just generally wasn't playable. This is about what I expected, and I am not surprised since this is such an early version of the game, but there are some signs that actually make me feel confident that it could be quite playable on the go.

The biggest indicator is framerate. I was playing on the lowest settings with 40% rendering scale, and it almost always stuck above 30 FPS. Even with the stutters and slowdowns, the framerate always kept above 30, and for pre-alpha without much optimization yet, that's pretty fantastic. I was able to push the rendering scale to 50% and it stick above 30 FPS as well.

The other indicator is actually the battery drain. Valor Mortis never pushed the Deck to its limits in terms of performance, which indicates that it is either not using all the resources the Deck has at its disposal or there's some bottleneck. CPU and GPU usage never hit the max, but RAM and VRAM usage are a bit on the high side. It could be a bottleneck of the RAM usage, which would actually make sense due to this being such an early version of the game, but with some optimization, we should see some increased performance that utilizes more of the Deck's hardware. The battery drain stuck around 12W - 13W, and never went above 16W.

The stuttering could also be from the lack of a shader cache, which is something the full release would not have an issue with, due to Steam's shared cache. This could help get rid of some loading stutters and just stabilize the game overall. The stuttering happened quite often, and it did make combat much harder than it should be, but it was still relatively playable.

Overall, I would consider this a great showing for the possible Steam Deck performance of the full release. This is a pre-alpha build, so this is a very early slice of development, but with the game sticking above 30 FPS the entire time, this is just wonderful. Soulslikes truly fit on the Deck, and I personally found the most joy playing them on a portable device, and I can see Valor Mortis being perfect for playing on a handheld. I can see myself getting lost in the world and getting stronger wherever I am, so I do hope it is able to run.

Valor Mortis can be wishlisted ahead of its release next year, and the playtest should be going on until October 13th.

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