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Arctic Awakening is a pretty captivating game set in the polar ice that we reviewed, and the game received a chunky performance and polish patch this week that has improved the experience, especially on the Steam Deck.

arctic awakening

The improvements in this patch are pretty significant, bringing a reduction in GPU usage across the board, optimizations to physics on drones, some gameplay fixes, adding a small tutorial on managing the inventory, and indoor optimizations. There are also Steam Deck-specific improvements, although the patch notes don’t go into any detail about what those are. While there are some nice bugfixes, these technical improvements are the big takeaway from the patch, and should improve how Arctic Awakening feels on the Deck.

Arctic Awakening is $24.99 on Steam and rated Playable due to needing to manually configure graphical settings.

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Michael Baker
As a British guy in his mid-thirties, Michael has played and reviewed games as long as he can remember. Narrative Designer at Grimlore Games 2019-2020 (Spellforce 3 franchise, Plarium Games 2023 as Lore Editor). His favourite game genres are strategy, RPG, simulation and RTS.
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