Banjo-Kazooie Native PC Port From Harbour Masters Is Now Released

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I have found a lot of joy going back and playing older games thanks to native PC ports and recompilations. These versions of retro games bring them back and make them playable directly on PC with extra enhancements, like higher frame rates, more aspect ratio support, mod support, and more. One of the first projects of these that I tried and overwhelmingly enjoyed was one for Banjo-Kazooie. It showed me the potential for older games being played today. Now, one of the best names in the space, Harbour Masters, has released a new native PC port of their own, and it looks amazing.

Recently, the team launched Lighthouse, which is a native PC port of Banjo-Kazooie. This brings us native performance with retained effects and visuals from the original, along with a bunch of modern enhancements. This includes a built-in randomizer, co-op, romhack support, a built-in gamepad mapper, and enhancements like higher framerate, higher resolution, and more aspect ratio options.

And yes, it’s completely compatible with the steam deck. Installation is fairly simple as well. All you have to do is download the Linux version of Lighthouse for the Steam Deck from GitHub, put your legally dumped copy of Banjo-Kazooie into the same folder as Lighthouse, and run the .appimage. After that, it should find the game automatically, and you can press yes to extract it. After that, quit the game, right click the AppImage, and add it to Steam. Now, you should be able to play it through Steam in Game Mode.

So far, it’sright-clicktastic experience. It covers the entirety of the Deck’s screen, hits 60 FPS easily with low battery drain, and the gamepad is recognized without issue. The only problem is bringing up the menu to change settings and turn on enhancements. We need to set one of the back buttons to the ESC keyboard input to bring it up, which is an extra step, but it does work and we can change settings once we are in the menu.

Ultimately, this is gonna be one of the best ways to experience this classic, and I’m so glad that they added in support for romhacks and randomizers, since the latter is gonna be a big reason why I play through it again. And with it running so well on the Steam Deck, it feels like a no-brainer to get into bed, relax, and lose myself in the beauty of Banjo-Kazooie.

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