Empyreal is Now Steam Deck Verified And We Can Confirm Ready For Portable Play

If you haven't yet, follow us on X (Twitter), Mastodon, or Bluesky to know when we post new articles, and join our Reddit or Subscribe to us on YouTube to check out our content and interact with our awesome community. Thank you for supporting us!

A copy of Empyreal was provided by Secret Mode for testing. Thank You!

After launching back in May, single-player action RPG Empyreal has gradually been getting updates. As of today, it has earned itself a Steam Deck Verified badge from Valve, after previously being rated as "Playable" due to small in-game text, which has been rectified by this update. But at this point, we're always a little bit wary of Valve's rating system, so how does Empyreal actually play on the Steam Deck?

After playing through the first few "dungeons" of the game, I would agree that Empyreal is deserving of the badge. It brings up the virtual keyboard when asking for text input, the in-game text is quite easy to read, and the performance on default settings nearly always stays at or above 30 FPS, with ever so slight dips to the high 20s when quickly moving the camera in busy areas.

The game's graphical options on Steam Deck are locked, besides Depth of Field and Bloom. But the default TSR setting with dynamic resolution keeps the game both looking and feeling decent to play. We've got shadows, good lighting with reflections, and despite the resolution being dynamic, it never degraded to an unpleasant level for me.

It is a heavy hitter on the battery (nearly always 20W+ draw), but the dungeons aren't too long, so it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Therefore, you should be able to buy Empyreal with confidence that it will run on your Steam Deck. If you do want to fiddle with the graphical options yourself, you can always use the SteamDeck=0 %command% launch option, which will give you access to all the graphical options to alter as you please.

Now might be a great time to jump into the game, too, as the latest update added transmogrification and other new features. Plus, a free demo on Steam is available to try before you buy.

If you enjoyed this article, check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that will help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got you covered!