Life is Strange: Reunion Is Playable On The Steam Deck With Big Compromises

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Even if it hasn’t stayed as great as it once was, I’ve always felt connected to the Life is Strange games. I attribute the first game and The Walking Dead Telltale game as the two that got me to realize just how great narrative-driven, choice-based games are. So, once Life is Strange: Reunion was announced, I was ecstatic. Bringing Max back with Double Exposure was wonderful, and now finding a way to bring Chloe back in an epic finale is a step above.

You can get Life is Strange: Reunion on GreenManGaming for $33.99 using coupon code MAR15.

I received my review key for it yesterday, so I won’t have a review for the game for a little bit. However, I do want to go over whether the game will be playable on the Steam Deck. Double Exposure was on the rougher side, so I was hoping that Reunion would be more playable on the go. So far, it actually is, but it has a good chunk of compromises to keep it in a playable state above 30 FPS.

Reunion defaults to a mix of high, medium, and low settings, which actually surprised me at first. With big releases like this, and coming after Double Exposure, it was pretty crazy to see any setting at high. However, that doesn’t mean the game looks great. The resolution scaling is turned down a bit, which makes the entire image look blurry. On top of that, shadows are atrocious. They are so low resolution that we can see the blown-up pixels flicker as the shadow changes. It can get distracting and jarring very quickly.

But when it comes to frame rate, it will mostly stick above 30. There were a few instances in cutting scenes where the frame rate would drop when there were a lot of effects on the screen, like fire, but I rarely ever saw the gameplay itself go below 30. It is possible this will change later on in the game. I haven’t played through the entirety of it yet, but I would be surprised if there were any massive drops later on that were more frequent.

It is possible to fix this by changing the settings, like bringing up resolution scaling to make it less blurry, or turning shadows on high to make them look less pixelated. However, this is going to very negatively affect the frame rate as a whole, and that’s just gonna make the experience worse.

Still, when comparing Reunion to Double Exposure, at least the game looks decent and can run at a mostly stable 30 FPS. Is it gonna be the best way to experience the game? Not exactly. But is it playable and somewhat enjoyable if you don’t have any other system to play on? I would say so, yes. This is how I’m going to be playing through the game entirely, so look forward to my full review for an overview on how the entire game runs on the Deck.

Life is Strange: Reunion is $39.99 on Steam, but you can get it for $33.99 on GreenManGaming by using the code MAR15.

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