Moss Makes the Leap from VR and Mostly Sticks the Landing in The Forgotten Relic - Preview

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Previously consigned to VR hell, Moss and Moss: Book II are now being ported over to a more traditional gaming experience in the form of Moss: The Forgotten Relic, along with some visual enhancements and included DLC. I tried out the demo to see how we can expect the game to perform on the Steam Deck, and I wasn't disappointed.

Moss: The Forgotten Relic (Demo) - Gameplay Impressions

The transition from VR to traditional control methods works fairly well for Moss: The Forgotten Relic. You control your little mouse, Quill, with the left analog stick, and your "reader" powers with the right analog stick. allowing you to manipulate enemies and the world with a floating orb (cursor). It all ends up being quite intuitive, as do the puzzles you're confronted with. You might spend a couple of seconds analyzing a situation before coming up with a solution. There's nothing too difficult here, at least in the demo.

One leftover from the game's VR origins still remains, however, and that's the small playing areas you are confined to. The Moss games are very linear, which isn't necessarily a problem, but each area is close to being a single screen, and that means you are constantly hitting small loading screens, sometimes only a few seconds apart. It really breaks up the flow of a very narrative-driven game that is clearly trying to keep you immersed.

Generally, though, Moss: The Forgotten Relic holds up. The puzzles I experienced were fun and not frustrating, and the combat is unique and works well. While the visuals are only a marginal improvement over those in the VR game, they still look decent. The voice acting holds up, and the narrative intrigues me, although we don't get a very deep look at it in the rather short demo.

Moss: The Forgotten Relic (Demo) - Steam Deck Performance Tested

After forcing the demo to use Proton 10.0-4 instead of the default Proton 9, I was able to get controller input working, and the game ran pretty well from there on out.

Moss: The Forgotten Relic only has the option to change resolution scaling for its graphics, which is locked on the Steam Deck.

We can comfortably target 60 FPS here. Generally, the game runs at around 70-85 fps, so locking to 60 fps gives us a smooth, stable experience while saving some battery life. You can expect around ~4.5 hours of battery life on the Steam Deck OLED, and around ~3 hours on a Steam Deck LCD.

Final Thoughts

Moss: The Forgotten Relic probably doesn't bring enough to the table to bring back players of the original games, but if you aren't a VR player and haven't experienced these games, this is a perfectly decent way to do it. Expect to encounter some limitations of VR games, such as the small playing areas, but these were good games at their heart, and that appears to be carrying over to this version, too.

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