Edit: Moon Studios did reach out and confirmed to us that this was because of a future patch and the game should not have gotten Verified yet. They didn't elaborate on when this patch would be public.
If you haven't yet, follow us on X (Twitter) or Mastodon 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!
I love playing games on the Steam Deck. It is easily my favorite way to play, and I love being able to take all these games on the go with me. I love seeing newer releases care about and discuss playing on the Steam Deck; this includes No Rest for the Wicked. The developer, Moon Studios, wants us to be able to play it on the go, and I would also love that, but it just isn't there yet. Too many performance drops and high RAM usage lead to freezes or crashes. And yet, somehow, the game got a Verified badge. While it was revoked and now has a Playable rating, it’s still worrisome.
The Verified badge, which comes directly from Valve, designates games that work well on the Steam Deck and could be classified as “great experiences.” It appears as a green checkmark on the Steam storefront, and while it’s nice to see, it isn’t always accurate.
Undoubtedly, I have been a bit of a critic of the Steam Deck Verified system. I have found verified games that had major issues, while unsupported-rated titles run wonderfully with no specific case as to why they have this rating. Unfortunately, it seems like No Rest for the Wicked falls under this category, and it just highlights the issues I have always had with this system.
For a quick timeline, No Rest for the Wicked has been released on early access on Steam since April 18th and has had a couple of major optimization updates. It still had some performance issues, including RAM usage crashes and freezes. On June 19th, the game got a Verified rating out of nowhere, and then on June 21st, it was brought down to “Playable” due to small in-game text.
Both ratings should indicate that a game is essentially a “great experience” on the Steam Deck, right? Well, I can’t say it is playable without changing some necessary settings in the BIOS or using a third-party tool.
I tested No Rest for the Wicked on my Steam Deck OLED yesterday after the game was rated Playable, and within 3 minutes, I had a freeze from RAM usage. All I was doing was running around, not fighting any enemies, and when I jumped into a river, my game completely froze. It did stay at 30 FPS the whole time, so I will give it that, but just running around the world and prompting freezes is not what I would call a “great experience.” You can change the UMA Buffer to 4G or use CryoUtilities to mitigate some of these, but when I did this in the past, it was still possible to encounter these freezes.
So, why would this get a rating indicating an enjoyable time on the Deck when freezes are common? Well, that one I don’t have the answer to. It could be a pre-emptive rating because of a patch coming that would fix these issues, or it could just be a lapse in Valve’s testing. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a game get a Verified rating with major issues (Remnant 2 was rated Verified before it was optimized and Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 still has huge graphical artifacting), so I wouldn’t be completely surprised.
Unfortunately, this makes it hard to trust the system and what Verified really means. Personally, I think it is a good indicator of whether a game will run or not, but it's not an indicator of a "great experience," and in No Rest for the Wicked's case, it brings up the issue of if a game needs to be able to avoid hard freezes during gameplay. It does justify why we exist to actually test games, so I will say that's a plus for us.
And this isn’t a dig at the game. No Rest for the Wicked has a ton of potential and is in early access, so it’s in active development. I greatly appreciate that Moon Studios is releasing tons of patches and dedicating the time to make it more playable on the Steam Deck. But there’s no way that the current state of the game should be Verified, and I’d say it maybe shouldn’t be Playable either without noting that freezes can occur that require you to reboot the system.
I look forward to playing the game portably in the future, but there’s no way it’s a good experience just yet.
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!
RECENT NEWS
Categories
Recent Tips & GUIDES
recent reviews
This goes for God of War aswell, only playable if u switch the UMA buffer file.. There's not anything on the steam page saying anything about this (i know u covered it) which is just sad and maybe even misleading as Verified should mean its playable no matter what. It is playable though just not in this state with crashes every now and then, lets hope this will get a fix eventually unlike GOW 2018 which they just dont care about the Steam Deck.
Yeah, official Compatibility Rating isn't very consistent. Dark Souls Remastered is marked as Playable because you need on-screen keyboard when creating new character; same deal with DS3 and Elden Ring, but these have Verified rating.
I get freezes from time to time on desktop too. The game has bugs it's early access. On steam deck I can achieve a rock solid 30 with high settings with a drop every now and then
I stopped caring about the "steam verified badge" and downloaded protondb ratings for decky. It's better to use those than to trust the verified badge
Definitely a more accurate assessment of how playable it is!
Agree, very convenient plugin, but it suffers from annoying bug. When you load a game, loading animation repeats multiple times/ In addition there is an occasional flickering when viewing any game page.
The Steam Verifies badge for this game doesn't apply until the next update. This took me 10s to Google.
Regardless, the Verified badge was applied before the update was ever made public, and then reverted.
Also Valve's current remarks on the game state that the only issue the game has and the only reason it holds the "Playable" badge, is that the in-game text is small.
This is not true, the game experiences significant dips below 30 FPS quite regularly, so while Valve says that performance on the Steam Deck is good with default settings, this is not the case.
Valve's testing in this particular instance is very poor.
Doesn't matter the writer didn't do their due diligence to even bother making that distinction even if they happened to be right theorizing it. People make mistakes. As mentioned the system has value. There are things to critique yes but ultimately it comes down to how much time is willing to be put into testing each game. Even this website doesn't do what I would consider adequate testing. It means playing the game beginning to end with no discovered issues or even 100% it if you want to add that category. it's simply unrealistic for this site and valve to do that level of testing. this is why you should advocate for user submitted reports for the verification system to either agree or disagree with additional commentary. As for legitimacy valve can easily just show steam deck specific play time for those users submitting reports. They should also open it up for general Linux use as well not just steam deck. Complaining while offering no possible remedies is just annoying especially if you neglect to provide the whole truth of the matter.
This is incorrect for a couple of reasons, and I am happy to elaborate:
We are in a very lucky position to review games and test them. We have multiple different writers and receive copies of games before they are released. There are some games that we don't get, like the new Shadow of the Erdtree expansion, and instead opt for an impression or first look rather than a full review. We will only do full reviews of games we play from beginning to end and test them thoroughly with our settings. Valve doesn't have the time to do this, but as a dedicated website that works with companies to get pre-release copies of games to review, we actually do.
As for a solution, you can check our old article about the Verified system where I go over how I would fix the system. It does need to be updated with some information, since it was written when Remnant 2 got the Verified badge, but I would still say the solutions hold true:
https://steamdeckhq.com/news/the-steam-deck-verified-system-needs-to-change/
In our reviews, we have a way to flag a review that needs to be updated (which will show on the review page if enough people flag it) and we have a way for users to vote whether the game is perfectly playable or not. So we do have a couple of systems in place that allow users to fact check us, and if you have any specific issues with games, we are more than open to criticism and happy to look into something we may have missed.
If you are dissatisfied, I completely understand, but when it comes to information that can affect a purchase, it is important to be as accurate as possible. People definitely make mistakes, but when there is a mistake that is repeated that can lead to people spending money for a product that won't work as advertised, it is even more important to call it out so it can be fixed. As for our site, we can look into ways the community can offer further commentary on our findings, but we were created specifically to play through games and do more accurate testing than a lot of others do, and it's because of the time we take and the trust the publishers give us that allow our team to play through games and review them. I can't see Valve changing up the system with added play time because we don't 100% know their system for testing, but play time could mean a lot of different things, and I don't see it as a full solution.
I do apologize for not linking to our other article or adding in those solutions I came up with to the article, that would have been good to include. We also apologize if you feel our testing is not adequate, but we do play games from beginning to end and publish our findings with issues we discover.
Thank you for taking the time to read this article and comment with your thoughts! If you have any further questions about our methods, please join our Discord server. I would be happy to DM you and discuss the matter more:
https://discord.gg/ukZeR5FEK4