Steel Seed is Packed with Slick Moves, Cool Ideas and Plenty of Black Screens - Preview

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Developers Storm in a Teacup promise a stealth-action adventure jam-packed with fluid movement and deep, strategic combat, all set in a mysterious, dark sci-fi setting. Steel Seed follows Zoe and her drone companion, Koby, as they explore a hostile and desolate world, looking to uncover the secrets of humanity’s fate.

The demo throws you directly into a straightforward mission to showcase gameplay fundamentals. This gives you a pretty solid taste of Zoe’s abilities, such as her lightsaber-esque sword, parkour-style movement, and the deeply important skill set that Koby offers. From your first interaction with the enemy, it is clear that Steel Seed wants you to play patiently and be smart and stealthy with your actions. Reliance on Koby, your companion, is high, as they are used to scout ahead and mark enemies. When marked, you can visibly see their movement patterns, allowing you to sneak up and attack them from behind without retaliation. Sounds simple enough, but Koby is not invisible, and if you get too cocky in your enemy marking, Koby will get spotted and attacked. This forces Zoe into direct combat, which is often a bad idea.

Zoe's primary attacks come from her sword, leading to fast and furious combat through a mixture of light and heavy attacks. She's also mad quick, and you can easily evade enemy actions. When successfully timed, the world around you slows down as she phases through the enemy, allowing you a small advantage to strike! You'll often be met with a mini-game when locked up with an enemy where you must quickly hit the correct sequence of buttons. Losing this mini-game, from my experience, has resulted in defeat. The combat is very cool, the movement is silky, and despite some visual limitations, the environment is beautiful! Much thought has been put into how different parts of Zoe and Koby's abilities can be used depending on your scenario.

Steel Seed leans heavily into stealth, which is a shame, as Zoe’s tool set of moves and abilities showcased would make for some great hack-and-slash content. But the game WANTS you to be stealthy and smart and will punish you if you aren't abiding by its rules. I’m very much a run-and-gun, hack-and-slash kind of guy, so I was in for a shock when the enemy spotted Koby and me and continued to absolutely annihilate us in swift fashion. And that is where the biggest issue occurred.

When visiting the Steam store page for Steel Seed or seeking out any trailers or promotional material, you can see that it’s a beautifully made game. Its visuals are stunning; coupling this with the sleek controls, you’re in for a winner… if your system can handle it. When I first loaded the game on the Steam Deck, the frame rate was poor, and the visuals were jittery when playing on the game's suggested settings. Even when dropping all graphics to the lowest settings across the board with the ultra-performance mode selected, the game struggled to keep a smooth performance, and the stunning visuals we’d seen in screenshots and trailers were instead muddy, full of texture pop-ins, and not a very enjoyable experience.

Not to mention it sucks the life out of your battery, with an expected 2 to 2 and a half hours life span. This only worsened in those areas where it was combat/enemy heavy, making it even harder to succeed, which meant I died… a lot! 

Dying in this game causes the screen to fade to black and loads you back at your last saved checkpoint. Simple enough, right? The only problem I faced was that each time I died, and the game would fade to black, the screen would remain black until either the game would crash and kick you back to your Steam Deck home page, or you would have to force a console restart. Unfortunately for me, this happened every single time I died, and that happened a lot!

This is a demo, so this will more than likely improve for the full release, but it's still worthwhile to mention.

Steel Seed is a very cool game that I was excited to sink my teeth into; however, the constant stability issues on the Steam Deck and crashing severely impacted my enjoyment of what I believe is a great game. Here’s hoping that the developers can find a way to ensure the game plays better when the full game is released. Or, at the bare minimum, not crash each time you die in combat. There's a lot of potential here, so I hope the game improves enough for the full release.

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