New Temtem Swarm Post Highlights How Perfect It Is For Steam Deck

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It's hard to deny just how great it is to play some games on the Steam Deck and choose it over a gaming desktop PC. It feels much more engaging and rewarding to be able to take your gaming wherever you go, and for me personally, it has given me a boost to play more games that I wouldn't normally play. This sentiment doesn't seem to be the only one I have, though, and even developers are starting to acknowledge how great it is. This leads us to a new post from Crema, the developers of Temtem, who talked about how playing their upcoming Vampire Survivors-esque game, Temtem: Swarm, on the Steam Deck is just the perfect way to play.

In the Steam Community Post, which is littered with pictures of the team enjoying the game on Steam Deck, they explain in detail why they feel it's the perfect companion for the game.

Co-Op Madness

The biggest reason they have for why you should play on the Steam Deck is the co-op, which has been designed to experience the joy of surviving and battling alongside friends both in-person and online. With three-player co-op, Temtem: Swarm has been engineered to make playing with friends so much more enjoyable. They provide a scenario where we are sitting on a couch, chilling, with two others, all have Steam Decks in hand, while you strategize to take down the creatures you are fighting.

Honestly, I love the scenario, even if I am just playing alone, it is so much more comfortable to relax on a couch over sitting at a desk. I have found it much more enjoyable to play games this way, and I can totally see myself really digging into this one more thanks to the Steam Deck.

Optimization Galore

Next, the post goes into how they optimized the game to make it run on the Steam Deck as well as it could. The game will have full controller support, so there are no problems using a gamepad, but the details keep flowing. To make hundreds of models appear on the screen without anything crashing, the team used unique techniques. Instead of using skeletons, they baked animations into textures. This means the GPU was handling the animations, freeing up the CPU to tackle attacking, moving around, and enemy behavior. This technique was carried over to particle effects and other effect animations, which are handled by the GPU as well.

Some special tweaks were implemented so everyone could go crazy with their attacks and all the chaos in the scene so it wouldn't overwhelm the Steam Deck. They found that one of the plugins they were using wasn't optimized for this, so with some special tweaks, the game is running like a charm as the chaos ramps up.

The team closes this section by mentioning there is more they can optimize, so it's expected that the game will perform even better than they are discussing right now, which is wonderful!

There are a couple of months left before the game is released, and they seem to be planning playtests, demos, and more. Temtem: Swarm looks like a fantastic game to play on Steam Deck, and I can't wait to try it out for myself!

You can wishlist Temtem: Swarm now on Steam ahead of its release later this year.

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