Lords of the Fallen runs surprisingly well on the Steam Deck

Lords of the Fallen is off to a rough start, with Mostly Negative reviews on Steam. Curiously, even though the game does have its fair share of gameplay-related problems, the problems that have been pushed into the spotlight are far more technical in nature. Namely, Lords of the Fallen runs exceedingly poorly. For some people, that is. Though some have managed to resolve the Unreal Engine 5 title’s shoddy performance via driver updates, this is seemingly not a universal solution, meaning that the developer Hexworks has a long road ahead of it. The really curious bit, though, is that Lords of the Fallen seems to run just fine on the Steam Deck, of all things.

Indeed, as the aptly named YouTuber Deck Wizard has shown, Valve’s low-spec gaming PC seems to be more than capable of running Lords of the Fallen at 60 FPS. It’s a shaky 60 FPS, granted, with frame times that are shakier still, but it’s a testament to the device’s versatility regardless. There are some obvious caveats to keep in mind, yes, such as the butchered image quality, although it’s hard to argue against the Deck Wizard’s success. So, what’s the ticket?

How is Lords of the Fallen running so well on the Steam Deck?

Obviously, many Windows-using gamers are having huge problems getting Lords of the Fallen to run reasonably well on their rigs. As the Steam Deck is objectively a low-spec laptop in a handheld chassis, you’d be hard-pressed for it to do any better than the far more powerful PCs that are having trouble with the game. It’s unclear what, exactly, is the reason for these big differences. In his video, Deck Wizard uses FSR Ultra Performance to get over 50 FPS on the regular, but a relatively stable 30 FPS is possible even with the upscaler set to ‘Quality,’ which is an impressive feat.

This surprising twist may have something to do with the fact that Deck Wizard is using the preview build of SteamOS 3.5, an upcoming operating system update for the Deck that touts meaningful performance improvements and more. Deck Wizard has also installed the popular CryoUtilities tweak that may play a role here as well, it’s worth pointing out. Further, Deck Wizard is playing the Epic Games version of Lords of the Fallen here, as the Steam version does not have access to in-game FSR at this time.

Yet, the fact of the matter is that this hardware-intensive soulslike – which is running on the infamously heavy Unreal Engine 5 – is seemingly doing just fine on the Deck, all things considered. Since some people report running the game perfectly well while others are having huge issues with performance and crashing, it’s likely that all this quirkiness will be smoothed out over the next couple of updates. Deck Wizard demonstrated similar successes with Remnant 2 as well, which means that this humble handheld may have a shot at keeping up with Unreal Engine 5 titles after all.