We tested Hell is Us on Steam Deck: jarring frame drops and choppy performance hold it back
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It was always going to be tough to cram a full gaming PC into a form factor as small as the Steam Deck. As the years roll on, it becomes harder for the modest specifications of the Steam Deck to keep up with modern AAA titles. Hell is Us has not received a ‘Steam Deck Verified‘ badge, and it isn't hard to see why.
Hell is Us is a sci-fi action-adventure with some creepy supernatural elements. Developer Rogue Factor previously worked on Mordheim: City of the Damned and have brought their experience with all things spooky and gothic with them in some of the elements of this game.
The game doesn’t release until September 4th, but a newly-released demo gives us a closer look at the performance right now. Player character Remi is a soldier gone AWOL in search of his parents. It quickly becomes apparent that things are not quite what they seem, as exploring the semi-open world has you come across otherworldly ruins and mysterious and hostile creatures.
Unfortunately, this also causes the game to start to chug a bit. Even with everything turned down to the lowest settings, transitioning to a new area would cause framerates to drop to the mid-20s or lower. Likewise, a combat encounter would rapidly cause framerates to tank as the Steam Deck struggled to keep up.
Turn everything down to Low
Settings used were as follows:
| Quality Preset | Low |
| TSR 3D Resolution | 50% |
| Anti-Aliasing | Low |
| Effects | Low |
| Global Illumination | Low |
| Post-Processing | Low |
| Reflections | Low |
| Shading | Low |
| Shadows | Low |
| Textures | Low |
| V-Sync | Off |
| FPS Limit | Smooth Frame Rate |
| HDR | Off |
| AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution | Off |
| AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation | Off |
The game is just about playable on these settings, as long as you are prepared to accept the inevitable framerate drop when moving into a new area you have not explored before, and the jittery combat. When not in combat, the game sails along at around 45 FPS fairly consistently. These are not exactly ideal playing conditions, but it’s barely tolerable, particularly if you're used to playing on consoles like the Nintendo Switch.
Movement is otherwise fairly fluid, and the Steam Deck control scheme suits the game well (in fact, the developers recommend a gamepad). The eerie and slightly surreal environments serve to cover some sins with the graphics settings turned down to Low, much like the pervasive fog covered limited draw distance in the original Silent Hill. Despite this, texture pop-in does happen fairly frequently, which ruins the immersion.
Hell is Us is barely playable on Steam Deck, but it is far from an ideal experience by most metrics. The big framerate drops are jarring and don't do justice to the carefully crafted world the developers have created. And while there is support for FSR 3 and frame generation, the handheld’s GPU usage was already being eaten up, so the extra GPU utilization needed to make upscaling viable just wasn’t there. In fact, it even caused the game to crash in our tests, straight back to the Steam library.
A lot of work will need to go into optimization to make Hell is Us a pleasant experience on Steam Deck, which is a shame, as it otherwise would be a good fit for the device, since the numerous save points make it suitable to play in short bursts. For an alternative that guarantees smooth performance, you can always turn to Nvidia’s new GeForce Now native app, provided the game comes to the cloud gaming platform.
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