Can you play the Dead Space Remake on Steam Deck?
The hottest horror remake to be released this year (so far) is causing some concerns. So, does the Dead Space Remake run on the Steam Deck?
After the mild failure of Dead Space 3, EA and their development teams went back to the drawing board for their dormant franchise. The result is a remake of the original Dead Space that we called “Sci-fi survival horror at its most gruesome”, in our review.
EA’s Motive team recreated the entire USG Ishimura in the Frostbite engine and the results are extraordinary. However, can the Steam Deck and its limited – but impressive – specs play the game?
Does Dead Space Remake work on Steam Deck?
Yes, it works just fine on the Steam Deck. This is after a brief interruption due to compatibility issues with Proton, the translation layer for running non-Linux apps.
The issue meant that the game was continuously crashing during gameplay, and has rendered it non-verified by Valve for the time being. Valve, however, deployed a hotfix to ensure that any issues were fixed.
There are still reports of the game lagging, or hitching up in certain areas. It’s probably due to the game’s method of caching shaders, which it seems to do while in-game as well as while installing on the Deck.
Some have found the game runs at Ultra around 20-40FPS depending on the location, so our recommendation would be to keep the game locked at 30FPS and at Medium, backed up by FSR and other supersampling available in the game.
We’re unsure how the Dead Space Remake is affected by Denuvo, the anti-piracy security being implemented in the game. Reports from other games in the past have indicated that performance can take a hit if a developer decides to use it.
However, an upside is, the game doesn’t use the EA launcher in any capacity when bought via Steam. This will ensure that if EA manages to break compatibility on Steam Deck again, Dead Space Remake shouldn’t be in that mess.
You can grab Dead Space Remake on PC below:
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