Does Death Must Die Run Well on Steam Deck? – Answered

The indie rogue-lite Death Must Die is one of those games you can play for hours without noticing the time quickly passing by. And that just screams, “Hey, that’s a great Deck game!” but can the Steam Deck run this Early Access title well or not?

Is Death Must Die Performance on Steam Deck Good?

You can play Death Must Die on the Steam Deck without any big issues. Performance is quite good despite still being in its Early Access period and not having the Verified sign yet. And honestly, it feels much more comfortable to kill endless waves of skeletons lying down on your bed than sitting on the same chair again. Simpler games like that have the perfect Deck vibe, and I’m all in for those.

But while performance is usually consistent, I’ve run into a few issues as soon as more enemies started popping up on my screen. Slimes, more specifically. Whenever a slime wave appears, my FPS would drop significantly in a way I haven’t experienced on PC. That’s something to be expected, considering how many different (and more detailed) models the game is trying to load at the same time.

But to be honest, that wasn’t that big of an issue. The game does get a bit slower for a few seconds, but it isn’t a run-killer in any way. I can still safely dodge as I always do, and my FPS goes back to normal after a few seconds and some slimes slew, and my run continues as normal until the next slime wave.

Curiously, the big skeleton waves wouldn’t trigger the same effect, so it seems like this problem is exclusive to those herds of icky creatures. But it shouldn’t be like that for long, as the game is constantly receiving more updates every day.

Since the Steam Deck performance is already okay, I wouldn’t bet on that problem to be a priority for a while, but it should be solved eventually if Realm Archive wants the game to eventually get the Verified symbol. And I feel like they do.