By The Blood of Dawnwalker has just landed, and it’s already been flagged as officially Unsupported on Steam Deck. That surprised me, because from everything I’ve tested, it looks far more viable than that label suggests. I played it on both the Steam Machine and the Steam Deck, and while performance is a little hard to swallow even on high-spec hardware, the Deck experience is genuinely better than some titles that already carry a Verified badge.
Steam Deck settings and why “Unsupported” doesn’t add up
The default low graphics preset actually does a pretty decent job out of the gate, so it’s not obvious why this one shipped unsupported. My own setup drops texture quality to medium and switches FSR from quality mode to balanced, which claws back a bit more performance without costing much visually. With that combination I’m getting a fairly stable base of 30fps, and the Deck will happily push higher than that in places too. It doesn’t hold a locked 30 the whole time, but it still outperforms several games Valve has already verified.
Combat is brutal, whatever you’re playing on
Whatever hardware you land on, be warned that the combat takes some getting used to. The opening hours feel simple enough, but once you’re loose in the open world you’re rarely fighting one enemy at a time — it’s usually two or three at once, and they cluster together and refuse to be split up. You’re also very squishy early on. There’s a For Honour-style directional parry system here, and it’s quick, so multiple enemies throwing fast attacks at you makes reading and countering them properly a real challenge. I’d guess it opens up once abilities and stamina scale in the later stages, but for now, expect it to punish button-mashers like me.
Frame Amplification (Decky Mako) and a quicksave bug to watch for
Running Decky Mako for frame generation pushes things up past 60fps most of the time, though I did notice some stutter through the screen capture that I don’t normally see on the deck itself during regular play — I suspect it’s specific to recording rather than something you’d hit day to day. Input latency felt very minor, though it’s hard to say for certain whether that was Maki or just me running out of stamina mid-fight. Either way, it’s a trade-off: a smoother picture versus a touch more input delay, and there are still spikes down into the 40s during heavier attack sequences even with Maki enabled. One more thing to flag while I’m on bugs — the quicksave doesn’t always reload the save you just made, and can instead jump you to a random earlier one. Be careful if you’re relying on it to bail out of a rough fight.
How it looks on GeForce Now
The Blood of Dawnwalker also launched day-and-date on GeForce Now, streaming at 1200p with full DLAA and the ultra preset, and it looks genuinely great at that quality. That said, even on a 5080 at 1200p with ultra settings and no upscaling, frame rates aren’t hitting 120-plus — a lot of the time it’s sitting down in the 60s. That’s a good sign of just how demanding this game currently is across the board, not just on handhelds.
Overall, I’d call this playable on Steam Deck right now, even running natively, and I’m hoping some patches bring it up to a smoother, more consistent experience soon. Let me know in the comments whether you’re diving in, and where you’ll be playing it.