After over 3 years of running like dogwater on Steam Deck, one of my favorite RPGs has finally earned its Verified badge

Bearded and Goggled figure rendered in yellow comic book style looks down at parchment in Dread Delusion — (Image credit: Lovely Hellplace)

I have to issue a mea culpa: Almost exactly three years ago, I reported on a performance improvement update for the excellent indie RPG Dread Delusion. The performance was improved, but it was not improved enough. After my initial excitement, I found the game's inconsistent framerates unbearably brutal, and I exclusively played on desktop.

But not anymore. Dread Delusion finally, for realsies, my hand to god, actually runs great on Steam Deck now: A rock solid 60 fps in my experience, at both the start of the game and a save dozens of hours in. It also boasts some blessedly gentle battery usage: Over four hours estimated playtime, with a tick rate on the percentage to back that up.

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Last summer, when I began a new playthrough of this first person, mini open world RPG, I fired Dread Delusion up on Steam Deck to get a consistent 25 fps in the starting area, despite developer Lovely Hellplace's early optimizations, and no amount of fiddling with settings resulted in anything I found pleasant enough to supplant the desktop experience. Factor of Games' May 2023 performance showcase is fairly illustrative, as is this Steam forum thread from last year about DD's Deck performance.

In my limited playtime after Dread Delusion's April 15 patch, I have yet to encounter frame rate dips outside a slight hang when loading a new area or autosaving⁠—it feels like I could set my watch to this game's frame rate on Steam Deck. I never finished the replay I started last year, but now I see a route to the end credits unchained from my desk.

Developer Lovely Hellplace is currently working on a follow-up game, and it looks sick: Entropy, a more JRPG-style experience that builds on Dread Delusion's distinctive art style and presentation. If you're wondering why you should play Dread Delusion, it has some of my favorite RPG quests ever, including "The Ethics of Eating Flesh," a twisty moral dilemma over the human meat substitute sustaining a society of sentient zombies that feels like a sci-fi short story from the 1970s.

Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch. You can follow Ted on Bluesky.

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