Death Stranding 2 is a bridge too far for Steam Deck

With the first Death Stranding running great on the original Steam Deck, players were hoping we'd get a similarly good experience with the sequel, and with that in mind, let's dive in to see if the Steam Deck can run Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.

We've also taken a look at how Death Stranding 2 runs on PC, if you are humming and hawing between which platform to play it on. With the Death Stranding 2 cast putting on such a terrific show, you'll want to play it on the best system you can.

But, spoiler alert, if that system is the Steam Deck, then you might have to look at upgrading to get in your Hideo Kojima time during your commute. With that in mind, read on to see how the Steam Deck fares when it comes to Death Stranding 2.

Can the Steam Deck run Death Stranding 2?

Sadly, you will need something with a bit more juice than Valve’s Steam Deck.

Even with the OLED model, which is slightly faster than the original LCD model, we struggled to hit 30FPS when using the included Portable mode settings.

As noted in our Death Stranding 2 PC port overview, Death Stranding 2: On the beach makes use of PICO (Progressive Image Compositor), which is Guerrilla Games’ in-house image upscaler specific to the Decima game engine, much like Epic Games’s TSR is for Unreal Engine 5.

The benefit of PICO is that AMD-powered handhelds such as the Steam Deck or Asus ROG Ally do not support machine learning-based upscalers such as Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s own FSR4, and so you can get much better image quality than you would in a game that is similarly difficult to run.

Curiously, PICO was set to Balanced by default. Turning this down to Performance clawed back some extra frames, at the expense of image quality.

But as for the actual gameplay experience, we only got framerates that were reliably above 30FPS during cutscenes that take place indoors, or when the surroundings are closed in. At the top of mountain ridges and when traversing wider plains, the framerate hovered between 24-28FPS for the most part.

When approaching intensive effects such as flash floods and rivers, the framerate takes a nosedive.

Strangely, the game almost came screeching to a halt when music started during normal play. It happened whilst running past a river during a storm, so it might be down to the Steam Deck struggling to stream in all the assets it needs.

We weren’t able to test any other handhelds, but we imagine anything newer than a Steam Deck will fare much better, or you’ll at least be able to squeeze out a consistent 30FPS.

If you do want to play it on your Steam Deck, then your best option is streaming it from your PC, if you have one. But Death Stranding 2 really begs to be played on as big and nice a screen as possible.

Death Stranding 2 does support native Steam Input, so controller prompts all look as they should, but don’t expect any DualSense magic.

If you’re set on SteamOS, then it may be a case of waiting for an eventual Steam Deck 2 or the upcoming Steam Machine, which should be able to offer a decent experience as well.

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