The Horizon Forbidden West Steam Deck badge has changed to Playable from Unsupported. However, this upgrade is doing nothing but ignoring the performance of the game on the hardware. There is an expectation for the user when they see this Playable label that this game is stable on the device.
Manual settings changes and severe blurriness undermine the new Playable status
Unfortunately, this title has a hard time keeping a stable frame rate that's playable without quite a bit of manual intervention. This is why we would recommend not picking up this title on handheld until the performance issues are addressed.
- Steam Deck Badge Status: Playble (Upgraded from Unsupported)
- Recommended Graphics Preset: Low
- Upscaling Technology: FSR 3
- Target Frame Rate: 60 FPS (unstable)
- Observed Frame Rate (Exploration): 19-25 FPS
Horizon Forbidden West is a massive open world action RPG developed by Guerrilla Games. There's a lot of exploration and action-packed moments in this game that require quite a bit of processing power. When playing this game on the Steam Deck, the default settings have the graphics preset at High which simply is too much for the Steam Deck to handle. Users will need to step in and change things in order to get the game playing.
For the testing purposes of this game, the author manually changed the graphics preset to Low and turned on FSR 3 upscaling. Despite these changes the frame rate of the game still is not stable when playing actively in the game. During exploration portions, it's not uncommon for the game to be chugging around 19-25 FPS, making it very slow moving.
During action-packed scenes, while once the scene is loaded up the frame rate is a bit more stable around the 30 FPS mark. However, the visuals are quite blurry constantly.
Horizon Forbidden West is $59.99 on Steam and on Fanatical you can get it for $50.99. This is for the normal global edition of the game. The Playable badge may give you a sense that this game is playable and playable in the sense of portability, but with the manual changes that need to be made and the deterioration of visuals it really isn't. So it's a bit of a misleading badge with how bad this game performs.
We discussed some of the same themes for balance and stability in the last Horizon Forbidden West update when we covered it. This current Playable state is not indicative of the actual user experience on the device. Way too much user intervention is required to get it remotely playable. The performance issues still hold it back for handheld users.
Source: SteamDeckHQ
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