New Hyper Light Breaker update makes the game playable on the Steam Deck

Hyper Light Breaker is a pretty darn neat game, even if it does have all the usual roughness of an Early Access release, but its Steam Deck performance was practically inexcusable on launch day. Somewhat unexpectedly, the developer Heart Machine has already managed to turn that around, however!

Heart Machine made a name for itself with the original Hyper Light Drifter, a practically legendary top-down hack ‘n’ slash indie adventure that sets the stage for Breaker. Seeing Hyper Light Drifter release in Early Access the way it did made me slightly worried about what the future might hold, but Hotfix v0.5.1.107947 has thankfully dispelled many of my concerns. Specifically, shoddy performance remains one of Breaker‘s biggest problems, but I am thrilled to report that the game is no longer unplayable on the Steam Deck. The flip side of the coin is that there’s some serious weirdness with how Heart Machine handles the Deck in general.

Image via Heart Machine

You can now enjoy Hyper Light Breaker on the Steam Deck, but there’s still some strangeness about

I am thrilled that Hyper Light Breaker runs reasonably well on the Deck. The gameplay loop is a perfect match for the console, and the new hotfix’s performance improvements have already made for a genuinely enjoyable experience. Heart Machine has already promised more optimization to come, and soon: “The strongest feedback we’ve received this week focuses on performance, particularly on lower-end machines and the Steam Deck. Today’s Hotfix includes a large number of performance improvements and improved Graphics Settings. Expect even more improvements in future planned updates as well.”

I didn’t anticipate the difference between the graphics settings a Steam Deck has access to and those you have on a regular PC setup. In my previous article, I mentioned that Hyper Light Breaker only lets you tweak three different settings:

• Shadow quality
• Foliage distance
• Prop detail

The new hotfix changed that on the Steam Deck, but not necessarily for the better. On the Deck, you now only have access to:

• Ambient occlusion
• Film effects
• Film grain
• Chromatic aberration

That’s right: the three original settings have been taken out of the graphics sub-menu and replaced with a handful of entirely different ones instead. Why is that the case? I do not know, but it gets weirder still. You see, the regular PC build of Hyper Light Breaker has what I would call a proper graphics tweak menu:

Screenshot by Destructoid

It’s still far from perfect, but it’s genuinely helpful and allows you to tweak the visual experience however you see fit. There’s no real way to do so on the Steam Deck at this time, and I cannot fathom why this would be the case unless there’s something very painfully obvious that I keep missing.

My gut feeling is that Heart Machine is trying to deliver a curated, optimized experience on the Steam Deck. This is fair, and an approach that’s more than valid for what is at its core a very low-spec gaming laptop. Yet, I do not see the value in only giving Steam Deck users a gutted version of the PC build’s graphics settings, no matter how I flip it.

Another possibility is that the Steam Deck’s options UI is somehow squeezed together and only displays a small portion of the full settings list. Since only the four bottom options show up on the Deck, that’s a distinctively realistic option but a problem nonetheless.

This whole realization has sort of overshadowed Heart Machine’s hotfixing efforts for me personally, though I’m sure the team will eventually get around to resolving this apparent problem in due time. Otherwise, Hyper Light Breaker is proving to be rather good overall, and I can finally recommend it. Even on the Steam Deck, as long as you’re okay with not being able to tweak settings however you want!

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