This weekend I tried the demo for Dead as Disco, a mash-up of the crowd control combat from Arkham Asylum and the rhythm-based bounciness of Hi-Fi Rush. It’s frickin’ fantastic, I can’t wait for the early access release. But playing it in buttery-smooth 240 FPS on my OLED monitor and RTX 5070 Ti desktop made me consider: This game might be a perfect torture test for low-end hardware.
So Dead as Disco is fairly simple from a structural viewpoint. It’s an indie game with very small arenas, and a maximum of perhaps a dozen characters on screen at a time. (At least in the demo.) There’s a lot of visual stuff going on, lots of psychedelic effects and visual flourishes to inform the player. But in terms of technical demand, I’d say it’s probably less complicated than, say, Shadow of War (which I’ve also been playing — man, I’m on a binge for that kind of counter-based combat).
And yet, rhythm games require more than just fast frames for satisfying gameplay. They need smoothness so you don’t get thrown off. They need low latency so you can get your timing perfect. And most of all they need all of this to be consistent. Anything that messes with the flow of the music can ruin the experience. It’s these areas that low-power devices can struggle with, even when they’re technically capable of handling newer, well-optimized games. Will Smith covers a lot of this in his deep dives on micro suttering.
Dead as Disco works as a test of the Steam platform, too. It’s an indie game from a small team. Presumably, they don’t have the resources to test across a lot of hardware — so far Steam is its only platform, and it only officially has a Windows version. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s limited to Windows. Running Windows games on Linux is the entire purpose of the Proton system, and even years after it became a hit, arguably the Steam Deck wouldn’t be a viable product without it. But small dev teams often can’t afford to dedicate resources to the Steam Deck or other non-Windows platforms, especially before a full release.
Indeed, when loading up Dead as Disco on my original Lenovo Legion Go (with Windows mercifully removed and a Valve-supplied build of SteamOS in its place), Steam warns me that the game hasn’t been tested for compatibility. I proceeded anyway. I knew, of course, that the game wouldn’t be as pretty or as smooth as on my ridiculous gaming desktop. But I’d consider it a win if A) it could install and run with no indication from the platform or the developers of its functionality, and B) I could get into a similar “flow” in the gameplay.
Michael Crider / Foundry
My initial run was a little rough. The game installed and booted fine, which didn’t surprise me. But while it ran alright after its automatic (low) settings were applied, it was choppy, and I definitely had a lower score with more issues on a song I had S-ranked the weekend before. Though the framerate was a constant 60 (the auto-set maximum), I was definitely missing some counters I wouldn’t have missed on my desktop, and getting a lower score.
I dove into the visual settings, swapped the game from fullscreen windowed mode down to fullscreen, set the framerate cap to 120 (The Legion Go’s screen can handle 144Hz), and brought the resolution down to 1920×1200. That’s well below the actual 1600p hardware, but well above the Steam Deck’s 1200×800 screen. Lastly, I flipped on V-Sync, which I don’t normally do, but it seemed useful for a trippy 3D rhythm game.
Bam. In this configuration, in the admittedly barebones “Infinite Disco” mode with the least-complex dance floor/battlefield, I was right back into it at a rock-solid 120 FPS, only occasionally dipping down 5 percent or so. The only things hampering me were the somewhat loose Legion Go thumbsticks. But once I accounted for that I was performing just as well as on my 34-inch monitor on the desktop. Maybe even better, since the smaller screen allowed me to keep my eyes on enemies more holistically.
Any rumors that I was shaking my hips to the beat with the Legion Go in my hands are greatly exaggerated. And since I live alone, you have to take my word for it. I popped over to the demo of the story mode, which has much more complex backgrounds and effects, and still managed to get a very respectable — and smooth — 75 to 85 FPS.
For a bit of comparison testing I loaded up Dead as Disco on my older ThinkPad laptop, currently running Linux Mint. Again, Steam was happy enough to install the game, and it even launched with the magic of Proton. But that machine’s 11th-gen Core i7 laptop CPU and integrated Xe graphics were not up to the task. It was squeezing out 25 FPS at the best of times, frequently dipping down into the teens, even as the characters were dynamically rendered at such a low resolution that it looked like I was watching through a screen door.
Michael Crider / Foundry
Just for fun I loaded up the game on my Galaxy Z6 Fold phone. This wasn’t a stream session, it was running Steam on local hardware via GameHub. This is an extremely cool system if your phone has the juice for it. I’ve played a few sessions of Hades II this way, with a nifty 8BitDo mobile controller. Sadly it couldn’t handle Dead as Disco, choking out about 10 frames per second at the best of times and constantly sputtering both visuals and music. That wasn’t so much a torture test as an execution.
Anyway, yes, SteamOS and the handheld hardware it generally runs on can do shockingly well even with games that absolutely demand smoothness and consistency. Just don’t expect it to work that well on pre-release builds, at least not without a little tweaking. I daresay the devs could probably spend a little time polishing it up before the full Dead as Disco release, even if that’s just making a Steam Deck/handheld performance preset, and/or submitting it to Valve and Microsoft’s game certification programs.
Oh, and try the Dead as Disco demo. It’s groovy, man.
