Metaphor: ReFantazio is bad for graphics nerds, but good for the Steam Deck

Few games demonstrate the disconnect between graphics and aesthetics as much as Metaphor: ReFantazio. A purely technical analysis would conclude that it has, at best, the fidelity of an early Nintendo Switch game, and yet anyone whose heart stirs even the slightest spark of emotion will immediately fall in love with the elaborate pause screen animations. Yes, this RPG has style for days, perhaps even a whole calendar, and one advantage of its more dated aspects is that it runs well on the Steam Deck's modest internals.

Well, me say Well – it goes up and down a bit, with more than enough sudden framerate drops. But then you can manage to stay above 30fps, which is plenty for a chatty, largely turn-based adventure like this. And although you'll see a warning about tiny text when you launch Metaphor on Valve's handheld, I had no issues with readability in the hours I played. And I have the eyesight of an eighty-year-old vole.

The controls are smooth too, with all the correct Xbox-style on-screen icons, and the deck's quick-resume feature – where the deck jumps straight back to the moment you paused it when you wake it from sleep – works smoothly. You can also expect above-average battery life, with an hour of play draining the charge on my original LCD Steam deck from 100% to 50%. Both the speakers and the screen brightness were set to 50%. So if you reduce this (or use the more efficient Steam Deck OLED), the utilization will be longer.

Veterans who run Atlus games on their Steam decks will also be relieved to learn that Metaphor doesn't have the problems with broken cutscenes or off-balance audio like both Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 Strikers experienced before their respective ones Corrections hindered. Here it is, ready to use on the deck, which is good news for everyone except people who do Proton GE installation tutorials. Oh, wait.

Added to this simple setup is the lack of sophisticated visual effects; Metaphor doesn't even have basic anti-aliasing, so it probably thinks ray tracing has something to do with drawing fish. Therefore, the little old Steam Deck can run more or less well with the default Medium preset if you don't even bother going into the settings menu.

However, I would suggest switching to Low. This disables ambient occlusion (one of only two non-resolution quality settings besides textures) but prevents Metaphor from dropping below 30fps in the most difficult moments. It's mostly fine at intermediate level, but in more complicated areas like cities and forests, there can be brief dips into the 25-29 frames per second range.

If anything, I would have liked a few more options to lower the visual quality even further. 30 fps will be enough, but Metaphor can reach a much smoother 60 fps in places, and the fluctuation between the two extremes is a graphical shortcoming that's harder to compensate for with animation flair and a flashy interface. You could change the deck's own settings to limit the screen to around 40fps, but I would have preferred to tinker with more specific lighting, shadows, and effects settings to hit the 30fps base instead.

Oh well. What we have here still works, which is more than could be said when some of Atlus' previous works appeared on handheld devices. Even though it looks like it was released the same year as them.