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PayPalStellar Blade recently had a demo released and thankfully, it does seem to run well enough on Linux, SteamOS / Steam Deck. Great news for the upcoming release, which is soon! The game in full arrives June 11th.
With the demo, progress will carry over to the main game and once you finish the demo, you'll also unlock an additional mode. The developer also worked to remove the region block, so thankfully it's another PlayStation Publishing title that will be available in more locations.
Desktop Linux
My testing with the demo was using the latest Proton 9.0-4, and there doesn't seem to be any problems. It looks great, seems to perform well on the defaults too. With the Very High graphics preset with AMD FSR 3 set to Quality it's been smoothly over 100FPS at 2560x1440 on Kubuntu Linux 25.04 with my Radeon RX 6800 XT.
For Steam Deck there's a dedicated graphics setting, which mostly sets everything down to low except for Character Object Detail they've put to Medium. The main problem with it are the visuals on Steam Deck, FSR3 gives quite a lot of distortion around characters during movement.
Performance though seems pretty reasonable. You're not going to get 60FPS even with the special Steam Deck setting, with lots of it hovering around the 40-50FPS mark on the Steam Deck LCD model. These shots below were on the Steam Deck default preset:
What was surprising was turning off AMD FSR 3, the game on Steam Deck is still very much playable and you do get a vastly clearer picture during combat and heavy action. The performance obviously drops a fair bit, but still actually above 30FPS. I would much prefer the clear picture and locking it to 30FPS. Thankfully, the developer did not lock the graphical settings so no workaround or launch commands needed.
These shots below are with the Low graphics preset but with Character Object Detail bumped up to Medium with TAA. You can see the FSR distortion is gone, so the picture is much cleaner and enjoyable. Although, you will sacrifice some battery life for it. Either way, you'll only get about an hour.
Appears that developer SHIFT UP actually did a pretty good job on optimising the game across different hardware. But the default trying to push it to 60FPS on Steam Deck just feels silly. Drop it down and enjoy it more. I am genuinely very impressed by how it runs on Steam Deck.
Looks like it has a decent set of accessibility options too:
I went into this completely blind, intentionally staying away from videos on it and all the social media chatter around the original release, so I'm quite excited for it. The demo actually was pretty good too so I think I might be sold on it.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Pyretic a day ago
damarrin a day ago
It's a shame that the default preset is so blurry,
You haven't seen blurry until you've seen Expedition 33 on the Steam Deck preset. It's absolutely atrocious and disabling the SD lock is a must for the game to look somewhat presentable.
This, otoh, runs absolutely beautifully at 40 fps. One sore point is texture quality, it's very, very low and no apparent way to change it. HDR looks very nice. I was getting around 2 hrs battery life to Liam's one, must be the OLED talking.
The game has its flaws, but is very solid in general, you're in for a good time there, Liam.
Last edited by damarrin on 2 Jun 2025 at 11:31 am UTC
Dahippo1555 a day ago
"Contains denuvo"
CyborgZeta a day ago
jgacas a day ago
I also recently heard that the developer has been fighting the region block that Sony's been applying to their games.
Game became available in my country recently, it was geoblocked by Sony from the beginning. I already accepted that I won't be able to play it, and was pleasantly surprised when I saw that game and demo are available in my country.
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