The Last of Us finally works on Steam Deck — with worse-than-PS3 level graphics
By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
The Last of Us Part I arrived on PC this March as an embarrassing, broken PC port of a game, even on high-end machines. When I tried it on my Steam Deck handheld, the game was utterly unplayable — despite co-creator Neil Druckmann’s assurances that the game would “grace” the Steam Deck.
But after 11 patches, I can finally confirm The Last of Us is completely playable on Valve’s portable PC.
It’s safe to go back in the… clicker-infested water?
As of last night I’ve completed all 14 hours of the game on my Deck alone, and I haven’t seen a single crash or game-breaking glitch. I rarely saw the frame rate drop below a locked 30 frames per second on default settings, and I’ve comfortably pressed the power button at any time to suspend and resume, day after day, without issue.
You no longer need to wait an hour for shaders to build. The controls are where they ought to be. There’s even a little “shake your Steam Deck” icon in the game when it’s time to shake your flashlight batteries.
The game was almost as good as I remembered, too, except for one thing:
It looks worse on Steam Deck than on my original, 16-year-old launch edition PlayStation 3.
See for yourself:
How is a 10-year-old game running better on 16-year-old hardware than its supposed remaster on a modern AMD chip?
It’s complicated, but here are two parts of the answer:
To make its troubled PC port playable at all, Sony cranked the settings down to the bare minimum. I’m not just talking about fancy features like screen space reflections and dynamic lighting quality, either. I mean draw
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