The Necromancer’s Tale runs great on the Steam Deck, and we’ve been doing a lot of our current playtesting on it.
Graphics
The game runs at 60fps on full graphics settings on the native Deck resolution. Text size is configurable.
Controls
The schematic below shows the game controls for the Steam Deck. You can play the game entirely using the two joysticks and buttons.
The joysticks move your character and virtual mouse pointer. During normal play the D-Pad is used for cycling through nearby hotspots (and you can use A to interact with one and automatically walk up to it). During conversation, the D-Pad cycles through your chat choices. The triggers and bumpers do a variety of camera controls and other in-game things that you would normally do with the mouse buttons/wheel.
Virtual Mouse
The right stick controls the mouse pointer, and settings include top-speed and acceleration. We have found this to be a very good replacement for mouse/touchscreen. In general, ‘A’ is equivalent to clicking the left mouse button, and ‘B’ is equivalent to pressing Escape.
The virtual mouse is used, and works very well, during inventory management and combat, which are the most complex parts of the game in terms of mouse control.
Keyboard
An onscreen keyboard appears when you need to enter text (which is rare- it’s generally just at the start when naming your character, or when renaming a save file). You can use the virtual mouse (or of course the touchscreen) to type.
Steam Cloud
The game saves to Steam Cloud so you can move seamlessly between Deck and PC play.
Touchscreen
The Deck's touchscreen works just fine, of course, if you wish to use it, but the game plays perfectly without it.
XBox Controller
The game runs equally well on PC using an XBox controller. Here too you can comfortably play without need for keyboard or mouse.
