Lost Soul Aside is unplayable on Steam Deck and barely playable on ROG Ally
Sony Interactive Entertainment and Ultizero Games released Lost Soul Aside for PlayStation 5 and PC (Steam) worldwide a few days ago. I was curious to see how the action RPG would feel on PC handhelds and also the PC port features. Sony has been promoting the PC version with a dedicated PC features trailer, but as a current console generation title, I wasn't sure if it would be a good experience on PC handhelds or not. I bought Lost Soul Aside for Steam to try it on both my Steam Deck and ROG Ally. The end result is not great on either system, but there's hope for ROG Ally.
Lost Soul Aside PC graphics and control options
Lost Soul Aside on PC has the following display options: monitor selection, display mode (windowed and borderless), resolution, brightness adjustment, HDR brightness (works on Steam Deck OLED), frame rate limit, and v-sync. The frame rate limit lets you use a 30fps, 60fps, 120fps, or no limit. When it comes to Lost Soul Aside's graphics options, you can use a preset or adjust the following settings: view distance, anti-aliasing quality, shadow quality, texture quality, effects quality, post-processing quality, super resolution sampling (upscaling), super sampling quality (upscaling mode), frame generation (DLSS and XeSS only), low latency mode, and ray tracing. Most of these let you use low, medium, high, epic, and cinematic as the options. Lost Soul Aside also compiles shaders on first launch.
Lost Soul Aside Steam Deck impressions
Lost Soul Aside on Steam Deck makes a very poor first impression, but things keep getting worse every minute. When using the absolute lowest possible settings, it drops to 1-2fps during the prologue cut-scenes and always crashes after the opening tutorial section when you get into a specific unskippable cut-scene. That tutorial section where you learn the basics of combat also does not run remotely close to well with it dropping below 20fps often. I tested the opening prologue on two Steam Decks with three different Proton versions including the latest version of Proton GE and Proton Experimental (Bleeding Edge) and could not progress beyond that cut-scene. Lost Soul Aside is marked as Steam Deck Unsupported by Valve, and in this specific situation it is accurate.
After playing an hour on ROG Ally and testing different autosave points, I was able to load a save on Steam Deck where it held 30fps outside combat, but regularly dropped to the low 20s even on the absolute lowest settings, 720p, and using Performance upscaling. Since the game keeps crashing at specific cut-scenes and you cannot progress without playing on another system and loading the save over, I consider Lost Soul Aside unplayable on Steam Deck. I also want to note that just like other Sony titles, the PlayStation Network login option does not work on Steam Deck.
Lost Soul Aside Steam Deck recommended settings
My recommendation is to not waste your time trying Lost Soul Aside (the full game) on Steam Deck until a patch is released or Valve can somehow address the potential memory-related crash. If you managed to get the demo working on Steam Deck, note that the full game will not let you progress beyond the prologue on Steam Deck, and even when I went beyond that point on ROG Ally and tried loading the save on Steam Deck, it crashed and rebooted. As I said above, I played a bit more on ROG Ally and then loaded the save on Steam Deck via Steam Cloud and was able to get in-game, but it is not worth doing right now given the visuals and performance on Valve's handheld
Lost Soul Aside ROG Ally impressions
Speaking of the ROG Ally, Lost Soul Aside is a very heavy game right now for PC handhelds. I was able to get it just about playable with it running between 20 and 50fps by playing on the lowest settings, 720p, and with the GPU set to use 6GB VRAM during the prologue. The actual game beyond that can run a lot better depending on the location, but you should expect 20fps at worst with up to even 80-90fps on ROG Ally with these settings. To get it to 720p, I had to force the whole device to 720p using the quick access menu. The game would not let me select 720p until I did this. It was only 900p or 1080p before. It is not playable at 900p or 1080p.
With these settings, Lost Soul Aside does not look good but it is technically playable. The performance is too erratic right now to recommend playing on ROG Ally Z1 Extreme. I don't know if the extra memory on the Ally X helps, but I don't have that to test. I also didn't have any crashes in the few hours I tested, but that one scene that crashed every single time on Steam Deck took about 30 seconds to load on ROG Ally. I thought the device had crashed, but it was just frozen in that scene for 30 seconds before loading.
Right now, I don't recommend even booting up Lost Soul Aside on Steam Deck until it gets big patches from either the developers or Valve to address the constant crashing. If you really want to play it on Valve's handheld, you're better off streaming from a more powerful device. Lost Soul Aside on ROG Ally is still too inconsistent for my liking even when rendering at a very low internal resolution with heavy upscaling. Right now, Lost Soul Aside on ROG Ally is what I consider barely playable and it is unplayable on Steam Deck. Neither platform delivers close to a good experience.
Lost Soul Aside is now available for PlayStation 5 and PC (Steam). You can download the Lost Soul Aside demo on PS5 here and PC Steam here.