Few games demonstrate the gap between graphics and aesthetics like 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 flutters at even the slightest spark of sentiment will immediately fall in love with the lush pause screen animations. Yes, this RPG has style for days, maybe even an entire calendar, and one benefit of its more dated aspects is that it runs fine on the Steam Deck’s modest internals.

Well, me participation fine – it’s a bit up and down, with more than enough sudden framerate drops. But then it can be made to stay above 30fps, which for a chatty, largely turn-based adventure like this is sufficient. And while launching Metaphor on Valve’s handheld gives a warning about tiny text, I haven’t had any readability issues in the hours I’ve played. And I have the eyesight of an octogenarian vole.

It controls smoothly too, with all the correct Xbox-style glyphs on screen, and the Deck’s quick resume feature – where waking from sleep mode takes you right back to when you paused it – works without a hitch. You can also expect above-average battery life, with an hour of play draining my original LCD Steam Deck from 100% to 50%. That was with the speakers and screen brightness both at 50%, so lower that (or use the more efficient Steam Deck OLED) and you’ll stretch it longer.

Veterans of running Atlus games on their Steam Decks will also be relieved to know that Metaphor is free from problems with broken cutscenes or out-of-whack audio, the kind that plagued both Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 Strikers before their respective solutions. Here it is ready to use, which is good news for everyone except people who make tutorials on installing Proton GE. Oh, wait.

Adding to this ease of installation is the lack of demanding visual effects; Metaphor doesn’t even have basic anti-aliasing, so it probably thinks ray tracing has something to do with drawing fish. As such, the little old Steam Deck can run more or less well on the default ‘Intermediate’ preset, if you don’t even bother going into the settings menu.

However, I would suggest going to Low. This disables ambient occlusion (one of only two non-resolution related quality settings, in addition to textures), but prevents Metaphor from dropping below 30fps in the most difficult moments. On Intermediate it’s fine for the most part, but you can see brief dips in the 25-29fps range in more complicated local environments like cities and forests.

In any case, I would have liked to have a few more options to lower the visual quality even further. 30fps is plenty, but Metaphor can hit a much smoother 60fps at some points, and swinging between the two extremes is a graphical shortcoming that’s harder to compensate for with animation flair and flashy UI. You could change the Deck’s own settings to set the screen to around 40fps, but I would have preferred to tinker with more specific lighting, shadow, and effects settings to bring out the 30fps base instead.

Oh well. What we have here still works, which is more than we could say when some of Atlus’ earlier works were hand-tied. Even though it looks like it was released the same year as them.