Thymesia on Steam Deck – Performance guide with optimized graphics settings and crash fix

Thymesia is a new addition to the Soulsborne genre that is surprisingly solid. A very fast and enjoyable combat system, high level of difficulty, gothic atmosphere and quite interesting environment design are the biggest advantages of this production.

As for story, our protagonist is trying to recover his memories, while a deadly plague is spreading around the kingdom. Ultimately, the plague can work in our favor and provide quite unique gameplay mechanics. As you fight more enemies and bosses you capture their diseases and use them as weapons.

Gameplay and review of Thymesia on Steam Deck with optimized graphics settings

You can change them at each checkpoint and quickly adapt to new threats. The game features a fairly complex character progression system – in addition to improving attributes, you unlock more skills that can change the gameplay quite drastically. What’s more, the skills can be reset at any time, which gives you a massive amount of freedom.

As I mentioned at the beginning – Thymesia can be very fast and you need to act really quickly. Opponents have two life bars – one is standard health points, the other shows their wounds. When attacking, you first damage their wounds and after that their health. You must keep on attacking as enemies’ wounds will start to heal after some time, which will prolong the encounters. There is no stamina level here either. Although some of the mechanics are innovative, the game is clearly inspired by Bloodborne.

The game is surprisingly solid, and aside from minor flaws such as lack of voice acting and very uninspired side missions, it can be very enjoyable if you like challenging titles. Just remember this is an indie game, not AAA.

How does Thymesia work on Steam Deck? Below you will find a tutorial along with optimized graphics settings and tips on how to fix the game launch error.

I. Thymesia on Steam Deck – startup crash fix

At the time of this writing, to fix the startup error in Thymesia on Steam Deck, all you need to do is enable Proton Experimental in the compatibility settings.


UPDATE: With Proton 7.0.4 you don’t even need to use Experimental anymore with this game. Works just fine out of the box.

II. Thymesia – Optimized Settings on Steam Deck

Thymesia runs on Unreal Engine 4 and, like most games, unfortunately has a stuttering problem. While the game doesn’t maintain a fully stable 40FPS, I recommend these settings because at 30FPS the input lag here is surprisingly high and hinders gameplay.

I don’t recommend setting the quality of shadows and filters below medium, because then the visuals lose a lot of the atmosphere and the lighting becomes very basic. The game’s built-in FSR 1.0 don’t work properly on pre-relase version so at this moment the best way to get most stable performance is use in-game resolution scaler at 75%.

I will publish video footage of Thymesia on Steam Deck tomorrow. Did you enjoy the game? Let me know in the comments!

[steam item=”1343240″]

Edward Gardner
Edward Gardner
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