Out-of-Box Experience

Once Human is not officially supported on SteamOS, but the game technically works out of the box. That said, the performance on Steam Deck with the latest Proton version is horrendous. While you're fine when standing still, both character and camera movement causes extreme stuttering and massive frame drops. To alleviate this, you need to run the game with an older version, Proton 7.0.6, which we did.


That said, even with Proton 7.0.6, the game doesn't perform that well on Steam Deck LCD, although it's definitely playable at the Low and Very Low presets. As you'll see on the next page, Steam Deck LCD's 1% lows are notably lower than on the ROG Ally, and even though the disparity in 1% lows reduces at Medium and higher graphical presets, uneven performance plagues the experience no matter which settings combo you end up using.


Performance is much better on the ROG Ally. The game runs and feels great for the most part, especially if you decide to play it with a mouse and keyboard. ROG Ally's VRR screen is a godsend for this game because the open-world map causes uneven performance (but far less uneven than on Steam Deck) with frequent FPS and frame time fluctuations, as well as occasional stuttering.


During our initial round of testing, the game didn't support controllers, so we had to use a community controller profile on the Steam Deck. The experience was subpar, to say the least. Aiming with the right thumbstick felt off due to the stick emulating mouse input, and the profile included a lot of instances of multiple controls being mapped to the same button (one control mapped to a regular press, another to a long press, and a third mapped to a double press) which often led to missed or inaccurate inputs.


On the ROG Ally, though, we used the mouse and keyboard combo, and the experience was way better. Everything worked flawlessly.

Once Human implemented controller support just as we were wrapping up this piece. We decided to return to the game and test its official controller support. Our impressions are very positive. The official controller mappings are well-thought-out and work miles better compared to the community profile we used in our testing; even the build menu works fine on a gamepad now. Big thumbs up to the developers.