Out-of-Box Experience

Silent Hill 2 Remake works out of the box on SteamOS. All you've got to do is download the game, wait for half a dozen shader pre-caching files to download, and you're golden.


While the game doesn't require any tinkering to launch, you will notice that it lacks some upscaling options found in other versions, namely FSR 3 and XeSS. You can enable those by typing the "SteamDeck=0 %command%" launch option. I don't recommend doing that because, TSR (UE5's Temporal Super Resolution upscaling solution) both works and looks pretty good. Secondly, using FSR 3 or XeSS not only increases memory usage but also makes instances of traversal stuttering much more pronounced.


The performance of Steam Deck with this game is not great. The intro area, taking place in woods near Silent Hill, uses up every ounce of power from Steam Deck's iGPU, resulting in sub-30 FPS performance that very rarely reaches 30 FPS even if you drop everything to Low, including TSR upscaling, as you can see in our performance charts.


The town of Silent Hill itself performs much better. You can expect a stable 30 FPS performance while exploring it, but some of the later areas, which we won't mention to avoid spoiling the game (let's just say they're out of this world), will make the game slow down to a crawl. Even with everything, including TSR, set to Low, you shouldn't expect stable 30 FPS performance. These said areas aren't as demanding as the intro area, but you will encounter long intervals where the frame rate drops to mid-20s and stays there, struggling to reach 30 FPS.


Personally, I don't find this very playable, but I won't stop you from buying and playing the game. Many Steam Deck owners are used to mid-to-high 20 FPS gameplay experience; if you're one of them, don't let me stop you from getting it. Just don't blame me if the poor performance makes you bounce off the game.


The situation on ROG Ally is far from great. It looks like a number of Unreal Engine 5 games suffer from busted visuals on Z1 and Z1 Extreme handhelds. We've seen reports about Still Wakes the Deep and Robocop: Rogue City failing to render shadows, with Black Myth: Wukong also displaying certain lighting-related issues, which we, admittedly, didn't notice in our handheld performance review due to the issues being much more subtle than those found in other games. Silent Hill 2 Remake is one of those games with more significant issues.


The rendering issues are far from subtle. The game doesn't render shadows at all, and the lighting looks kind of busted. This results in a flat, zero-contrast look, with interior areas looking like none of them have a roof.


Outdoor areas look a bit better, but they don't feature the volumetric fog effect. This makes the visibility too darn high, which isn't something you want in a Silent Hill game.


Enabling ray tracing effects restores shadows and makes the game's lighting look normal.


Unfortunately, enabling ray tracing doesn't fix the lack of volumetric fog effects. It also destroys performance, making the game struggle to reach a stable 30 FPS even in the least demanding areas.

Luckily, there's a solution for these issues. You can switch to the Vulkan renderer by using the DXVK translation layer and forcing the game to launch into DirectX 11 mode. Firstly, you need to download dxvk-gplasync files from the project's GitLab page, courtesy of Ph42oN.

Next, open the package, then open the "x64" folder, select the "dxgi.dll" and "d3d11.dll," and copy them to the directory of the Silent Hill 2 Remake executable file, which should be located in: steam/steamapps/common/SILENT HILL 2/SHProto/Binaries/Win64. Once you place the two files inside the proper folder, go to your Steam library, right-click the Silent Hill 2 icon, go to "properties," and type "-dx11" in the launch options.


Switching to Vulkan remedies the graphical issues and brings back volumetric fog, which is just slightly less thick than in DirectX 12 mode but hey, at least it's present.


The fix also makes the game much more demanding since now you have regular visuals instead of zero shadows and no volumetric fog. In other words, you'll have to use 720p resolution with TSR set to Low to get playable performance.


And yes, you're limited to TSR upscaling because running in DX11 mode removes access to FSR 3 and XeSS upscalers. But hey, at least the game looks normal.

We hope that Bloober Team or AMD will fix this issue with a future patch or a GPU driver update, but since Still Wakes the Deep and Robocop: Rogue City still suffer from graphical issues at the time of writing this text, there's a slim chance the issue will be resolved anytime soon.

Regarding controls, Silent Hill 2 Remake plays great on a controller, including Steam Deck's and ROG Ally's inbuilt controllers. There's no need or reason to use a mouse and keyboard combo.