Hell Is Us: A Comprehensive Performance and Graphics Overview

Who knew a fantasy hack 'n' slash could have so much to say about the realities of war! Hell Is Us is now available via its advanced access scheme for all Deluxe Edition owners of the game, and we've so far been thoroughly impressed with its grim subject matter. As we've been able to get a bunch of hands-on time, this also means a proper performance review was due, and that's precisely what we've got for you today.

Though it's not a full-on AAA blockbuster, Hell Is Us is still an extremely good-looking game with some massive open-world levels for the players to explore. This initially made us think it wouldn't perform well on low-spec machines, but the fact is that we got the game to run perfectly stably on even the humble Steam Deck! That's right: Hell Is Us is a very viable option for Deck owners, and down below we'll give you both the optimal graphics settings for the Steam Deck, and a set of optimized settings for desktop PCs, to balance out the game's graphics and performance.

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Hell Is Us Performance Review

Before we get to Steam Deck specifics, here's our broader take on Hell Is Us's performance envelope: it's shockingly good! Well, okay, maybe not shockingly good, but certainly far better than we expected it to be. Hell Is Us runs very, very well out-of-the-gate on our RTX 4070Ti/Ryzen 5 7600X machine at 'High' settings. Really, it sits in stark comparison to the strangely mishandled PC build of MGS: Delta, which we recently critiqued for this exact reason.

Even moving on to the 'Ultra' preset with Frame-Gen enabled and a few things tweaked down here and there remains a viable option on this rig, which suggests solid scalability and a performant experience overall. There's really not much to complain about in this regard, we think.

In a more practical sense, here's the best set of balanced PC settings that offer excellent performance without compromising Hell Is Us's striking visuals in any meaningful way:

• Native UI resolution
• TSR 3D resolution: 80-90%, if applicable
• Anti-Aliasing: High
• Effects: High (lower to Medium if you're at 8 GB of VRAM or lower)
• Foliage: Medium
• Global Illumination: Medium (lower to Low if you're at 8 GB of VRAM or lower)
• Post-Processing: High
• Shading: High
• Shadows: High
• Textures: Medium (lower to Low if you're at 8 GB of VRAM or lower)
• View Distance: High

We've found that Textures and Foliage settings, in particular, have an extreme effect on the game's performance, so try tweaking these accordingly if you do come across any issues. On that note, there are a few other things we recommend you tweak to get a better playing experience out of Hell Is Us!

• Camera Settings: Set the 'Movement Lag' and 'Rotation Lag' options down to 0.2
• Gameplay Settings: Set the 'Datapad Opening Animation' to Short

Finally, keep in mind that the game's Motion Blur rendering is handled via the 'Post-Processing' option without a more granular solution. This isn't optimal, but if you go into Hell Is Us's Accessibility Settings, you'll be able to fine-tune how strong and pervasive motion blur is, at least. We've set it down to 'Reduced' and had a massively improved experience compared to the default, which felt fairly excessive at a glance.

Optimal Hell Is Us Steam Deck Settings

As for the Steam Deck, we're going to recommend sticking to a 30 FPS cap at the full 90Hz refresh rate for Hell Is Us. 40 FPS is feasible down the line with some optimization mods and/or patching from the devs' side of things, but it's just not as rock-solid as we want it to be.

Instead, if you go for a 30 FPS performance target, you'll get a longer battery life, a virtually perfect frame-time graph, and a game that doesn't look half-bad for a handheld experience. Don't forget that in-home streaming might also be an option for you, in some cases!

Back on track, there's really only a few settings you need to modify to get Hell Is Us to run well on the Steam Deck:

• Set your overall graphics settings to 'Low'.
• Boost the TSR 3D resolution scale to 40%.
• Set the FPS limit down to 30.
• Enable XeSS on its 'Balanced' mode.

With that all out of the way, you're also going to want to go into the 'Accessibility' options tab and set 'Motion Blur' to 'Reduced' level. We know that motion blur is often disliked, but it's a very necessary setting at low frame-rates, and will help smooth over those 30 FPS for a surprisingly decent and smooth playing experience.

You may also wish to experiment with setting some options to a higher level, which is fair! Textures in particular can look muddy in close-up scenes, which there are plenty of in Hell Is Us. Yet, the Deck's fairly limited amount of RAM makes this a challenge, and we'd instead recommend staying tuned for further performance optimizations via patching.

Still! This is a huge success for the Deck, and we think Hell Is Us is well on its way to be a cult classic, even this early in its lifecycle.

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