We have ostensibly entered the era of mainstream AAA releases being "too big" for the Steam Deck in 2025. Between Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Rise of the Ronin, it's easy to see why you might stop trying to run cutting-edge titles on it. Yet, it's not all quite so black and white, at the same time, as games such as Assassin's Creed Shadows do still run on the Deck surprisingly well. And now, we can add South of Midnight to that same list, to boot.

That's right, folks: South of Midnight works very, very well on the Deck as it turns out. To kick things off, the game is officially Verified by Valve for Steam Deck playing, with a full set of features and proper support for all of the device's hardware capabilities. On that note, the developer recommends enforcing a 30 FPS cap to get a truly consistent gameplay experience. Can we crank that up to 40 for the most part, though?

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Optimal South of Midnight settings for the Steam Deck

The baseline default recommended by the developer for South of Midnight on the Steam Deck is the 'Medium' graphics settings preset at 1200x800 and a 30 FPS cap. As the game runs above 30 FPS at any given time at these settings, this ensures that the hardware isn't overly stressed, and you get to enjoy stable and reasonably smooth gameplay virtually across the board.

As-is, South of Midnight also looks rather excellent, and the OLED model will be able to get you over three hours' worth of game time without any additional fussing. So, if you don't want to muck about with game settings and tweaking, you can expect a rather excellent experience playing South of Midnight on the Deck out-of-the-box. Neat!

In our testing, we've found that maintaining a rock-solid 40 FPS on the Deck isn't yet feasible while playing South of Midnight. That's the bad news: some scenes will tumble your frame-rate down to low 30s no matter what you do, and the cutscenes themselves are capped at 30 FPS, to boot. This means that those who appreciate consistency over everything else may find 40 FPS untenable.

However, if you're not that hung up on consistency, you'll discover that it's fairly easy to get 40 FPS about 80% of the time in South of Midnight. You will want to keep all settings at Medium or below for this to work, and set Upscaling to 'TAAU'. Doing so softens the image up a tad, but it's not too noticable while increasing the performance ceiling of the game to make 40 FPS that much more achievable.

Dropping View Distance, Anti-Aliasing Quality, and Foliage Quality down to Low will give you even more performance overhead to maintain that 40 FPS cap, and make South of Midnight a smoother experience on the Deck. It's not a perfect 40 FPS cap by any means, but it's not an annoying, stuttery mess either, so pick your poison.

South of Midnight can reach all the way up to 90 FPS in select scenes on the Deck, but this is neither reliable nor common enough to target this performance envelope. Even 60 FPS is untenable the vast majority of the time on the Deck, so we recommend either locking stuff up at 30 FPS or going for a tentative 40 FPS cap, instead. Either way, South of Midnight comes highly recommended on the Deck from 2Game's editorial team.

Get your copy of South of Midnight right here at 2Game!