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It would be great for people like me who don't mind the degraded quality, which makes it almost feel like you're guiding a VHS camcorder
Dropped Video Settings to "Low" and then Tweaked as Follows to get the best look and performance on this PC in this current configuration: FOV = 70, Interactive Water on, Bloom on, Lens Dirt Effect on, Motion Blur On (gets rid of that weird waffle of pixels effect), Depth of Field on, VHS Film Grain = 26, Chromatic Abberation = 30, Lens Distriton = 23, Anti-Aliasing = TAA, Lighting Quality = Minimal, Reflections Quality = off, Image Upscaling = Off
Had a bit of a Atari-like pixelated oval of brighter graphics until I turned Motion Blurring on, otherwise, game looks great and runs smoothly on this setup.
The game was defaulting to a custom graphics mode which was preventing the levels from launching. I run Pools on multiple different PCs so it requires different tweaks depending on the computer I'm running it on.
If you are running a system like mine you might need to drop Graphics to Low and introduce new elements to the configuration ala-carte until you find a setup you are comfortable with. I wound up getting this configuration running great by tuning some things down. This might be okay with people like me who are a bit "retro" but for some people who want upper level graphics of course, newer hardware will be better.
It would only let me set any resolution lower than native one for my display. I set a resolution immediately lower than native, then I quit the game and opened configuration file at ~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/.config/unity3d/Tensori/POOLS/prefs. I found these parameters among other settings:
<pref name="Screenmanager Resolution Width" type="int">3200</pref>
<pref name="Screenmanager Resolution Height" type="int">2048</pref>
<pref name="resolutionIndex" type="int">48</pref>
I modified them accordingly for native resolution of 3840x2160 for my display:
<pref name="Screenmanager Resolution Width" type="int">3840</pref>
<pref name="Screenmanager Resolution Height" type="int">2160</pref>
<pref name="resolutionIndex" type="int">49</pref>
framerate drops are common when in water, there are in-game settings to disable some water effects and make the game run faster
Overall the game runs extremely well. The game's default graphics are too heavy for the Steam Deck but the developer has presets to fix this. I personally use the "Steam Deck Performance" preset since I prefer the higher framerate over the quality.
FSR set to 3 on Deck, not in game, resolution dropped as well in game
DRI_PRIME=1 %command%
The only bug I encountered was my screen occasionally fading to black when changing scenes and not displaying again. Minimizing and re-opening the window immediately fixed that. Easy to work around.he launch option was simply to make the game run exclusively on my dGPU, and will not be needed in most cases.
Worked out of the box
Played the entire game, no issues.
Performance on the deck is pretty bad. You have to lower resolution and graphics settings quite far to even get a stable 40 FPS.
Not recommended unless you enjoy interactive slide shows.
Set FSR to 0.85
Lighting artifacts as a result of the Unity global illumination use in this game
Default configuration got 30-45fps out of the box on Steam Deck. You can improve this by either using FSR or decreasing the lighting quality in settings.
