Resident Evil 4 (2023)

Feeling pretty sick, I haven’t kept up with anything this week. But one bit of news popped up that grabbed my interest – the Resident Evil 4 Demo.

The little teaser demos for Resident Evil 7 and onwards have been a lot of fun. For the newer entries, they have been stand-alone experiences adjacent to the final game. The same engine, but is not directly tied to the new main story.

For the remakes, the demos have been closer to the main game but limited in some fashion to avoid spoilers. This usually meant an hour total to play the demo.

But for Resident Evil 4, no timed demo had appeared. In my mind, I guessed Capcom decided Resident Evil 4 didn’t need to whip up any more excitement. I was wrong.

While I was keen to finish the Dead Space Impossible run, I couldn’t even start it. Coughing fits and permadeath don’t mix! But a demo? Well, worst case I wouldn’t finish the demo sequence. What did I have to lose?

Then another thought struck me. I could play lying down on the Steam Deck! By all accounts, Resident Evil has been performing well on the Deck, so I was curious to see how the demo would play.

So, I installed the Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw Demo (I wonder which enemy this will feature?) and fired up the game. I was both impressed and disappointed.

Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw Demo was running pretty well. I am sure I could play through the game at pretty locked 40 FPS nicely. There is also no time limit! Play the Demo as many times as you like, and enjoy exploring the opening village at your own pace.

BUT. There are a lot of graphical issues on the Steam Deck, and try as I might, I couldn’t fix them.

But the Steam Decks visual glitches didn’t stop me from finishing the Demo. I even managed to unlock the secret ‘Mad Chainsaw Mode’, and immediately died. This means I need to unlock the mode again, and I don’t know how I did it the first time so a new challenge waits for me.

If you have a Steam Deck and want to play Resident Evil 4, there is a fix out there. You need to go to the experimental update branch, which includes an updated video driver.

This seems to fix all of the visual issues shown here. Hopefully, this driver will be added to the stable release prior to Resident Evil 4’s launch.

Super quick entry this week. Last week I talked about the visual issues of the Resident Evil 4 Chainsaw Demo on the Steam Deck. Well, Valve has released the new graphics driver ahead of the next major update, which fixes the graphical glitches completely!

Compare last week’s example:

With the same scene a few days later with the latest Steam Deck update applied:

It’s still not enough to convince me to playthrough Resident Evil 4 on my Steam Deck – that run will be on the PS5. But if the Steam Deck is your primary way of playing games, you can breathe a sigh of relief that performance issues are already addressed.

I mentioned this with the Steam Deck thoughts last week – the effort and responsiveness of Valve to ensure that games run as smoothly as possible on the Steam Deck cannot be understated. Sure, the best experience is when you purchase the games on Steam, but when is the last time Sony or Microsoft stepped in to make a gaming experience better across the board like this?

When this journal comes out, there are only a couple of days until the Resident Evil 4 remake releases. I don’t think I will be getting that Dead Space Platinum – I can’t wait to jump back into RE4!