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.

