Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a great game but it suffers from a poor performance on the Steam Deck, and the default settings imposed on Steam Deck owners suck. So here’s a little guide to make things a little better and more enjoyable. We won’t do any binary downloads from a shady source to fix the Unreal 5 engine here, there are things to do first without putting your device at risk.

The problems on the Steam Deck are the following:

• you have no options to change any graphical settings on the Steam Deck.
• The manor scene has the wrong colors (all white)
• The shadows are on the lowest settings by default and make close-up scenes look awful during conversations

Here is the manor scene with the wrong colors, for example:

Here is the fix for all of this. This is what I use on the Steam Deck LCD version.

First, insert the following in your launch options for the game, to unlock the graphical settings.

Once in game, change the settings to match the following:

And then:

Once you are back in the game, you will now see that the manor scene looks correct:

You will get between 20 and 30 FPS in most situations, and the game will look great even in dialogs.

As well as when you move around:

You will enjoy the fight with the Axons even more.

So that’s it. I’ve been using these settings for a long time on the Deck, and it’s a good balance between being playable and looking as good as it can.

Enjoy!