Harvestella
Cloud Saves
Proton GE 7-43
No Changes Needed!
Harvestella is a life-simulation RPG where, as the protagonist, you wake up in Nemea town during the season of death known as Quietus. Now that it has passed, you will lead a life of self-sufficiency by growing crops, cooking, and crafting to get by. All of this will help you enhance your skills in real-time battles where switching jobs during combat is key to overcoming them. Will you be able to overcome threats that arise and figure out the truth behind this world's creation?
Harvestella is another JRPG from Square Enix that focuses more on living a normal life as a farmer rather than fighting. While the farming and life aspects do exist and can help, this game is first and foremost an action RPG. I find it to be quite enjoyable even though the combat system is less detailed than other real-time systems found in other games. But will this be a game you can enjoy on the Steam Deck?
Harvestella: Performance
I can happily say the answer is yes! Harvestella is able to run out of the box at 60 FPS and it felt incredible. Playing this in my hands with the Deck's gamepad felt like a perfect fit. I did notice a couple spots where battery would drain more, but these were far and few (mostly in town). To mitigate this, I set a TDP of 9. This did drop frames to 58-59 in some areas, but I wouldn't have been able to tell if I didn't see the framerate bar.
I did notice that setting the framerate cap/refresh rate down to 50 also helped save even more battery and keep the game feeling buttery smooth. Bringing it down saved about 3W, which added about 30 min to an hour of overall battery life while bringing temps down by 4c-5c. For a minor change like this to help and still keep the game feeling smooth is definitely recommended.
There are some pre-rendered cutscenes that don't run correctly, so using Proton GE 7-43 (our guide to Proton GE) fixed that. Otherwise, I experienced no issues at all!
Lack of Shadows
It also appears that some objects in Harvestella don't produce shadows, which makes looking at certain scenes feel off. The biggest one for me is the farm in the beginning. The rocks don't have any shadows and because of that, feel like they don't belong and were just models placed in the scene. It isn't the end of the world, but it is definitely noticeable.
Harvestella is another example of Square Enix absolutely crushing it with Steam Deck support. The game is a good time, but what makes it even better is the near-perfect performance on the Deck. Since the only thing that needs to change is Proton GE, this game gets a perfect 5 star rating, but doesn't quite hit Best on Deck. Luckily, Harvestella is still a great game to play on the Deck, but due to needing Proton GE, which doesn't come pre-installed on the device, we can't give it our coveted badge.
Harvestella is a life-sim JRPG with real-time combat. And this is one you can enjoy fully and completely on the Steam Deck.