Can I play Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 on gaming handhelds?
Yes, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is playable on gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck, ASUS ROG Ally, and Lenovo Legion Go. For the best experience, though, you’ll need to make a few tweaks to the settings.
Clair Obscur isn’t supported on Steam Deck, but …
Though some of the excitement surrounding its launch was stolen by Bethesda’s surprise shadow drop of Oblivion Remastered earlier this week, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — a brand new turn-based fantasy RPG, and the first game from the recently formed studio Sandfall Interactive — has quickly started making waves as one of 2025’s best and most interesting titles. Set in a dark Belle Époque-inspired world in which a mysterious Paintress is slowly erasing humanity from existence year by year, it tasks players with embarking on a long and perilous journey to reach her Monolith and put a stop to her “gommages” once and for all.
Clair Obscur stands as one of this year’s best-reviewed games across Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, and PS5, with critics singing praise for its unique blend of turn-based strategy and real-time action mechanics, expertly written story, and immaculate presentation thanks to gorgeous visuals and a fantastic musical score. I also reviewed it myself, giving it a score of 4.5/5 stars and writing that “Sandfall Interactive’s debut RPG perfectly fuses the deep strategy of turn-based combat with the satisfying challenge and mastery of real-time action games, resulting in a wholly unique experience that sets itself apart.”
Unsurprisingly, the game’s status as a critically acclaimed must-play — along with the fact that it’s available to play on the popular Xbox Game Pass subscription service — has many players worldwide interested in the title. And of those, many are also hoping they’ll be able to play the RPG on gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck. These smaller and more affordable alternatives to full gaming PCs have rapidly become fan-favorite devices, but they don’t always run new games well.
In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s case, Sandfall’s debut game is officially labelled as Unsupported on the Steam Deck. However, lots of testing by the community at launch has confirmed that you can get the game running quite well on the handheld with a few settings tweaks. Check out the section below for the best settings to use on both Steam Deck as well as more performant Windows handhelds like the ASUS ROG Ally.
… use the best settings for Clair Obscur on gaming handhelds and it will play well
Out of the box, many graphics-related settings are hidden when playing Clair Obscur on the Steam Deck. You can work around this if you want to (more on that in a second), but the default configuration of the game runs more stable. The two settings you can change that meaningfully impact performance are your upscaling method (TSR or XeSS) and your resolution scale; for a clean and smooth experience, it’s recommended to play with TSR and the Medium (75%) resolution scale preset and to lock your framerate to 30 on Steam Deck.
To unlock more settings to mess with, you can add “SteamDeck=0 %command%” (without quotes) to Clair Obscur’s launch options in Steam. This will automatically improve visuals a bit — some effects appear to be disabled on Steam Deck by default — and give you more sliders to tweak, but overall, you’ll be looking at dips below the 30 FPS mark as a result. Whether or not you should unlock these settings is entirely dependent on whether or not you’re okay with that.
As for more powerful handhelds like the ASUS ROG Ally, ROG Ally X, or Lenovo Legion Go, they don’t have the same restricted settings that the Steam Deck does and can run the game considerably better. Once again, TSR is recommended for these handhelds, as are Medium graphics settings for a great balance of quality and performance. As for your resolution, it’s recommended to go with 720p and a resolution scale of anywhere between 50 and 75% to get 50-70 FPS (the explorable world map hovers around the performance floor, as it’s more demanding).
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is out now on Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC (Steam, Epic Games, Xbox app), and PS5 for $49.99. You also have the option of playing it on Xbox or PC through Xbox Game Pass, and can get it on sale for just $34.79 at CDKeys. It’s one of the best Xbox games and best PC games of the year, and a must-play for turn-based RPG fans.
