High on Life is here and it is absolutely hilarious but what we're here for is how well this runs on Steam deck and what the best settings are overall.

If you are a fan of Rick and Morty you are gonna absolutely love this game if it's not your kind of humor then it may take you aback a little bit as it is absolutely brutal not just on the content front but also the references and some of the antics that you'll get up to as well.

In the early gameplay it does look like you can hold 50 FPS quite happily on medium settings however you do get some huge lag spikes and frame drops down into the 30s in some random areas and even in some of the talking sequences that you wouldn't think would be that much of a challenge. Unfortunately this does get a bit worse later on.

High settings capped at 30 FPS you would think would be a bit more stable, it does look absolutely gorgeous at high settings but it doesn't even hold those 30 frames per second especially a little bit later in game when you hit one of the alien worlds, then it barely holds 20 frames per second on high so high settings even capped at 30 is not going to be possible.

Even changing this to the medium settings doesn't get you a whole lot better on the alien world so before you get to this stage you will be able to play on medium locked 40 extremely happily but even on the Alien Planet capping at that 40 Hertz on medium settings it will bounce all over the place and it does hit 60 frames per second in some spots but this is such a wide range again when you get into some of the later areas it plummets back down into those 30s

If you want to cap it at 40 Hz on those medium settings it will give you a better experience overall but it still plummets under the 30 mark in some areas and it's not even in combat it's just as it's rendering in some of the world and you'll see a bit of popping with this as well.

The best settings overall for this is actually to put the graphics quality to low and then bring the texture quality and effects quality up to medium and leave it capped at that 40 Hertz with v-sync on.

Now you'll get a pretty flat-lined 40 FPS even with everything going absolutely crazy and although it does look a little bit fuzzy in some areas it's still more than enjoyable and having that stable frame rate and frame time is massively important in this game as it makes it feel a lot less janky and once you get used to the lower settings as long as you haven't looked at the high settings too much it does look absolutely gorgeous.

You do see occasional dips under that 40 every now and then but it's nowhere near as bad as on any of the other settings and it's more than playable and you'll see we do get those couple of spikes but you barely notice them.