Astral Chain PC recompilation adds Linux, Steam Deck, upscalers and ultrawide

The native PC recompilation of PlatinumGames' Switch action game Astral Chain has grown a lot since version 1.0: it now runs on Linux and Steam Deck, supports DLSS, FSR 3 and XeSS, ultrawide screens and HDR, and its author calls it complete.

Less than two weeks after its first public build, the Astral Chain Recomp project has reached what its author, captainj-sparrow, describes as a final state. The static recompilation turns the Nintendo Switch code of Astral Chain into a native x86-64 program with a Vulkan renderer, and according to the developer the whole game can be played from the opening to the end credits with no known gameplay or visual problems. The latest build at the time of writing is version 1.15.0, released on November 13.

Astral Chain came out in 2019 as a Switch exclusive. It was developed by PlatinumGames and published by Nintendo, and puts the player in charge of a police officer fighting alongside a chained creature called a Legion.

What changed since 1.0

The updates after the 1.0 release were mostly about image quality and smoothness. The port now offers three temporal upscalers, NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR 3 and Intel XeSS, with the author putting particular work into recovering motion data the original game never exposed, to avoid ghosting. Ultrawide aspect ratios from 16:10 up to 48:9 are supported with the HUD kept in its proper place, cutscenes run at 60 fps, and there is HDR output, a field of view slider and a choice of Xbox or PlayStation button prompts. Texture processing was improved, a no-HUD mode was added for screenshots, audio desync was fixed, and the most recent builds add ambient occlusion and sun shadows. A lot of effort also went into removing stutters, with shaders prepared during installation rather than while playing.

Linux and Steam Deck

Besides Windows, the project now ships a Linux build and a dedicated Steam Deck profile. Players report a stable 30 fps on the Deck, and the author would like to offer a 40 fps option there. Frame generation is deliberately not the plan, since the combat depends on precise timing for moves like perfect dodges.

What you need

No game data is included. The installer asks for your own copy of the game dumped from your own Switch, the base version 1.0.0 together with the 1.0.1 update, and builds the executable on your machine. On Windows the README asks for Windows 10 or 11, a CPU with SSE4.2 and a graphics card with Vulkan 1.3. The work builds on the TotK Recomp pipeline, and the author thanks contributor capibawa for help with performance, timing, visuals, HDR and upscaling.

To try it, follow the instructions on the project's GitHub page with your own copy of the game.