When the game was revealed way back at E3 in 2021, the art style immediately stood out to me. I like cyberpunk-style settings and design, and the combination of 2D side-scrolling pixel art with modern-looking, artistic lighting caught my eye. And it’s not all 2D. Elements in the background, although layered, appear very three-dimensional. It’s kinda like the Dragon Quest HD-2D Remakes, only as a side-scroller.

When I decided to test the game, I didn’t quite know what to expect on the performance side, so I stuck with my 1440p monitor, as I usually do for all my performance analysis blog posts. Exceptions exist, of course, and this could actually have been one. Performance is so good that running at native 4K is easily doable. But in doing so, I wouldn’t have found any odd technical issues that make this post an analysis rather than just a report of my impressions.

Spoiler: you don’t want to play at insanely high framerates.

Welcome to another Linux performance analysis with a bit of personal impressions sprinkled on top.

Replaced is about an AI being transferred into a person, but we do things the human way here. So, disengage your analytical brain, give the video game portion all the performance, and enjoy some action gameplay plus a bit of rambling.

I also have a German version of this video.

Hardware & Software

I’m showing you gameplay on CachyOS and Windows 11. Both systems are powered by an AMD Ryzen 7800X3D, paired with 32 GB of RAM and an RX 9070 XT graphics card.

CachyOS ran on Kernel 6.19.0, Mesa 25.3.5, and Cachy-Proton from early February of 2026. Windows 11 was on version 25H2 with updates as of the 22nd of February 2026. AMD’s GPU driver was version 26.1.1

With that out of the way, let’s jump into the game and briefly look at the launch procedure and main menu.

Game Launch & Main Menu

Launching the game via Steam was unremarkable; it just worked.

The same can be said about the main menu, at least the unremarkable part. You won’t find any graphics presets or individual visual settings. The only things you can adjust are the resolution, whether to enable or disable Vsync, and a framerate limit. That’s all you get for graphics, and it made my task easier 😅. By the way, in-game framerate caps do not work when Vsync is enabled.

What the devs did include was a setting for the subtitle size. That’s great when you’re playing on a TV or your eyesight starts to fail you.

If you like to go wild with settings, adjusting the keyboard bindings is the only way to indulge your inner customizer. It’ll be a brief amount of joy, though. Replaced’s game mechanics appear to be limited in scope and do not require a lot of keys and buttons to press.

Speaking of buttons: You cannot remap the controller. Why do developers still not include controller remapping? But it also doesn’t really matter, because the controller isn’t even detected in the main menu. Neither on Linux nor on Windows. However, it works in-game, and it’ll show up in the in-game menu. As I said, there isn’t much to remap anyway, but I have muscle memory from sooooo many games for a few specific functions, and Replaced violates almost all of them.

Performance

As you already saw in the intro, Replaced runs at hundreds of FPS at native 1440p. This game might actually fall into the 60 FPS at 4K category on Valve’s Steam Machine 😉. Leaving the snark aside, this kind of performance is great news. In all honesty, Replaced might be perfect for the Steam Deck or any other handheld.

Since the demo was very short and included a few scripted scenes, I can show you Windows and Linux footage side by side for comparison. Given the performance, the comparison is mostly just for the fun of it. In the end, you don’t want to play at over 300 FPS anyway, as I’ll get to in a moment. For now, let’s just enjoy the art and the action for a bit.

As was already obvious from the limited number of key-binding options, the gameplay is not very complicated. Your main character has a primary attack, which is melee, and a secondary attack, which is a powerful gun. There doesn’t seem to be a traditional ammunition mechanic, and instead, you recharge shots by engaging in hand-to-hand combat. Replaced isn’t a shooter. It’s a brawler with a counter mechanic similar to the Batman Arkham games.

I also found a very brief section devoted to some Lara Croft-style acrobatic traversal that you would normally find in a side-scroller game. It was quite basic, though, and the biggest challenge was finding out about this type of movement in the first place, despite the obvious yellow markings.

Technical Issues

Let’s get to the part where I finally tell you about the technical issues that I found.

Maybe you already noticed it in the footage, although it’s harder to see in the recording than it was on a monitor when playing the game. Take a close look at how the character looks in motion. It’s very jittery. The main character doesn’t look sharp and clearly defined, as if it’s doubled or tripled. The best comparison I can come up with is for old people like me, who remember what the trailing mouse pointer option in Windows looked like back in the day.

After a bit of testing, I found out that Replaced has some form of animation issues at higher framerates. I mainly noticed the effect on the main character when moving through the environment, but it might also affect enemies. Since I’ve never seen enemies running across the screen, only in slower combat scenarios, I cannot confirm that thesis.

So, let me slow it down and go through the framerate settings. I ran several tests to confirm this. Initially, my monitor was set to 144 Hz for gaming, but I also confirmed the behavior at 120 Hz. I wanted to ensure the best match when limiting the framerate to a multiple of 60. Please note that some uneven frame-to-frame animation comes from recording at 60 FPS, but not playing at or syncing to said 60 FPS.

Let’s start from the worst experience and work up to the best.

Unlimited Performance

Not imposing an upper limit on the framerate is like letting an untrained dog loose in a park full of people. Nothing good can come of it.

The overall character motion isn’t smooth at all, but notice what happens when the framerate goes above 300 FPS. As I already mentioned, it’s a lot more noticeable when you’re seeing it live, playing the game, but I think you can still make out the effect in my recordings.

120 / 144 / 240 Hz

All steps from 240 Hz down to 120 Hz continue to exhibit hitching animations. The higher the framerate, the worse it is. Not even vsynced 120 FPS are immune to this problem, which makes absolutely no sense. One would think that enabling Vsync between the GPU and the monitor should eliminate any unevenness. But it appears that this is a deeper issue, probably tied to the decimated animation style, which makes the character’s movement appear at a lower framerate than the backgrounds do.

60 / 100 FPS

When we reach 100 FPS or one step below that, which is 60 FPS, the experience is essentially flawless. The character animates without any hitches or sudden jumps, and one of these two options would be my go-to setting. Ideally, set your monitor’s refresh rate accordingly (whatever is supported), turn off the in-game framerate limiter, and enable Vsync. This should give you the best visual experience.

30 FPS

Lastly, let’s also look at 30 FPS for that cinematic flair. While I wouldn’t consider it the best way to play Replaced, it’s undoubtedly a cohesive way to do it, given the characters’ lo-fi animation style. At this level of performance, the scrolling backgrounds and the characters are in sync, which does have a certain charm.

But still, more FPS = better, so this is a no-go.

Famous Last Words

Obviously, I cannot say whether the late-game progression unlocks combos or if the gameplay remains as one-dimensional as in the demo. I had a lot of fun, and I think it’s perfect if you prefer more straightforward titles, especially if you cannot devote hours on end to a game each and every day. My only fear is that the game runs for much longer than, say, 10 to 12 hours, and the gameplay doesn’t evolve over time. That will not go over well with critics, and gamers might also grow bored toward the end.

I hope the full game is as fun as the demo, and that the story is so engaging it pushes players forward, potentially encouraging them to look beyond the simple gameplay. In times when computers are hideously expensive, great-running games that are also great overall are exactly what we need.

But I can’t deny that I’m a bit worried. The game has been in development for five years, and I wonder what all that time was spent on. I hope it’s the story, writing, and level design, because the gameplay doesn’t seem to be it, judging by the available key bindings. And with that downer of a statement, I’ll end the post.