Laughless Saint Split Screen on PC

Split screen is officially supported

Unusually for a small-team PC RPG, this is not a mod or a workaround. Steam lists both of these categories for the game:

  • Shared/Split Screen Co-op
  • Shared/Split Screen

Alongside Remote Play Together, which lets a friend join your local session over the internet without owning the game.

The controller caveat

The one thing to check before planning a couch session: Steam lists Partial Controller Support, not full.

For split-screen play that matters, because a second player on the same machine will normally be on a pad. “Partial” is Valve’s flag for a game that works with a controller but expects keyboard or mouse for some parts — menus and text entry are the usual gaps.

NerveLabs has been actively working on the controller experience during early access:

DateChangeUpdate
20 AugControllers given rolling, bound to right buttonUpdate 6
20 AugController quantity selection greatly improvedUpdate 6

Quantity selection is exactly the kind of menu interaction that “partial” tends to mean, and it was explicitly improved. Expect the pad experience to keep changing during early access.

Patches aimed at small screens

Split screen halves your usable screen area, which makes UI density a real problem. Two changes address it directly:

  • Update 7 improved UI snappiness and replaced certain aspects with symbols for smaller screens
  • Hotfix 5 added hit markers with a beta version specifically for split screen, tracked separately from single-player and networked multiplayer

The fact that hit markers needed a separate split-screen implementation tells you the mode is genuinely a distinct code path rather than an afterthought — and that it is beta-quality by the developer’s own labelling.

Performance for two players on one machine

Running two viewports doubles the rendering cost, and this is an early access build with known performance work in progress. Two settings from the patch notes are directly relevant if split screen runs poorly:

  • Update 7 added the ability to turn off shadows for significantly improved performance
  • Update 7 added a saturation slider
  • Hotfix 5 and Hotfix 4 both included performance and VRAM fixes, including a leak that caused ugly textures

There is also a hardware caveat worth flagging: the developers added a popup warning if Nvidia drivers are below version 600, stating that older drivers are the source of most crashes, and separately fixed laptops incorrectly selecting the integrated GPU instead of the dedicated one. If you are setting up on a laptop for couch co-op, check both.

Minimum specs are a GTX 970 or Radeon R9 290 equivalent with 8 GB RAM — see system requirements. Those are minimums for one viewport.

For how saves, hosting and shared consequences work once you are in a session, see co-op and multiplayer.

Sources

  • Steam store page for app 3849000 for category list and controller support level.
  • NerveLabs official announcements, Hotfix 4 / Hotfix 5 / Update 6 / Update 7, 18–21 Aug 2026.
Was this guide helpful?