Darkest Dungeon 2 by developer Red Hook Studios is the sequel to the widely enjoyed Darkest Dungeon which featured roguelike systems and turn-based combat. Darkest Dungeon 2 attempts to build on the original game by adding some interesting new ideas to the formula while retaining what made the original so good. If you’ve played the first game, you’ll know that its character management, turn based combat, and exploration would make it an ideal game to be played portably. It’s on Steam, but is it something you can run on the Steam Deck?
Can Darkest Dungeon be Played on the Steam Deck?
When you look at Darkest Dungeon 2 on the Steam store, you’ll notice a few things that indicate the state the game is in. While it technically just came out of Early Access, the fact it doesn’t yet have controller support isn’t great when they’re indicating it’s a complete game. Controller support is slated to come later, which poses a problem for playing this on a Steam Deck where you rely on controller style gameplay most of the time. It’s also currently not officially supported on Steam Deck.
You can still download Darkest Dungeon 2 on Steam Deck and it runs ok, but the controls need a lot of tweaking as you have to essentially map keyboard and mouse controls across the various buttons available on the Steam Deck. It’s playable but clunky in this manner and certainly not an optimal or enjoyable experience, even if the game itself does run well on the Steam Deck.
Another big issue is that if you’re playing it on the Steam Deck, it currently doesn’t have cloud save available, which is a real pain if you were hoping to play it on both your PC and your Steam Deck as your save won’t be available between the two platforms. It’s another quite surprising thing Darkest Dungeon 2 is lacking upon its release. There seem to be promises of it being added in later but it still doesn’t feel like that should be something they’re patching in after the game is released.
While you can play Darkest Dungeon 2 on the Steam Deck, in its current state I’d say you’re better off waiting until they roll out some of these promised updates to add in controller support and cloud saves. These updates will make things much easier and more enjoyable overall and at that point it will probably become a fully supported title for the Steam Deck.
