Traditional Roguelikes for the Steam Deck - ScottBurger/going_rogue_podcast GitHub Wiki

I've tested a lot of traditional roguelikes on my steam deck for the podcast. Some have reasonably good support out of the box, and others you can get going very quickly by just using the "WASD Keyboard + Mouse" option and customizing from there. Some games have very good community gamepad layouts already designed as well.

The goal here is to list traditional roguelike games that play well on the Steam Deck specifically in gaming mode without the need for any extra peripherals or keyboards hooked up.

Starter Layout

Trad rogues use a LOT of keyboard input by default. So to bridge the gap to the Steam Deck form factor, I made a layout that maps A-M and N-Z to the left touch pad. You switch between them with the R4 button. This should unblock a huge majority of classic input style games without the need to bring up the virtual keyboard every 10 seconds. Example for Cogmind here: steam://controllerconfig/722730/3511440881

Best In Class Trad RLs on the Steam Deck

  • 100 Rogues - Works great via proton experimental.

  • Alchemist’s Alcove

  • Armoured Commander II

  • Babel of Ystilia

  • Caves of Qud - Best in class gamepad support for a traditional roguelike. Just a phenomenal amount of effort and polish makes this better to play with a gamepad than K+M in my opinion.

  • DA_RL

  • Deadzoned: A Credits Bounty

  • Invisible, Inc.

  • Golden Krone Hotel

  • House of Necrosis

  • Jupiter Hell

  • Jupiter Hell Classic

  • Lost In Prayer

  • Moonring

  • Monster Lily

  • Rogue-FP - Native controller support, if a little janky.

  • Quasimorph

  • Shiren the Wanderer: The Mystery of Serpentcoil Island

  • Tangledeep

  • Terminus: Zombie Survivors

  • UFO 50: Bug Hunter

  • WazHack

WASD with Mouse Trackpad

  • 868-Hack

  • 868-Back

  • Ancient Domains of Mystery

  • Approaching Infinity

  • Cinco Paus

  • Desktop Dungeons / Rewind

  • Dungeonmans

  • Dungeons of Dredmor

  • Dwarf Fortress - I'm amazed this works even remotely. The aspect of a zoom in/out button is 100% needed, but once those are mapped to your favorite controls (I used L4, R4) it's great.

  • HyperRogue

  • Mainframe Defenders

  • One Way Heroics - use the community layout by “SkyLordGuy”

  • Path of Achra

  • Rift Wizard - Works great once you set it to boot into windowed mode and requires the use of proton experimental.

  • Rogue Fable III

  • Shattered Pixel Dungeon - Works very well via the touchscreen interface directly.

  • Tales of Maj'Eyal - Recommended to use "Ultimate Vexation's Bindings" by SHIELDBRO in the community layouts.

  • Terra Randoma

  • Warsim: The Realm of Aslona - (Not technically a trad RL, but including anyway) Download the community input mapping for the 0-9 number wheel on the trackpad and you're golden. I think I actually prefer playing Warsim on the Deck as opposed to my pc.

Emulator-based

( Most of these run really well on the steam deck via Retroarch )

  • AGB Rogue - Gameboy ROM can be found here

  • AGB Hack - Gameboy ROM can be found here

  • Azure Dreams - Works well on the DuckStation emulator. Quite a nice form factor for this game, actually.

  • Cave Noire - Fun game for a Gameboy emulator

  • Dragon Crystal - Sega-based, very similar to Fatal Labyrinth

  • Fatal Labyrinth - Needs a Sega Genesis emulator, but otherwise controls well

  • Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer - Works great with the MelonDS emulator and some settings to get the top screen to be smaller. [MelonDS] Config -> screen layout: horizontal, screen sizing: auto. [In-game] Dungeon Settings -> Top Screen: Overall map, Touch Screen: Map off. Same for Pokemon Mystery Dungeon.

  • NDSLarn - NDS rom can be found here

  • NDSMoria - NDS rom can be found here

  • Pokemon Mystery Dungeon - See Shiren above for similar setup on MelonDS.

  • Powder - Need a gameboy emulator to run it, but the ROM is here

Needs Some Effort

These are games not designed for gamepad use, but by using the grogpod A-Z wheel controller profile, are surprisingly playable on the steam deck

  • Brogue - Download .exe, run with proton experimental.

  • Cogmind

  • Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup - DCSS does have a native Linux port, but it’s easier to just download the windows binary, add as a non-Steam game and run via proton experimental.

  • Sword of the Stars: The Pit - This one took a lot of tooling to get working, but when it finally did, it ran with 0 issue.

  • Unreal World - Load with Proton Experimental. Use "Wehrwolf's URW Binding" by GhostLord in the community layouts.

  • Zorbus - This technically had gamepad support but enabling it for the steam deck is a chore. It’s buried in the settings menu as a toggle, but even then you have to disable steam overlay to get it working properly. Likely better with a controller profile mapped to the keyboard commands.