🍿 PokeRogue on Steam Deck for offline play

Snacks (🍿) are my collection of recipes for solving problems. Often recorded (and cleaned up) from actual discussions where I'm involved in helping others with technical problems. Not all solutions are mine but I started collecting them in one place because you never know when you need one.

PokeRogue is a fun browser-based Pokemon fan-game rogue-lite.

The good news is, it can be played in offline mode with Steam Deck. These instructions are based on the instructions of Reddit users r/Naothe and u/Academic-Ad5874. Big thanks to them!

GitHub user Admiral-Billy has a repository for app wrappers to the browser game for different platforms. To play on Steam Deck, download the PokeRogue-Linux.zip from the latest release and unzip it into your Steam Deck (either in Desktop Mode or on another computer and uploading via scp or rsync).

Then in Steam Deck, head to desktop mode, navigate to the folder and run the pokerogue executable. Once the game loads, go to the File menu and choose Download latest game files (for offline). It'll take a moment to download all. I then went to Settings menu and chose Offline mode and Auto-hide this menu.

After that, I closed the app and opened Steam. Then, add the executable as a non-Steam game. Once added, head over to that game's properties and add --no-sandbox to the Launch options.

Optionally, this is a great moment to upload custom art to make it look good in Steam Deck's Gaming mode. There are few options in SteamGridDB to choose from.

Next, start Steam into Gaming mode and start the game. Then change controller settings:

• Right touchpad -> Mouse
• Right touchpad click -> Left click
• R4 -> Alt (to show/hide menu)
• Right Bumper -> Shift (I like it for showing status and seeing stuff like what TMs do)

Also, when using the Utilities (like type chart, etc), it will open in a new window and can be closed through Steam main menu. Took me a moment to find that out.