Is The Thaumaturge playable on Steam Deck?

The Thaumaturge is 11 Bit Studio’s morally ambiguous story-driven RPG. Isometric RPGs are great on handhelds, so I have good news about The Thaumaturge with some additional caveats.

Yes, The Thaumaturge can be played on Steam Deck. But here’s the issue: It’s locked at the lowest settings. It doesn’t let you change graphical settings when playing on the device.

How to change graphical settings in The Thaumaturge on Steam Deck

There’s a way around those limitations if you want to tweak things more to their liking. To get to the settings, you’ll need to open the game’s preferences and add this command under launch options: SteamDeck=0 %command%. This will fool the game into thinking it’s not running on a Steam Deck, giving you the full graphical options.

Now, to note, The Thaumaturge is a pretty demanding game in terms of hardware, so you’re probably going to want to leave it at low. However, players have noticed that, by default, the game is using an upscaler that isn’t ideal. According to this Reddit thread, testing shows that XeSS is probably the best compromise, though FSR gets the best performance.

As I mentioned, The Thaumaturge is a demanding game in terms of hardware. According to a user in that same Reddit thread, with these settings it runs at about 30 FPS, but with dips when things get crowded.

So, to reiterate, The Thaumaturge is playable on Steam Deck, however you might want to tweak the settings a smidge.