Cruft runs well on the Steam Deck, and if you are comfortable using its joystick or trackpad to move the cursor, it’s a great way to play. The simple graphics are a breeze for its hardware and the no-pressure gameplay is perfect for dropping in and out of.
Cruft’s input system was not conceived with controllers in mind. It’s a very mouse-driven game, so there isn’t an alternative to doing most things through the mouse cursor. Thanks to Steam’s Input Translation feature, you can use the joystick or trackpad alongside the L/R buttons to do everything you would do with a mouse. We also made sure that you can rebind your controls in-game from the escape menu, in case a specific button mapping isn’t working for you. The controller layout that seems to work the best for Cruft is “Keyboard (WASD) and Mouse”. You shouldn’t need to select this layout, it is the default.
There are some limitations related to our partial controller support that matter to the Steam Deck and deserve to be explained:
The combination of our version of Unity and UI Toolkit has a bit of a blind spot around virtual mouse support, which prevents us from letting you rebind ANY button to the primary or secondary action. Those actions have to be linked to the buttons that are being translated into the left or right mouse buttons.
Because we are relying on Steam’s Input Translation, we cannot show the proper button glyphs in the tutorial or other menus.
Let us know if you run into other problems Crufting on the Deck!