How to play Pure on the Steam Deck

This guide will show you how to play Pure on your Steam Deck by creating and mounting a blank ISO to give the game the impression it’s running on a computer with an optical drive, allowing the game to run on your Steam Deck (and very well, I may add).

Pure on the Steam Deck

The lack of an optical drive is a barrier to getting Pure to run on modern systems, and that includes the Steam Deck. Thankfully, the way to circumvent this restriction is also fairly easily overcome on the Deck as well. This guide will show you how to create and mount a blank ISO to give the game the impression it’s running on a computer with an optical drive, allowing the game to run on your Steam Deck (and very well, I may add).


First, restart your Deck into desktop mode.

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Open “Discover” and type ISO into the search box in the upper left corner. There will be 2 programs/utilities we will be downloading from these search results: PowerISO and Mount Unmount ISO.

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After downloading both, open PowerISO. Go to “File” and “Save As…”

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Click on “Files of Type” and select “Standard ISO images”

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Give your ISO a name (unless you’re fine with the default name). Mine is #ISO#.iso so it stays near the top of the folder. I selected “deck” from the sidebar and saved the ISO in the Documents folder for easy access.

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Close PowerISO and open “Dolphin.” Navigate to your saved ISO in the Documents folder (easily accessible from the Places portion of the sidebar).

Right Click (L2) on the ISO you created and select “Mount/unmount iso image” then “Mount”

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If all went well, you’ll see your ISO mounted in the Devices portion of the sidebar, with a little disc icon next to it.

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Now you’re free to launch back into the Deck’s Gaming mode and play some Pure!

The ISO will stay mounted as long as the Deck isn’t rebooted. For relative convenience, you can add the “Dolphin” file manager to Steam to be able to mount that ISO without having to enter the desktop mode.

Funny enough, you can also just plug in a USB optical drive into your deck to launch the game that way, but this should prove more convenient overall.

The game runs great as well. I was able to lower the TDP to 4 and still get 60fps with consistent frame times and over 5 hours of playtime on High settings. I did disable Shadows as they seem a bit broken currently, but maybe you’ll feel differently about them.

Hope this helped!

[billyjoe]

How did you resolve glitches problem in menu and ui? Already tried several game iso’s and different Proton versions.

[J7]

Idk what tricks or proton ver you r using but on my steam deck this game has glitches in menu and ui, idk how to fix that

[ProducerSK]

All worked for me, but save game not working...every time i quit the game...i begin tutorial and settings are back to default

[sebastienlegus]

I still have black screen with non sound at launch,how do you change the resolution ?

[-λErrorλ-]

I ended up installing it with the original ISO through Lutris/Wine and used no-CD patch. Changed resolution to 1280x800 and it works great! The Special trick button isn't mapped by default.

[-λErrorλ-]

What compatibility are you using? It always boots to a black screen for me but I can hear the intro video and menu music/navigation effects.