The Tears of the Kingdom recomp shows how far playing Switch games can go, and I am optimistic after trying it on the Steam Deck.
November 1, 2026 3 min read
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Now, when I cover games on this website, I tend to be a little strict with some specific types. I tend to stay away from games that can still be purchased and played on current consoles. Because of that, I don’t cover many emulated or recompiled PS4 or Switch games, as I don’t want to encourage piracy. However, as the scene grows, I’ve become interested in how they run on the Deck, so I dipped in and decided to test it myself, starting with Tears of the Kingdom.
Before I discuss my experience, I want to reiterate that SteamDeckHQ does not support piracy in any form. We completely support using your own legally purchased copies of your games to be used however you want, whether it be emulation, recompilation, or native PC ports. In this article, I used my own dump of my legally purchased copy of the game. If you’re interested, I encourage you to purchase the game and dump it.
The project I used is called totk-pc-recomp, and it’s made by valentderah with the help of Claude AI. Despite the project using AI assistance, I decided to take a chance on it because of the contributors’ backgrounds. They seem to have their own developer background, and I’m under the impression that they know exactly what the AI was doing, and if it didn’t exist, they would be able to do it themselves (but they would need much more time).
Setting it up was relatively easy as well. Once I had all my files, I just launched the program, pointed it to the files it needed, and gave it a folder to output the recompiled game. It takes more time than I expected, but it’s good to go as soon as it finishes. Since the recomp has a Linux version, the recompiled game has a Linux executable that we can easily add to Steam. The Linux version is still very early and hasn’t been tested extensively, but it is available.
And for what it’s worth, it does run. In the early, contained areas, the game will hit 60 FPS at the default settings with 83% rendering scale and 1280×800 resolution. However, it drops pretty significantly once you get into the open world. It sticks around 30-40 FPS, with some drops below 30 when you fall through the sky. Even when lowering the rendering scale to 60%, it still sticks around 30-40 FPS. Lots of shadows also flicker on the ground, which can be quite distracting.
This is also with a brand new native Linux version that hasn’t been tested much, so the fact that it can hit 30 FPS consistently is impressive. With optimizations, it will only get better to play on the go.
I wouldn’t consider it playable or recommended on the Steam Deck yet, but it’s running significantly better than emulation, which is pretty incredible. I can definitely see a future where recompiled games like this are not only playable on the Deck, but also well optimized. It’s crazy how many of these recompilations keep coming out, and how much better some of them are than emulation. I can only see this getting better with time, as long as these developers continue to work on it and optimize.
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