Does Nightmare Kart run on Steam Deck?

Nightmare Kart is full of hellish creatures but plays heavenly on the Steam Deck. Here’s everything we know about playing the kart racer on the go.

Nightmare Kart may not be the version of Bloodborne everyone wants to see on PC platforms. Soulslike fans have been waiting for a PC version of the 2015 PlayStation 4 game for what feels like an eternity. However, with no PC announcement in sight, Nightmare Kart is the next best thing.

Beginning as a fan-made Bloodborne demake, Nightmare Kart features all the stylings of the FromSoftware game and transforms it into a polished kart racer.

Those eager to fill the Bloodborne-shaped hole in their lives on Steam Deck don’t have to look far, as Nightmare Kart makes for a hellishly good time on the go.

Can you play Nightmare Kart on Steam Deck?

You can play Nightmare Kart on the Steam Deck, but Valve hasn’t yet put the game through its official verification testing process.

With Nightmare Kart releasing for free on Steam on June 5, that’s unsurprising. Plenty of games take a while to go through Valve’s often-questionable verification process, even weeks after launch.

LWMedia/Valve

However, despite having no ‘playable’ or ‘fully verified’ status, Nightmare Kart plays perfectly on the go.

With a game so heavily inspired by not just Bloodborne, but the graphical stylings of the original PlayStation, it makes sense. Unlike graphically intensive AAA games like Baldur’s Gate 3, Nightmare Kart doesn’t ask for much from your Steam Deck.

The game’s system requirements only ask for a “64-bit processor and operating system” to function, which the Stem Deck is more than capable of providing.

At default, the kart racer’s in-game graphics settings will have the FPS capped at 30, which is more than ideal for the aesthetically retro experience. From our time racing through the campaign, everything ran incredibly smoothly, with the Steam Deck running at a stable 30 FPS just as described.

If preferred, you can set the FPS cap in-game to 120 FPS or uncapped entirely. However, by default, the game runs even better than most kart racers of the original PlayStation hardware.

With Valve’s emphasis on verified games having to run on the Steam Deck with the default graphical settings, likely, it won’t be long until Nightmare Kart is fully verified for the handheld.

Nightmare Kart only asks for a minuscule 300 MB of install space for your Steam Deck. However, picking up one of the best microSD cards for the Steam Deck will still help ensure you have plenty of storage space for Nightmare Kart and any Steam Deck game you want to play.

Especially if you haven’t yet picked up the 1TB Steam Deck OLED or upgraded the SSD.