Many fans are rightfully asking: Can you play Returnal on PC? Will it support Steam Deck? With the trend of PlayStation console exclusives making the leap to the desktop, these are fair questions. Housemarque has yet to officially announce whether its sci-fi shooter will be brought to PC, but looking at the Steam database, it looks like an announcement will be coming soon. If anything, it’s a poorly kept secret at this point.
Will Returnal release on PC?
It’s very likely that Returnal will be coming to PC. An entry on SteamDB codenamed “Oregon” was found in May (as reported by our brother site PlayStationLifestyle), and scouring through the localization strings through the changelist, it’s clear through references to Atropos and Tower of Sisyphus that this is really a PC port of the game.
Better yet, pouring through the latest history on the entry page, a change on July 25 notes that Steam Deck support will also be enabled. A variable called “steamdecktouchscreen” was updated along with “steamconfigurator3rdpartynative.” A new addition of “steamcontrollertemplateindex” was also made, suggesting that this Returnal PC port will likely have Steam Controller support too.
Since May, the database entry has been updated on a frequent, almost weekly basis. Before that, there have been plenty of depot and app changes throughout this month. From July 15 until now, there has been at least one batch of updates every day. The frequency of these changes suggests that Housemarque is getting close to revealing the PC release for the game.
That said, there is a slim chance that this is all a farce. It could be some person trying to fool all of us by naming things with Returnal-related words, but it doesn’t look like it.
In other news, Fortnite Epic Summer Slam will bring John Cena to the item shop later this week, and MultiVersus is currently more popular than every other fighting game on Steam.
