Gloomwood adds full controller support, becomes Steam Deck Verified

Gloomwood just crossed the line from a keyboard-and-mouse curiosity into something far more welcoming for controller players. The early access stealth immersive sim now has full native controller support and has been upgraded from Steam Deck Playable to Steam Deck Verified, which means Valve considers it ready to work great on Steam Deck right out of the box, without the manual tweaking Playable titles can still require.

The update, posted on Steam Community on April 15, 2026, brings more than just a badge. Tutorials now display proper controller glyphs, button rebinding is supported, and the interface has been adjusted so handheld and couch play feel built-in rather than improvised. The developers also added a new shop in the market plaza, but the controller overhaul is the main event. In their announcement, the team warned that everyone’s keybinds would be reset for the update, a blunt sign of how deep the input changes ran.

That matters because Gloomwood has long lived in a very specific lane. Built by New Blood Interactive and credited to Dillon Rogers, David Szymanski, Nate Berens, and Thomas Porta, the game has leaned into Thief-style stealth, Victorian gloom, and immersive sim systems that reward careful play. Steam says it entered Early Access on September 5, 2022, and that the final version is expected to include every district, weapon, item, enemy, and feature not yet in the Early Access build. Its Steam page lists 5,464 English-language reviews and an Overwhelmingly Positive rating, while SteamDB shows more than 7,000 total reviews.

The timing also tells its own story. SteamDB records Gloomwood’s all-time concurrent player peak at 1,939 on September 6, 2022, right as interest spiked around launch. More than two years later, the game still has enough momentum for a control-scheme overhaul to matter commercially, not just technically. A Steam Community discussion from November 2, 2024 shows the developers had already said official Deck verification would come once the controller scheme was finalized, so this badge is the payoff on a long-running promise rather than a quick platform checkbox.

For an immersive sim with a loyal PC following, that is no small shift. Gloomwood has moved from a game many people made work on Deck to one that now officially welcomes it, and that should make the Victorian city easier to enter for new players and less fussy for the people who have been sneaking through it since 2022.