The Last of Us is officially listed as unsupported on the Steam Deck (opens in new tab) store page, and Naughty Dog says it will have to wait for verification until the PC version is patched.

Prior to its release, it appeared that The Last of Us Part 1 would work, or at least be partially supported, on Steam Deck. Neil Druckmann, the game's lead developer (opens in new tab), confirmed that it would work on Steam Deck, and Valve used shots of the game to promote it for handheld gaming devices (opens in new tab). But that turned out to be a pipe dream as the game's performance on PCs was revealed. The Last of Us is currently not porting well to PC (opens in new tab), and Naughty Dog has been working belatedly for the past week to patch the game to make it playable.

A new hotfix aimed at addressing some of these performance concerns arrived later today, April 4, and a larger patch is promised for release on Friday, April 7.

Naughty Dog has also confirmed that Steam Deck certification will have to wait until these and subsequent fixes are released in order to improve the game's overall PC performance.

The Last of Us Part 1 is playable on Steam Deck despite its official release. However, in order to get close to a playable frame rate, you will need to pull out all the performance-boosting tips, such as putting up with low quality settings, enabling FSR, and capping the frame rate. [But that's not my experience; enabling Wine-GE-Proton7-35 will start the game before it crashes with a critical error; enabling Wine-GE-Proton7-35 will start the game before it crashes with a critical error; enabling Wine-GE-Proton7-35 will start the game before it crashes with a critical error; enabling Wine-GE-Proton7-35 will start the game before it crashes with a critical error. I want to play more games with the deck anyway.

Sony has done well with PC ports before, with past exclusives like Death Stranding and God of War; Horizon Zero Dawn wasn't a great port, but it certainly wasn't a bad PC port either. Let's hope "The Last of Us Part 1" improves to this standard; it's still nice to see a PS-exclusive game get a PC release.