About
Friday Night Funkin is a free, open-source rhythm game by ninjamuffin99 / The Funkin Crew (2020) inspired by Dance Dance Revolution and PaRappa the Rapper, featuring Boyfriend battling a cast of bizarre characters in rap battles. The best Steam Deck path is Psych Engine — a community fork by ShadowMario that officially supports Linux (since 1.0.1), offering improved performance and mod support over the base Kade/vanilla builds. Grab a prebuilt Steam Deck/Linux build from GameBanana (the former Flathub Flatpak was archived as end-of-life on 2026-01-01), extract it, and mark the PsychEngine executable runnable, then add it to Steam as a non-Steam game.
Identity
Launch
- Binary
- PsychEngine
- Needs files
- none beyond the binary
Runtime
- Runs as
- Native Linux
- Proton
- not needed
The one thing to know
- The old Psych Engine Flatpak (io.github.shadowmario.fnf-psychengine) was archived as end-of-life on 2026-01-01 and is no longer on Flathub — do NOT rely on flatpak run.
- Current path: download a prebuilt Steam Deck / Linux Psych Engine build from GameBanana (see guide links), extract it, chmod +x the PsychEngine executable, then add that file to Steam as a non-Steam game. The official ShadowMario GitHub releases ship source you compile yourself, so they are not a one-click option for most Deck users.
- The official base game remains free and open-source at maddymakesgamesinc.itch.io/fnf — Psych Engine is a separate fan fork, not the official commercial release.
- Default keyboard controls map to face buttons via Steam Input; verify keybinds in Options → Controls before first run. There is no native gamepad menu in older builds, so a Steam Input controller layout is the reliable way to drive menus on the Deck.
- Mods (songs, weeks, characters) go in the build's own mods/ folder next to the executable; the old per-app Flatpak data path (~/.var/app/...) no longer applies.
Community guides
Write-ups and threads from people who got this (or a similar) game running. deckport links to them — it doesn't reproduce them.
Get the artwork
deckport never hosts game images. Open this game on SteamGridDB, pick
the cover / hero / logo / icon you like, and drop them into the
game folder under .deckport-art/ before you push it to the
Deck. The importer files them under the right names automatically.
Run it on your Deck
Two files: the one-time importer (deckport.py) in your
Deck's home folder, and this game's install helper. Copy the game
into ~/Games and run the helper with Steam closed — it
writes the recipe (binary, launch options)
and registers the shortcut with artwork.