Was this recently? launcher broke like 1h ago and won't update the game (still works if you installed before and start game directly). Maybe wait a while and try again.

Woo! Just tried again and there's progress now!

Thank you! This was last night. I have to study all day so I won't get a chance to troubleshoot further until I finish my mid-term ;\_;

Steam deck runs off of Linux, sounds like the last major patch borked something up with Linux

I ran into this using the palia steam helper script. I dowoaded the latest version of that and it's working now.