Tactical Breach Wizards

Tactical Breach Wizards is the third game from Tom Francis, the indie developer who made Gunpoint in 2013 and Heat Signature in 2017. It is a turn-based tactics game with a single design hook that changes how the genre feels: you can rewind your turn as many times as you want until the outcome is right. No save scumming, no reloading the mission, no committed-and-regretted moves. The game just lets you take back any action until you press End Turn.

The honest catch worth knowing if you plan to play it on a Steam Deck and a desktop: Steam Cloud is listed as a supported feature on the store page, and in practice it does not sync. Multiple community reports confirm sync failures when you switch between machines. The workaround is a manual file copy, which works fine, but you should know about it before you load the game on a second device and assume your save will be waiting.

Game overview

You command a small squad of wizards (kevlar-wearing, gun-toting, modern-conspiracy wizards) through a story-driven campaign that unravels a corporate plot through a sequence of room-by-room tactical encounters. Each room is a puzzle with multiple solutions, and the rewindable-turn mechanic lets you experiment freely with combinations of teleports, magical pushes, and weapons fire until you find one that clears the room without losing a wizard.

The campaign runs about 14-15 hours through the core story, with 20-30 hours for a full playthrough including optional content, and 30-50 hours if you go for full completion. Steam Workshop adds an active community of custom levels and a level editor that has been live since launch. Players who like the campaign tend to stay for the Workshop content well past the credits.

There is no co-op and no multiplayer. Tactical Breach Wizards is a single-player game.

Where you can play it

PC, Steam only. No console ports, no plans for console ports.

The game is Steam Deck Verified (December 2024) with the official green checkmark from Valve, meaning gamepad input and on-screen UI both work correctly at the Deck’s resolution. Frame rate sits at the Deck’s 60 fps cap. Battery life on a Deck OLED is roughly 4-5 hours per charge for the kind of slow-paced tactics play this game encourages.

No native Mac or Linux build. Linux via Proton works well: that is the path the Steam Deck uses. Mac via CrossOver or Whisky works as a community workaround but is not officially supported.

No Switch, no Switch 2, no PlayStation, no Xbox. Suspicious Developments is a one-person studio and console ports are not on the roadmap.

Cross-saves and keeping your progress

This is the section that earns the honest editorial flag.

Steam Cloud is listed as a supported feature on the Steam store page. In practice it does not sync reliably between devices. The community-documented failure mode: you save on machine A, launch the game on machine B, and either get an “unable to sync with the Steam Cloud” error or a blank screen where your save should appear. Multiple players on the Steam forums and on Reddit have reported the same pattern across 2024-2026, and a recent game patch (a Unity security update) did not address it. As of June 2026, no Steam Cloud fix has shipped.

The workaround that does work is a manual file copy. The save folder lives at C:\Users\{username}\AppData\LocalLow\Suspicious Developments\Tactical Breach Wizards\SaveData. The save files are plain text, so a flash-drive copy moves them cleanly between machines with no corruption risk. If you regularly play between a Steam Deck and a desktop, set the path up once and treat the copy as part of your routine.

The native save system on a single machine works fine: one save slot per profile, per-mission autosave that captures the room state every time you advance, and a quick load on any restart. You do not lose meaningful progress to a crash — autosave covers you within a room.

No cross-platform sync because the game is PC-only. Steam Cloud is the only network path the game offers, and it is the broken one. Pack a USB stick.

Features that matter on the move

• Steam Deck Verified at 60 fps with battery life around 4-5 hours per charge. The slow turn pace means a charge lasts a long flight in tactics-game time.
• Rewindable turns remove the save-scum loop that other tactics games depend on. You do not need to reload a mission to recover from a bad move; you press undo. This makes the game far more travel-friendly than the genre norm because you never lose 20 minutes to a single mistake.
• Per-mission autosave means short play sessions work fine. You can pick up exactly where you left off after a 10-minute commute.
• Single-player only means no online dependency and no co-op partner coordination. Plays cleanly offline once installed.
• Workshop content downloads while you are online but plays offline once cached. A long flight with a Deck full of community levels is a real play loop.

Recommended setup

A Steam Deck plays this well at the Verified rating, and the 8BitDo Pro 2 is the best second controller if you also want to play on PC with a pad rather than mouse-and-keyboard. The game supports both input modes natively; mouse-and-keyboard is slightly faster for selecting targets in dense rooms but the gamepad path is fully Verified-clean.

If you play on two devices, set up the manual save-copy workflow before your first cross-device session. Trying to figure it out at the airport when your save has not synced is the worst time to discover the Steam Cloud limitation.

See our controllers guide for the full multi-device pad recommendations, the cross-saves guide for how Steam Cloud’s sync model compares with NSO and PSN (and where the manual-copy workaround fits the broader save-portability story), and the Steam Deck vs Switch 2 cornerstone for how a PC-only Steam Deck title fits into a household that also runs a Switch 2.

Verdict

Tactical Breach Wizards is the genre-respecting tactics game built around one mechanic that changes the feel of the whole genre. Rewindable turns mean you experiment instead of save-scum, and the result is a 14-hour campaign that respects your time without sacrificing the tactical depth. Tom Francis pedigree is real: Gunpoint and Heat Signature both held up, and this one is on the same shape. The Steam Deck Verified rating makes it a strong handheld PC pick. The honest editorial flag is the Steam Cloud sync that does not actually sync — set up the manual-copy workflow before you travel, and you have a clean cross-device tactics game for the cost of one folder path you have to remember.