I played the game on deck a couple of month ago, if I remember well I had the same problem and the problem was that it was missing a windows redist installation or something like that. I fixed it by installing another game, like super meat boy or below, that indeed installed the windows pre requisites required for them to work
It was a pristine new deck even for me, problem is that, for some reason, Alan wake doesn't trigger the windows pre requisites installation during his first start. Only workaround I found was that, give it a try
That's also why it doesn't happen to anyone, if you install and start a couple of games prior to AW you'll never encounter the problem, because Proton container will start filling up his folder with all the different windows things necessary to work. I should've done a bug report but I'm too lazy, I'm pretty sure that it's a reproduceable issue if you just format the Deck and install AW on it in a pristine Proton container or whatever
I wonder if this explains some other discrepancies. For example, what I have been dealing with above playing the second AI: The Somnium Files. It seemingly works for some folks and does not work for others. It is possible something gets fixed in the installation of another game.
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