Unplayable offline on the Steam Deck.

Bought it last year on Epic Store and bought it here once more, only to find out that despite them apparently boasting about Steam Deck support (and the Steam variant running on it better, which I do acknowledge), you cannot get past the "Checking entitlements..." screen when you boot the game up.
I tried unlinking my account, all online functionality is disabled yet the single-player game is rendered useless when there's no internet.

This is both laughable and disgusting.

Unplayable offline on the Steam Deck. Bought it last year on Epic Store and bought it here once more, only to find out that despite them apparently boasting about Steam Deck support (and the Steam variant running on it better, which I do acknowledge), you cannot get past the "Checking entitlements..." screen when you boot the game up. I tried unlinking my account, all online functionality is disabled yet the single-player game is rendered useless when there's no internet. This is both laughable and disgusting.