How to Find Hidden Games on Steam Deck: Unhide Games in Your Library

This is about games you hid yourself, using Steam's "hide this game" option, and how to get them back. If you are hunting for hidden gems (good games nobody talks about), that is a different thing, and it is what the rest of this site does.

The quick answer

1. Press the Steam button (the one under the left stick), then choose Library.
2. Move up to the search box at the top left and press the A button to start typing.
3. Type any part of the hidden game's name. Even a single letter is usually enough.
4. A hidden tab appears in the row above your results, next to all, library, friends, store and tools. Move across to it using the R1 bumper, and your hidden game is in there.
5. To unhide it: open the game, go to the gear icon on its page, then choose Manage and Remove from Hidden.

That is the whole fix, and it goes straight back into your normal library. The rest of this page covers why it vanished in the first place, and what to do if you cannot remember the name of what you hid.

Why you cannot just scroll and find it

Valve changed this in a Steam Deck client update in November 2025. Hidden games used to still turn up in your All and Library tabs. They do not any more. The patch note was blunt about it: "Fixed hidden games showing in All and Library tabs. They now appear in their own tab if applicable." So if you are scrolling your library hunting for a hidden game, you will never see it, no matter how far you scroll.

I hid a game on my own Deck to check every step here. Typing a single letter really is enough: one "B" and the hidden tab appeared with Breathedge sitting in it.

One catch that trips people up: the hidden tab does not exist until your search text actually matches something you have hidden. A Valve developer confirmed this directly. So an empty search box, or a typo, means no hidden tab at all, which makes it look like the feature is broken when it is really just waiting for a match.

How to hide a game in the first place

1. In your Library, highlight the game's artwork, but do not open it.
2. Press the Menu button (the one with three lines, on the right, near the ABXY buttons).
3. Choose Manage, then Hide this game.

What if you cannot remember what you hid?

This is the real hole in the search method. Searching only helps if you know roughly what you are looking for, and if you hid something months ago you probably do not.

There is a path in Settings that should solve exactly this:

Steam button → Settings → Home → "1 game is hidden" → Manage

That row even carries the subtitle "Games hidden from your library are also hidden from What's New", so it is clearly meant to be the answer. As of 14 August 2026 it does not work. I tried it on my own Deck, assumed my system was out of date, updated, and tried again. Same result. There is a Valve bug report about this going back to 2023 that is still open.

So if you have forgotten the name of what you hid, the practical workaround is to look it up from a full Steam client instead: Desktop Mode on the Deck, or Steam on a PC. The desktop library still lists hidden games properly, so you can get the name there, then go back to Game Mode and use the search method above.

If a game is missing but you never hid it

Worth ruling out, because "hidden" is often not the real problem:

• It may simply not be installed. Check whether your library is filtered to installed games only.
• Your library may be filtered by Deck compatibility. If you are only showing Verified titles, plenty of games you own will not appear.
• It could be a family-shared game that the person sharing it is currently playing.
• Non-Steam games and emulators need to be added to Steam before Game Mode will show them at all.

Why a game recommender wrote this

Fair question. I run a hidden-gem finder, and when I looked at what people were actually typing into Google before landing here, a chunk of it was not about gems at all. It was people trying to find their hidden games on a Steam Deck. Completely different problem, and the advice out there is out of date since the November 2025 change. So I hid a game on my own Deck, worked out what actually happens now, and wrote it down.

If you did come here for the other kind of hidden gem, that is what the rest of the site does: say what you feel like playing and it digs up well-reviewed games you have probably never heard of, each with the honest catch on it. Free, no signup, over at secludedgems.com.

Thanks for reading,
Adrian