I've been testing it out and got it working using the Lutris flatpak and Wine 6.5. The Steam Deck provides a Discover store where you install most tools you'll need.
Assuming you are familiar with Lutris (plenty of guides out there), here are steps I took to get it working:
Install Lutris from the Discover store
Install ProtonUp-Qt from the Discover store
Open ProtonUp-Qt and select Lutris under Install for
Click Add version
Select the Kron4ek Wine-Builds Vanilla compatibility tool, then select version 6.5
Click Install and wait for the installation to finish
Open Lutris and add a game using Add locally installed game
Under Game options, set the executable as the install.exe
Under Runner options, set the wine version to the one installed using ProtonUp-Qt, should be call wine-6.5-amd64
Save the game configuration, then click Play to run it
Go through launcher installation using default options
Edit the same Lutris game configuration and switch the executable to the patcher.exe
Save the game configuration, then click Play to run it again
Go through the full game installation (this should take a while)
Done! Each time you run the Lutris configuration it will bring up the patcher launcher with the option to launch Classic or Awaken.
(Optional) Enable Windowed (virtual desktop), it fixes an issue with the mouse disappearing issue for me, YMMV
(Optional) Under System options, enable Restore resolution on game exit, it fixes some screen resolution/orientation switch the game does only in desktop mode
Been testing out more recent versions of Wine but they don't work. Later versions of Wine 6.x (6.6+) crash because the _Launcher.exe is being interpreted by Wine as a DDL and not an executable. Proton variants and Wine 7.x seem to crash because of libldap issues.
Controls also took me a while to configure but Steam Deck provides sufficient mapping options to adapt your play-style.