Ok so I found the solution....total user error on my part. As I mentioned I'm new to this and this was my first go around with Greenworks and the Steam API. This also ended up worse before it got better and I'm hoping to help prevent the same headaches for anyone who reads this in the future. When I went to make the game pause when overlay active I did have it set correctly, however when I compiled the project I not only still had this broken but also managed to break my achievements.. Now I didn't immediately check my project because I had also just reset all achievements on steam to re-test them and I thought that the command I ran "reset_all_stats <appid>" to do that had somehow broken something because my game was only in pre-release and not public. Before you end up feeling as dumb as I did and go 50 builds deep like me...here's what happened. Anyone who goes looking will see that you need 4 files from the Steam SDK that are compatible with your version of Greenworks and NW.js these are .dll and .lib files the first being in public>steam>lib> and then whichever OS you're building. You will notice in that folder win32 and win64 each have a folder. The other files are in redistributable_bin in this folder you will see a folder for win64 BUT no folder for win32. The 2 files not in a folder ARE the win32 .dll and .lib files. You can imagine that fishing for these files could get annoying every time you go to build..which is why I tried to be slick and put all these files into a folder so I could just copy/paste all at once into the package file. Here's where I messed up I was building for win64 but when I made my little "shortcut" I grabbed the 32 bit redistributables...yeah..so for the next 50 builds I was copying the wrong SDK files from my "shortcut" into my build which of course broke communication with Steam and caused everything to break including achievements. I hope this helps save someone from being dumb like me. Lesson to be learned here is that I know releasing your game is exciting and this is the final stretch before doing so, but chill, breathe and take your time because 2 files being wrong could ruin your world quick. Sorry for the long post I hope you all have a great day!