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Aperture Desk Job from Valve is out now and it's ridiculous

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Aperture Desk Job is the latest game from Valve, it's free but it's also just a tech demo to show off the Steam Deck controls and features. It's actually a really charming and quite comical experience set in the Portal world but no it's not Portal 3.

"Aperture Desk Job reimagines the been-there-done-that genre of walking simulators and puts them in the lightning-spanked, endorphin-gorged world of sitting still behind things. You play as an entry-level nobody on their first day at work — your heart full of hope and your legs full of dreams, eager to climb that corporate ladder. But life’s got other plans, and they all involve chairs. Designed as a free playable short for Valve’s new Steam Deck, Desk Job walks you through the handheld’s controls and features, while not being nearly as boring as that sounds." — Valve.

You get to test all the controls including the microphone, touchscreen and gyro aiming while also destroying things with a toilet that has turrets attached to it. A very deadly toilet. You will also come across various other household appliances that have weapons attached, it's completely ridiculous but a lot of fun.

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Easily the absolute stupidest thing I've played this year I think, and I say that in the nicest possible way because it's easily worth playing through. Doesn't last long though, at only 30 minutes but worth a go.

Shot taken from Deck:

You don't actually need a Steam Deck to play it, as it's a controller game. Find it free on Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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Ehvis Mar 2, 2022
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Fairly high production value for half an hour.

Most interesting thing was that I hadn't plugged in my controller and it said that on screen (menus still worked with mouse). When I did plug it in the message disappeared, but the controller still didn't work. Had to restart the game to make that happen. I suppose that won't be an issue on the deck.
pete910 Mar 2, 2022
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Quoting: mark348Looks really fun.

It is enabled !

Just don't work.

The fact they say use Manjaro and that is what I use perplexes me somewhat
Anza Mar 2, 2022
Quoting: pete910
Quoting: mark348Looks really fun.

It is enabled !

Just don't work.

The fact they say use Manjaro and that is what I use perplexes me somewhat

I have had games crashing because I have had Steam overlay enabled. Disabling it has helped in those cases. Though if I remember correctly, restarting Steam client has fixed that issue too.

I did quick test and disabling Steam overlay didn't have any effect on startup. Game started up just find with it disabled. I don't know if there are side effects from that during the gameplay.

So there's two things that can be tried out quite easily, former just matters much more if Steam client is left running for long time. Also I noticed that there was update today, so could first try if game starts up without any fiddling around.

If those don't help, running Steam from terminal could give some clues.

Also at least for me, Steam places crash dumps in /tmp/dumps. If there's new one when game refuses to start, then it could be crash. In that case dmesg also should have line about segfault or few other possible crash reasons.

PS: as it's Vulkan title, problem might also with ancient GPU or drivers
WORM Mar 3, 2022
The game launches for me, but I can't get any of my controllers to work with it. My Switch controller worked on the main menu and promptly stopped being useful after that.
Typijay Mar 3, 2022
I tried playing this on 2 of my computers, it pegs the GPU at 100% on my HD 8790M Quad Core i7 Laptop and Quadro P1000 Core 2 Quad desktop and manages <10fps no matter what resolution I lower things to (tried as low as 720 x 480).

Playing at lower than native resolutions doesn't scale and I end up with black bars to the bottom and right.

Works with Stadia controller, but not well on PS3 controller.

So yeah, it's a shame that they don't have any settings for dialing down the graphics so that it's even playable on lower end hardware.
Anza Mar 3, 2022
Quoting: WORMThe game launches for me, but I can't get any of my controllers to work with it. My Switch controller worked on the main menu and promptly stopped being useful after that.

I had the same thing. For me restarting Steam client helped though. That's at least easy to verify.
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