I love that the four seconds of Sid Meier's Civilization® VI footage in the video are entirely cinematic rather than gameplay, making it look like some sort of intense action thriller. 🤣 (At 0:25, if you want to see.)

I've already picked up Divinity: Original Sin 2 after my brother talked it up to me last month and two more DLC for Cities: Skylines, we'll see if I end up picking anything else up. I got Terra Invicta when it was on sale a few weeks ago and it's been consuming my life.

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Quoting: Liam Dawe*taps the sign* https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/04/report-steam-deck-to-pass-3-million-sales-during-2023/

That too. :grin: Also I looked it up in case anyone else wants to read it, it was from the The Verge and my memory was playing tricks on me: How Jsaux rode the Steam Deck to escape the Amazon wilderness [External Link]

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Oooh, multithreading! Building megaprojects with lots and lots of dwarfs has always been my main interest, and of course that tends to slow the game down when you've got ~200 little simulated dudes running about the place. I should benchmark my in-progress fort with Proton and the native version when it comes out.

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Quoting: finaldestGreat news to see continued support on the deck. I am curious as to how many steam deck units valve have now sold.

No official numbers, but there've been some estimates of possibly around 2 million, maybe reaching 3 million by the end of the year. (Source: an Ars Technica article I read this morning about Jsaux and how they become such a big provider of Steam Deck accessories.)

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• Discover a robust menu of meals to cook - you can't explore a new world on an empty stomach!


• A plethora of fish and bugs also inhabit the planet - go uncover them to fill out your collection!

In a moment of dyslexia while skimming this list, I read these two bullet points together and got "Discover a robust menu of bugs to cook…" :grin:

Sounds cool. I couldn't get the demo to work on Proton, but if there's a Linux version coming out I'm content to wait.

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Proton is closing in on its 5 year anniversary soon too!

Is it really just that recently? I remember several years of my early Linux adoption (2014) passing over things that didn't have a Linux version, but it feels like forever since I pretty much stopped bothering to check what platforms were supported because most things just work now. :happy:

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Forgot to update with two more I tried on Saturday:

Quoting: AnzaLittle Kitty, Big City
Non sci-fi version of Stray. It takes a while to get hang of it, but once you get hang of it, there's few cat like things to do and some side quests to do. Cat like things include dropping things that are in high places, hunting birds and tripping people over. There's some risk of things feeling grindy as tasks involve doing same thing over and over again. Though I don't know if some of them are actually necessary for completing the game. Might be there just for achievement hunters and completionists.

I liked Stray, and liked the idea of this, but it didn't really click with me. I think Stray's automatic jumping behavior ruined it for me – after having that cat-like grace of never messing up a jump, Little Kitty, Big City's jumping mechanics (where you can either tap the button for a quick jump, or hold it down to aim your jump) felt clunky, and it felt like I could barely get any height whatsoever in jumping. I played maybe 10 minutes, enough to reach the crow and what feels like the start of the main quest to get back up to your apartment window napping spot, but just wasn't interested enough to continue. To be fair, the game felt solid, I like the artstyle, and I didn't see any bugs or glitches or anything, it just wasn't my cup of tea.

En Garde!: another "I couldn't get this to run." It seemed interesting, as a sort of medieval brawler with a theatrical bent, so I'll probably keep it on my wishlist and see how it develops.

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Quoting: NezchanViewfinder […] And you get to pet the cat.

Wait, you can pet the cat? Wait – there's a cat‽ Think I need to replay it… :happy:

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Ok, having tried all five demos, here's a little review. First off, a minor annoyance: all five required me to put PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command% in the launch options, or they'd fail to launch with an error.

• Jumplight Odyssey: a bit like FTL: Faster Than Light, as you flee from jump point to jump point in front of an encroaching indomitable enemy. Except instead of an 8-crew-max ship you've got a capital ship which can hold dozens of crew members; my ship started with 68 people and I rescued several more during the demo. There's also a bit of ship-design as you can build new rooms in some empty areas of the ship, so there's some long-term upgrade and strategy. I didn't let the enemy catch up with me so I don't know what combat looks like (from the trailer there's hostile boarders, at least!), but I like the feeling of captaining a large ship and keeping watch over a bigger crew than you could get in FTL. I didn't get great FPS from it (~15-20), and there weren't really video options to change, but I'm willing to bet that'll improve as the game develops.


• Viewfinder: this one was fantastic. It gave me some real Superliminal vibes, as the core mechanic allows you to place photographs in the world which become real, allowing you to walk into them. The trick is all in the perspective – I needed a bridge, and had a photograph of the side of a building, so I rotated it 90° and it turned into a bridge I could use. Later in the demo you get a camera, allowing you to make your own photographs to solve the puzzles you find. There's a nice reverse mechanic you can use at any time which allows you to easily go back to before you do anything (with easy bookmarks for things that significantly affect the world, like putting down a photograph), making it easy to try different solutions to things. Finally, I was going to praise the game's artstyle, when a puzzle late in the demo had me jumping between different pictures with very different artstyles, from watercolor to crayon-drawing to 90's pixel shader, all of which were executed just as competently. And finally, this one had no problem running at 60 FPS the entire time.


• One Lonely Outpost: I couldn't get this one to run. I tried the latest half-dozen Proton versions, and the best I could get was 6.3-8, where it ended up on a loading screen forever. Otherwise I just got a pure white screen and some sounds that sounded like a logo splash screen. I'm not super-competent at fiddling with launch options, so if anyone finds out (or has some suggestions on) how to run this I'd appreciate it.


• Station to Station: this one got to what I surmise is the main menu, but was all blurry so that I couldn't make anything out. Clicking around made it sound like I was clicking buttons, but I couldn't figure out how to un-blur it. I'd similarly appreciate if anyone figures out how to make it work.


• Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew: another standout. The same quality as in the other similar "Shadow Tactics" games, with solid mechanics (the voice acting is stellar as always, too). I enjoy the more fantastic setting, as it allows them to really break out some more crazy powers (for player characters and enemies!), like teleportation and insta-growing bushes. It also looks like instead of a linear campaign there's more of a choose-your-own-mission structure, which sounds fascinating, especially since you get to pick your crew composition each mission. (I saw something about being able to upgrade your crew's abilities, too.) The maps are now individual islands rather than custom maps for a linear campaign, which you can approach from different points. I had FPS issues with this one as well, with it hovering between 15-25 FPS much of the time, but at least it has a lot of video options so I'll fiddle with those and see if I can get it running better. Also the whole quick-saving/quick-loading thing is now a diegetic part of the story, which is a pretty interesting way of doing things, but fits in with the whole fantasy setting.

Edit: OK, Shadow Gambit wins hands-down for sheer amount of demo content; I hadn't finished it when I wrote my comment (had about 90 minutes in), and all told I spent 3.2 hours in the demo, easily longer than the others put together, and past several natural-feeling points for when a demo might end. (And I've got enough experience with the Shadow Tactics formula that, while I'm no speedrunner, I'm also not particularly slow either.)

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I knew there was a game I was looking forward to which had a demo out at this, but, checking now, it appears no fewer than five games* on my Wishlist have demos to check out. :woot:

*Viewfinder, One Lonely Outpost, Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, Station to Station, and Jumplight Odyssey, for the curious.

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