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Discord is very popular indeed, and extremely hard to replace also for a specific reason:

API

It's amazing how easy and "deep" you can interact with your Discord server from outside. Having users already assigned roles, channels, permissions and the like based on external databases is a godsend for large gaming groups. Until FOSS replacements (or any replacement, for that matter) can't offer comparable customization, Discord is the way to go - unless all your gaming needs are filled up by something that can manually manage a few users.

The enshittification will be a serious blow for more advanced/larger/more complex gaming communities, or games heavily relying on Discord as an external service.

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The demo gives you a decent opportunity to give the game a try-out. The download is tiny, so if you're curious, see for yourself. It is quite easy to get into, and I found it grew on me over the course of playing a number of runs.

Recommendations to the developer:

- Suggest adding cursor keys as an alternative to mouse-control for more choice. (This might also help out people with genuine accessibility problems, not just keyboard addicts.)

- I found it fairly frustrating to have one's weapons run out before the end of a level, so I'd have a perpetual low-damage weapon instead of no weapon whatsoever. Alternatively, make it so that damaging boxes or barrels doesn't use up your weapon.

EDIT: Played some more and spotted what seems to be a minor bug in the (demo) game. With the Rogue character, I didn't successfully complete a dungeon, and it offers to backtrack. I carried out the backtrack, completed the dungeon successfully and wasn't presented with the dungeon exit, but given a repeat backtrack again. (I completed the dungeon again, and was offered yet another backtrack.) A problem like this is usually resolved by quitting and starting a fresh run.

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They take place in the same universe.

Not only that (like Alan Wake does, as well), but literally the same agency, FBC. Guess what the C stands for ;)

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I don't think there is a Linux version of a game that uses GodotSteam on GOG, since they all seem to use GOG's wrapper that has no Linux version.


If you need knowledge of the implementation of the Lua runtime to optimise the solutions that does not sound like a lot of fun.

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Got sucked into this for a few hours last night. Some of the optimisation and token count that people get on the leaderboard is unbelievable, I think I'm too poor at maths to get some of the probably more elegant formulaic-type solutions. But the good news is it's fun despite that. It's honestly just fun to experiment with random solutions and see what insane patterns of shape and colour you can get from tweaking variables and comparison operators.

There are also a ton of cool details, like at the game's bootup screen it shows your actual machine specs. When you type, the game plays a mechanical keystroke sound, and you can customise the type of switch it's supposed to sound like! Since it's made with Godot it takes full advantage of the UI controls and you can do a ton of cool customisation of panel sizes and window sizes too, even minimizing them! The UI is so cool and immersive.

It's a shame they went with a custom account leaderboard instead of using Steamwork's leaderboard functionality. It also doesn't have achievements. I'm not even sure it has Cloud Saves, maybe they weren't using GodotSteam for integration? Anyway, sometimes submitting to the leaderboard or browsing the pages fails and you have to retry loading a few times.

I've been playing the Native Linux release and it works on my system without issue. So cool!

EDIT: I'd love to see this one on GOG, with the account functionality stripped out if needed.

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Funcom was also behind The Secret World, a MMORPG that had you interact with "out of the game" elements, such as internet "fake" websites, or installing an app on your smartphone to try to decode a morse code inside the game... Clever and fun :)

However, they kind of ruined it with its sequel, Secret World Legends... but that is another story :(

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I really appreciate games that have demos (try before you buy). I may not judge a book by its' cover, but I do judge a game by its' demo.

Here is what I discovered about Lost for Swords:
1. Upon booting the game I saw the Godot Engine logo (+1 rep)
2. I looked in the settings and saw options for game difficulty (+1 rep)
3. Upon entering the game I saw a "Basic Tutorial" option. (+1 rep)
4. I went through the Basic Tutorial. It did a great job of explaining the game. (+1 rep)
5. I also noticed there was an "Advanced Tutorial" (+1 rep)
6. Once I got through the tutorial, there was a generous amount real game content (+1 rep)
7. I got interrupted part way through the game. When I restarted the game, my previous progress was saved. (+1 rep)
8. The game has Steam Achievements (+1 rep)
9. The game does not have Steam Trading Cards (-1 rep) I know... I am a shallow person.

Bottom Line: I purchased the game.

Once I purchased the game, my progress from playing demo transferred to the full game. (+++++++ rep)

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With what looks like unique characters this has XCOM: Chimera Squad vibes. Which I thought was an interesting take on the basic gameplay of XCOM and a fun time, even if I didn't end up playing it as much XCOM 2 overall. Could be good, we'll see! Though I'll wait for it to release before getting my hopes up.

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I was already somewhat thinking it with the insectile design but I saw the "Crawling Olives" in the trailer and my mind immediately went to "Kinda bug, and kinda snack…"

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If UE5 could fix their terrible default configs and performance issues along with EXCESSIVE requirement to use upscaling and sometimes framegen... then I wouldn't mind so much... but that is where we are today.

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Oh boy, can't wait for more consumer exploiting to come.

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Oblivion has NO steam Deck friendly config afaik. it will give you 10-20fps.

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AI writing exploits into their drivers now, just keeps getting better from NVIDIA.

If only AMD could figure out high end GPU gaming.

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pretty sure Funcom was behind Anarchy Online, that old MMORPG I once spent a little bit of time in, a bygone age.

I doubt I will check this out anytime, its likely to shutdown eventually anyway since it relies on players to exist it seems.

Would love a single player RPG like this with tie in COOP/PVP on the side, but as the core part of the game, nar.

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Is it just me, or does "Funcom" sound like it should be the evil government in some bizarre dystopia?

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COSMIC is pretty exciting, to me it's the potential of getting a DE that might actually care about the non-power Linux native experience eg: The people who just want to use their computers. I love the fact they are actually putting effort into accessibility.

Last time I tried to use Linux on my main computer it failed miserably due to lack of accessibility. The best accessibility tools were in KDE and they were subpar and complicated to setup properly. When I reached out to the devs they basically said it wasn't their priority or interest and that people with disabilities should stick to Windows and Mac, and so that's what I did for my main computer. Since System76 is a company with vested interest in people using and enjoying their computers which starts with the DE I have high hopes for it over the long run.

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FYI, you can grab your Steam key here https://www.humblebundle.com/home/keys if you already purchased the DRM free version.

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Roughly Victorian era series of murders and it's not happening in London? Is that even allowed?!

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@shadowofward There is essentially zero difference between distros for performance. You'll want to look for things like support, convenience, community, as well as personal preference.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/12/the-best-linux-distribution-for-gaming-in-2025/

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I bought it last night and installed it on kubuntu 24.04 lts. Steam selected proton hotfix to run the game I was suprized how great it runs. FSR 3 everything jacked up to ultra and buttery smooth so far.
I'm using the amdvlk driver since the Tome Raider series runs better than radv on those titles.

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After going public, each Discord user changes from a person into nothing but an earnings potential statistic.

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Sure, but the point of getting confirmation is to ensure it will continue working, and not just be randomly pulled like we've seen from many pre-releases in the past.

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I can just say that the Anti-Cheat haven't been a problem at all during the playtest, and I've been playing from the beginning.
The only problem it had was for like 1 or 2 months that you had to install AMDVLK (even if you ran with RADV after), but that has since been fixed.

It has gold status on ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com/app/1172710


[EDIT] Also forgot to mention that Conan Exiles their other game works with Battle Eye without any issues.

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I hope eventually they will divert some resources to the iced toolkit.

The documentation for it has been improving (there's a really nice in-progress guide book; in addition to some outdated/deprecated cookbook type manuals), and there's a pretty wide variety of example applications, but especially with respect to widgets interfacing with external data, the examples are pretty limited to simple things, which really don't help with the intricacies of Rust's borrow, lifetime, etc. rules.

Earlier this year I worked through rustlings, and a few other Rust tutorials; I was under no illusions about my competence (?!) in rust, though nevertheless I was looking forward to building a new version of my simple pdf viewer using iced. (currently a version exists that uses bare opengl, in C, via glfw) It started out fine, and I was even proud of myself when I figured out how to add a function to mupdf's rust bindings to request some extra stuff from the C side -- but then I couldn't figure out how to load rasterized pages progressively into a widget, so I gave up. Granted, I'm just a silly amateur; though various forums show real programmers getting puzzled over similar tasks.

So anyway, I hope we eventually have resources to help app developers make better use of iced.

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Not that I've seen. Compared to this https://wiki.bethesda.net/wiki/snapwiki/Doom/SnapHub/:

- There's no "SnapMap Community". Instead a "Play" tab which contains some maps to play.
- Instead of "My Snapmaps" there's a "Create" tab with the same content (but without "My published maps" & the wiki link).
- There's no "Find match".

I don't know if you can copy them from the filesystem.

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Oblivion Remaster from the recent ones seems another UE5 slop again. Performs bad, looks pretty blurry and awful.

Part of the reason for the performance might be that the remaster runs two engines under the hood. Much of the game logic still runs on a mixture of Gamebryo/Creation Engine and the rest as well as the graphics are powered by UE5 on top. It is a slightly weird move and I can only assume that the reason for that is that they were able to push out the game a lot faster this way since it is not made inhouse by Bethesda.

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System76

The desktop has been pretty solid base to me for months. Maybe a bug or two sometimes. But I read this year is the year of Cosmic. And to me it's definitely. I'd wish my capacity right now gave me more chances to learn in order to put my little grain of salt.

Cosmic has made me finally feel at home on a computer.

There's just some annoying things I'd love to be able to help polish, but I'll wait because I love these guys, their philosophy, their work.

System76

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Kind of like going from Space Quest 4 to Space Quest 6.

Good lord, yes – Space Quest 6 looked so weird to me.

... that reminds me: I haven't played Space Quest 5 in ages. I think I still might have the disks somewhere...

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1100$CAN, here. 689$CAN for the 512gb OLED Steam Deck and 819$CAN for the 1tb model.

I will stick with my LCD Steam Deck. If I had to make a move, I'd pick the 512gb OLED Steam Deck and swap drives with the 1tb I already have in my LCD.

All in all, I'll wait for the Steam Deck 2.

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I guess it could be blocked in Germany.

Could be. But it's weird since you can get the games at both Steam and GOG here.

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