The first two games in the series will crash if presence of libpulse-simple.so.0 is detected but PulseAudio daemon is not running, the cause is most likely inability to handle failure of internal FMOD code as it attempts enumerating audio devices.

This usually is not a problem – on a working PulseAudio-equipped system the game will just use PA; on a system without it, it will simply default to ALSA – but one might want to keep the libraries intact in order to preserve dynamic linkage while simultaneously preventing poetteringware from actually running. In such case, the first Higurashi game will crash immediately after launch and the second right after logo roll.

The easiest solution is to patch the binaries to look for a non-existent library – this will fail the PulseAudio check no matter the situation. Note this will most likely prevent them from running on a PulseAudio system because PA likes to take over ALSA interfaces exclusively – make sure you make a backup before trying to patch the binaries.

In both affected games the offsets you'd have to modify the string at are the same: 0x13adb0d for x86 and 0x13a53b1 for amd64. It doesn't really matter what you replace libpulse-simple with, just as long as it's not an actual library (I used libnanodesuhauu) and you don't go over the length.

Other games in the series run fine as-is.