If you've ever played Kingdom of Loathing... well, then you probably know about what to expect. Some similarities that you'll learn in the first few minutes: Meat is still the currency, still stick-figures, still Muscle/Mysticality/Moxie-based classes. Some differences you'll learn in the first few minutes: unlike KoL you're not limited by adventures per day, your character is animated/moves around If not, KoL is a free online game but you are limited in turns per day. This you pay up front but can play as much as you want. Other: If you are playing on Linux and the shortcut/launcher for this game appears to do nothing, as mine did on Fedora 37, you can fix this very easily. Simply open the game's install dir then into the "game" subfolder and find the execuable "West of Loathing.x86_64". You need to set the executable bit so it can run. You can do this graphically from your file manager (in Cinnamon desktop: right-click > Properties > Permissions tab > check the Executable box on the "owner" row). Or from terminal, run chmod u+x 'West of Loathing.x86_64' The launcher shortcut / game should work perfectly after that
Some of the gamers who grew up on games that dumbed down the combat (unmodded Skyrim comes to mind for some reason... don't get me wrong, I like Skyrim too but it's completely different in terms of combat), may find the combat in Risen to be much much more unforgiving. It does require that you get used to it, but once you do, combat is still manageable and it much more rewarding than in those dumbed down systems I mentioned bc you feel like you actually did something challenging instead of just checking off a box After playing through this, I think it has become one of my all time favorite games and I really enjoyed this game. I might only recommend it to folks that I thought could adapt to the combat though. If I recall correctly, this game has controller support but I didn't like it or maybe I just wanted to customize (I like having a more complex 2-mode control setup). Since I'm on Linux and was playing via wine, I am able to disable the game's ability to detect the controller (if interested, google "WineBus Enable SDL" and set to 0) and I ended up using a custom antimicrox profile... Anyway, the only other thing I can think to mention - and trying to keep things as spoiler-free as possible - is that I was annoyed that the final boss's combat mechanics felt drastically different compared to the rest of the game's combat that I loved, it felt like I had briefly entered a 3d platformer.
Decent game, love the concept. The latest Linux installer (planescape_torment_enhanced_edition_3_1_4_26532.sh) has some issues though on modern distros though (I'm on Fedora 37)... it's not that difficult to fix, but some might be disappointed that it doesn't "just work" Essentially, it is missing some libraries (libssl.so.1.0.0 which has been replaced by openssl-libs) that are not present on modern distros. It is pretty easy to fix and the game will work just fine, even on non-Ubuntu distros. I hope the devs will consider releasing a patch on GOG in the future. Especially, considering that the libraries in question are open-source and could possibly be packaged with or downloaded by the installer... that is what that other "heated water vapor" client does ;-) The way I fixed it was by following some advice on the GOG forums to create a "lib" folder under the game's install folder and copying the missing libraries under this folder. I heard of some folks mentioning that they found the older library files on I think Debian servers... but I just got mine out of a folder from the "heated water vapor" client app under my ~/.local/share//ubuntu12_32/-runtime/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu folder and copied the entire folder's contents to the "lib" dir under the game's install dir. After that, just use a text editor and add 1 line near the start.sh file. I put mine on the second line, immediately after the first line with bash - which you should keep as the first line. The line I added looked like this: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/full/path/to/game-install-dir/lib" After adding that, everything works great and I can launch the game from the normal menu/deskop launcher with no issues. Sound works, mouse & kb works, etc.
Game itself is an older point-and-click adventure as noted in the other reviews. I will say that for the Linux install experience, despite it being a ScummVM-based game, I was suprised that the latest offline installer (loom_en_gog_2_20099.sh) did not work for me out-of-the-box (ScummVM has been around for a long time and is pretty stable in my opinion). Oddly, I also have The Dig on GOG (another ScummVM game), and that one did work just fine out-of-the-box. I'm on Fedora 37 rather than Ubuntu so possibly there were some newer system libraries on my OS than what the game was expecting. In any case, if you find yourself in a similar situation, you can resolve this easily by bypassing the including scummvm install and using your distro's scummvm package instead. First install scummvm through your distro's package manager, then under the game's install directory use a text editor to edit 1 line in the file support/gog_com.shlib : you'll want to change the last line of the run_scummvm function (line 170 for me) to use /usr/bin/scummvm instead of ./scummvm/scummvm - but leave all the arguments the same, only change the path. After making these changes, the game ran fine for me. Audio worked, etc.
