Hi there!

I'm new to using GOG Galaxy, and recently bought and installed F.E.A.R. Platinum and Stranglehold. The games work well and I haven't encountered any issues playing them. However, when exiting either game through the main menu, my monitor goes to black, and intermittently flashes grey. The only way to fix this is to uplug the monitor cable and plug it back in, which brings back the desktop. The same thing happens if I attempt to alt-tab out of the game to terminate it.

I have a dual monitors, and this issue happens on my primary monitor, which is VGA > DP. This does not appear to be a problem if I run the game on my HDMI monitor.

I've poked around and tried to troubleshoot, and found a few topics centered on this issue, mostly game specific. I've ensured that the refresh rate is 60hz and that the drivers are up to date. I've also tried to configure the games to run in windowed mode (using fullscreen=false argument in a custom exe), which didn't seem to work.

Again, this only happens on my primary monitor thankfully, but I have not had this issue with any other games that I run in Steam or from my desktop. It only appears to be an issue with these two games, and I'm reluctant to buy any more if this will be a persistent problem.

Thanks so much in advance for any assistance or guidance that anyone can provide!

Good thinking! I did try that and got the same result. I also read a troubleshooting tip about managing 3D settings in the NVIDIA control panel, and enabling "application controlled" preferred refresh rates for specific applications, but I don't have that option seemingly anyway.

I'm pretty stumped. I can play these on my second monitor if I just unplug the one that's giving me issues, but it's a hassle and I don't have this issue with anything else aside from these games that I've gotten from GOG.

Oh, so you have two monitors plugged in to one graphic card? Afraid I have only ever used me monitor. I vaguely remember seeing another post of multiple monitors here but can’t think more. I wouldn’t expect it refresh rate, I have nvidia and gsync and run everything through it. More likely to be something not liking two monitors. Perhaps someone else has some idea. You could try the Helpdesk although there is little support anymore.
Oh last try, check pcgamingwiki (always a good site for any issues):
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/F.E.A.R.

That has a dx9-dx10 wrapper which may help.

if you're using both monitor with 2different cable into 1graphic card, there might be slight issues about because it's different processing, i think if you can skip VGA since it's the most dated input then you wont have much of a problem

I appreciate the responses. I'll check the wiki to see if there may be a solution there.

I doubt that it's related to having two monitors, because even if I unplug my other monitor completely, the issue persists.

I should note that I've also checked "disable full screen optimizations" in the properties of both applications, which also hasn't helped. It is particularly bizarre because this is the only time I've had this issue. I've run lots of games and never encountered this before, which makes me think that I either got unlucky and bought two games that both have this specific problem, or that something GOG related is causing it (which may also be unlikely given that launching the games without Galaxy reproduces the same thing).