Posted December 30, 2024
Two semi-frustrating experiences, with solutions/workarounds, which will probably affect Windows users as well:
- The game crashed consistently after ~10 seconds in the menu, showing a Unity crash dialog. This is because I block all games from accessing the internet, but my OS is still reporting that there's an internet connection available, and the game tries to connect to discord and whatnot, crashing if it fails. This can apparently also happen if the developer's server is unreachable (ref), which I find veeeery iffy (DRM-adjacent). Physically unplugging the ethernet cable makes the crash go away.
- There was no sound in the game. I feared weird wine library shenanigans - but no, it's simply because the checkbox for "music" defaults to off, and the default volume sliders for UI interaction and master volume are set too low. It's super sensitive to small changes, swiftly going to way too loud if you drag the sliders all the way to the right.
I've found Steam forum threads on both issues, with the developer responding (thus aware), but apparently they've abandoned further development on the game ( ref and ref), so there won't be proper fixes for these things.
Finally what's likely to be a wine-specific issue:
- Selectboxes in the settings (for e.g. resolution) show white on white text. Only the selected option is readable when the selectbox is closed. This is the saving grace that makes these settings only near-unusable.
From what I've seen of the game, there's enough to like that I'm glad these aren't showstoppers. Performance however is pretty bad on my system, so I'll probably wait for a hardware upgrade before really diving into actual gameplay. After that, I might look into Creatura 2.0 coming next year - though I'll very much take the developer's attitude wrt providing fixes into account.
- The game crashed consistently after ~10 seconds in the menu, showing a Unity crash dialog. This is because I block all games from accessing the internet, but my OS is still reporting that there's an internet connection available, and the game tries to connect to discord and whatnot, crashing if it fails. This can apparently also happen if the developer's server is unreachable (ref), which I find veeeery iffy (DRM-adjacent). Physically unplugging the ethernet cable makes the crash go away.
- There was no sound in the game. I feared weird wine library shenanigans - but no, it's simply because the checkbox for "music" defaults to off, and the default volume sliders for UI interaction and master volume are set too low. It's super sensitive to small changes, swiftly going to way too loud if you drag the sliders all the way to the right.
I've found Steam forum threads on both issues, with the developer responding (thus aware), but apparently they've abandoned further development on the game ( ref and ref), so there won't be proper fixes for these things.
Finally what's likely to be a wine-specific issue:
- Selectboxes in the settings (for e.g. resolution) show white on white text. Only the selected option is readable when the selectbox is closed. This is the saving grace that makes these settings only near-unusable.
From what I've seen of the game, there's enough to like that I'm glad these aren't showstoppers. Performance however is pretty bad on my system, so I'll probably wait for a hardware upgrade before really diving into actual gameplay. After that, I might look into Creatura 2.0 coming next year - though I'll very much take the developer's attitude wrt providing fixes into account.