I cycled through some games today to properly decompress and get my mind off of yet another work week surviving morons, and waiting for late packages in the mail (waiting on gifts to send to people… some of them late, misdelivered and dropped off by residents on other streets, the post office is kind of fucky over here at the moment). I wanted to try some of the freebies I’ve accumulated in my library over the years, and decided to try Lego: Ninjago Movie because, why not? I tried to play it under Linux awhile ago and ran into audio issues, and I figured I’d play it under Windows to get around that issue. The good news is that the audio works! The bad news is that it crashes more than a drunken sailor. I did some reading around, and this game, despite the positive reviews, crashes galore on certain setups, and mine seems to fall into that happy little club. I’m running up to date drivers, it was a clean install of the game, and I even tried running it in both DX9 and DX11 mode. I’m going to see if I can tweak something under Proton, but so far I’m thankful this was a freebie; the amount crashes alone would have made me demand a refund.
Upon returning to the ultimate trudge that is my Steam library I took notice of Neon Boost; a parkour style platformer with an 80’s tron/synthwave aesthetic. You have to get from point A to point B by bouncing, ducking, rocket jumping and running along walls while listening to synthwave during constant movement. There was a LOT of dying. Some instructions are floating in the air, and I had to come around a few times just to figure out what I was supposed to do, or I didn’t climb onto the wall or rocket jump properly from said wall. You can check it out for yourself on Steam, it’s an eternal freebie.
I also gave Lara Croft And The Temple Of Osiris a try again (not a freebie, unfortunately), but the damned game still suffers from amnesia every time you launch the game. At least a free indie came through for me, even if it is a ballbuster.