Gaming

It’s easy to forget that not everyone plays video games on Windows. Some users prefer Linux, even on a desktop, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, not every developer supports Linux, which makes it challenging to find and play the games you want. So, can you play Zenless Zone Zero on Linux?

Zenless Zone Zero does not natively support Linux, but it does work. So long as developer miHoYo doesn’t make any significant changes, it should still run fine on Linux. The key is to download and install the game using Heroic. It’s a free-to-use, open-source game launcher capable of running Epic Game Store, GOG, Amazon Prime Games, and more on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Once you download Heroic and install Zenless Zone Zero, consider running the game via Proton Experimental. Most users seem to have luck there.

While Zenless Zone Zero isn’t on Steam and will likely never launch on Valve’s digital storefront, it does somewhat work on Steam Deck. There’s no official support, though. As such, you may run into numerous issues and poor performance.

If you want to try to play Zenless Zone Zero on Steam Deck, you can install the gacha game using Heroic or Lutris. It’s the easiest way to download and play the game on the handheld through the Epic Game Store.

Alternatively, the ROG Ally should have no trouble downloading the game, as it runs Windows natively.

While Linux remains in the air, what about controller support in Zenless Zone Zero? While you’re waiting for the game to install, now’s a good time to sign up for the Insider Gaming Newsletter!

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Allegations have emerged against the show’s creator, suggesting that the Netflix Horizon series may be scrapped.

In 2022, news broke that Sony had plans to develop a TV series based on Horizon Zero Dawn in partnership with Netflix. A few months later, they officially announced that Aloy would be the main character and that Steve Blackman, known for his work on The Umbrella Academy, would be directing the production.

The series was planned to join Netflix’s lineup of adaptations based on video games, alongside the Lance Reddick-led Resident Evil series, The Cuphead Show, the upcoming Bioshock movie, Castlevania, and more. Horizon also represents another TV venture for PlayStation, which is currently developing The Last of Us for HBO, God of War for Amazon Prime Video, and Twisted Metal for Peacock. PlayStation’s upcoming projects also include the forthcoming Ghosts of Tsushima film.

I’m disappointed to share that the unfortunate news has surfaced that they will not be “continuing with the series.” According to a report from Cheyenne Roundtree of Rolling Stone magazine, Horizon Zero Dawn and Orbital, another series that Steve Blackman was set to lead, have been canceled.

The recent accusations against Blackman regarding the working environment have raised concerns. Allegations of bullying, manipulative conduct, and retaliation have surfaced. Representatives of Blackman have refuted these allegations.

There’s a chance that the series could come to life with someone else leading the way, but we will have to wait and see what the Netflix producers have planned.

While Nintendo of America has long-since cut its repair support of the Wii U, Nintendo over in Japan was still repairing the hardware. Now, it’s officially run out of spare parts, meaning that it can no longer repair any damage.

Announced on social media (via OatmealDome), Nintendo Japan revealed it’s run out of parts. While we knew it was running low on parts last year, it gave no indicator when the peripheral would officially end repair support.

[Wii U]

Nintendo has ran out of spare parts for the Wii U in Japan.

Because of this, they are now unable to repair broken Wii U consoles or peripherals.

(Wii U repairs already ended several years ago in North America.) https://t.co/ry151GMyTq

— OatmealDome (@OatmealDome) July 4, 2024

Nintendo has been weirdly strong when it comes to repairing hardware past its prime, and even the Wii U, the forgotten system Nintendo seems to want to forget, is no exception. For over a decade, it had been continuing to support repairs for customers. That said, the Wii U eShop shuttered last year and its online play functions closed earlier this year.

EA Sports FC 25 will be released in September.

That’s according to prolific game leaker Billlbil-Kun, who writes on Deallabs that the game will likely be revealed within the next 10 days.

The game will reportedly be released in a Standard and Ultimate Edition. Players who purchase the Ultimate Edition of the game will receive a week of early access, as has become standard with EA‘s football titles, it’s claimed.

EA Play players will allegedly also receive this benefit alongside their 10-hour trial. EA Play players will also reportedly receive a discount to in-game currency and will be able to transfer in-game currency between EA FC 24 and EA FC 25. This will be a one-time offer, as has been the case in recent years.

As the UEFA Euro 2024 championships are currently taking place, it’s possible that the game will be announced during the final game, which takes place on Sunday, July 14.

UEFA is partnered with EA for EA Sports FC meaning it’s possible that the announcement could be integrated with the tournament.

In VGC’s review of the current-gen versions of EA FC 24, we said: “EA Sports FC 24 isn’t the huge departure that we’d hoped for. While Ultimate Team devotees will likely be happy, the rest of the game feels like an afterthought in the transition away from the FIFA license.”

With a rather positive launch and a relatively large community, Nexon’s new title is off to a good start. The First Descendant is a third-person action title with looter shooter mechanics and online cooperative PvE gameplay. Players will have various skills and weapons to use against a well-developed variety of enemies. 

However, many users are complaining about something basic that happens at the beginning of the game once the player opens it. The community, in general, hopes that the studio will fix this issue soon.

Promoted as a kind of direct competitor to Destiny 2, this title, where players must work together to defeat various powerful bosses, is gaining quite a bit of popularity. The First Descendant is a looter shooter that allows players to choose all kinds of characters and skills in order to defeat various enemies controlled by artificial intelligence. It is a free-to-play game that has a ton of microtransactions.

Despite receiving a generally positive reception at launch, the community is beginning to voice complaints about the initial issues this title presents. One of these issues is that when the user opens the game, the Nexon logo emits a loud sound that seems to annoy players.

The title “Nexon” screen needs a nerf. Way to loud.
byu/thatoneguyy22 inTheFirstDescendant

Users report that the elevated volume of this particular sound literally blows their ears out once the player opens the game. Seemingly, it’s just an incredibly annoying problem, that should hopefully be fixed soon.

This is something the studio can quickly fix without making it too loud. Games like Fortnite, which often surprise players with a rather loud ambient sound during the loading screen, also exhibit this type of issue.

Another obvious possibility is that players may directly lower the game’s volume, at least in this particular area, or adjust their sound system settings. The game has other, more important issues.

Reddit users quickly recalled the famous THX sound, which also had the effect of practically blowing your ears out, in response to this complaint. In general, while the game’s reception is positive, social media does not seem to be actively talking about this title. However, it still has many active players on the various platforms where it is available. This title could be more successful in the coming months.

The First Descendant is not Nexon’s first game as a service; this South Korean developer also launched Warhaven, which unfortunately did not have a favorable reception from players. This could be the studio’s opportunity to create a game that becomes quite popular and receives periodic content. The success of such a game is seen only several months after its release, when the number of active players can be verified.

What are your thoughts on this player’s complaint? Let us know in the comments!

• Lost in Play has seen its first-year anniversary arrive
• The game has been the recipient of two Apple awards
• It features a childlike odyssey filled with puzzle solving and exploration

Happy Juice Games’ Lost in Play, published by Snapbreak, is seeing in its first-year anniversary today. Winner of two Apple awards, for best iPad game in 2023 and a design award in 2024, Lost in Play features a childlike odyssey of discovery and puzzle-solving.

Lost in Play follows two siblings, Toto and Gal as they journey through a world of childlike imagination. One of Happy Juice’s key design points is their use of a simple hint system and clever design to make the game as quick-paced as possible and avoid the usual ‘pixel hunting’ elements of exploration games that Lost in Play emulates.

Happy Juice Games have definitely earned the awards and accolades that Lost in Play has been given. For our part, we contributed to this praise with our own review, with a Platinum score which is rare even for positive reviewers like us. In particular, we singled out the graphics and gameplay design as key points which drew us in.

Lost to the world

Two Apple awards, especially in consecutive years, are nothing to be sneezed at. So we’re pleased to see that Lost in Play is able to boast about it. For our part, we’re intrigued to see what Happy Juice Games comes out with next, if anything. And after the innovative approach they took with Lost in Play, our expectations are definitely high.

In the meantime if you’re looking for other top games that caught our eye, why not take a deep dive into our massive master list of the best mobile games this year (so far)?

Even better we’ve got the latest entry in our regular feature of the top five new mobile games to try this week, featuring some of the best titles to hit storefronts over the last seven days in a variety of genres.

After more than four years, the base-building, resource management sim Satisfactory got a surprise release date announcement on Friday, along with the reveal of an important feature: flushable toilets.

The short trailer shows a character having to go to the bathroom. They run and jump over obstacles before rushing into a toilet while another character stares at the camera. The release date for Satisfactory 1.0 is unveiled at the end: September 10.

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“The HUB’s once-trivial toilet has been updated with an advanced flushing mechanism, providing an extra luxurious worker experience for pioneers,” a post on Steam reads. As a fan of flushable or interactable toilets in video games, this seems like a top, extremely important feature.

The PC game is also getting a ton of updates for the 1.0 release. First up, the map has gotten many new resource nodes (places throughout the world where you can use extractors to mine for resources), along with balance tweaks on the distribution of caterium, sulfur, quartz, iron, copper, limestone, coal, and water geysers. Secondly, the dedicated servers will receive more support, including advanced settings like auto save.

There are a ton of balance updates in general, with many aimedat helping players in the early and midgame. For example, some recipe costs have been changed to make it easier to reach higher tiers, like heavy modular frames and screws for computers. Moving between tiers has also been smoothed out, with a more gradual transition for research trees.

Of course, 1.0 will introduce more optimizations for game performance. As you play through Satisfactory and build out your factory, you’ll gather a lot of assets and moving parts, which can really strain your PC. This is a common problem with city builders and base builders like Cities Skylines, and the developers at Coffee Stain have worked to reduce performance issues.

The developers say more changes are incoming as well, so fans should be on the lookout for updates.

Satisfactory has hit it big on PC since it came out in June 2020 — just a few months into COVID-19 lockdowns. It sold over a 1 million copies in the month after launch, and 5.5 million as of February 2024.

Part of the reason for its four-year-long early access concerns a switch to Unreal Engine 5, which bumped up the minimum system requirements. There have also been long development times as the developers integrated certain features and ideas, like the priority power switch to help with power issues, according to an interview in PCGamesN.

Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Don’t look down.

Waves the size of skyscrapers explode beneath me as I creep across a busted metal beam in the middle of the North Sea, suspended at the base of an oil rig that’s in the process of collapsing. I’m crawling swiftly but carefully, knees sliding on the wet metal and eyes locked on the platform in front of me. Don’t look down.

I look down. The cold sea is boiling just inches from my beam, white spray reaching up, threatening to pull me under miles of suffocating darkness and pressure. Fuck.

In Still Wakes the Deep, horror comes in multiple forms. Violent creatures stalk the walkways on thin, too-long limbs that burst from their bodies like snapping bungee cords. Human-sized pustules and bloody ribbons grow along the corridors, emitting a sickly cosmic glow. The ocean is an unrelenting threat, wailing beneath every step. And then there’s the Beira D oil rig itself, a massive and mazelike industrial platform supported by slender tension legs in the middle of a raging sea, groaning and tilting as it’s ripped apart from the inside. Each of these elements is deadly; each one manifests a unique brand of terror.

Still Wakes the Deep is a first-person horror game from The Chinese Room, the studio behind Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. The game is set in the winter of 1975 and its action is contained to the Beira D, a hulking metal maze that offers mystery, a growing familiarity and death at every turn. The rig is filled with a rich cast of characters from the British Isles, most of them Scottish. Players assume the role of Caz, an electrician on the rig whose best friend is Roy, the cook.

Still Wakes the Deep feels like a hit from the PS3 and Xbox 360 era, devoid of modern AAA bloat. It’s restrained like the original Dead Space, with a core loop that serves the narrative and vice versa. The mechanics steadily evolve without becoming repetitive or cumbersome. Its monsters are murderous but not overplayed. In Still Wakes the Deep, the horror is unrelenting but its source is constantly shifting — vicious eldritch beasts, the crumbling rig, the angry North Sea — and this diversity infuses the game with a buzzing tension until the breathtaking final scene.

The game is fully voice acted and its crew members are incredibly charming. An undercurrent of good-natured ribbing belies every interaction, and the dialogue is earnest and legitimately funny, even in life-or-death situations. This skillful sense of character development only makes the carnage more disturbing once the monsters board the Beira D.

After the oil rig drills through a mysterious substance deep in the North Sea, a giant eldritch organism takes over the structure, crunching its metal corridors and infesting the bodies of some crew members. Caz is on a mission to survive the creatures and escape the rig — and help save Roy, whose body is fading fast because he can’t get to his insulin.

Gameplay in Still Wakes the Deep is traditional first-person horror fare, executed with elegance and expertise. The action involves leaping across broken platforms, balancing on thin ledges, running down corridors, climbing ladders, swimming through claustrophobic holes and hiding from monsters in vents and lockers. There are no guns on the Beira D, and Caz has just a screwdriver to help him break open locks and unscrew metal panels, placing the focus on pure survival rather than combat. Interactive materials tend to be highlighted in yellow, so it’s never a question of what to do or where to go, but rather how to get there without falling prey to the monsters, the sea or the rig.

Each input feels perfectly precise and responsive. Climbing a ladder, for instance, requires holding RT and pressing the analog stick in the proper direction — but if Caz slips, players need to suddenly press and hold LT as well, so he can regain his grasp in a quicktime event. In these moments of sudden panic, squeezing both triggers feels like the natural thing to do. It’s deeply satisfying to clasp the gamepad as tightly as Caz is holding the rungs of the ladder, player and character completely in sync in the aftermath of a sudden scare. Still Wakes the Deep is a prime example of intuitive game design.

It’s also just a gorgeous game. I stopped short multiple times while playing Still Wakes the Deep simply to admire the crisp lines, complex lighting and photorealism of specific scenes, but every frame is dense with thoughtful and well-rendered details. The otherworldly structures littering the rig cause Caz’s vision to bubble like a melting film reel, and multicolored circles overtake the screen every time he passes too close to a pustule — it’s disorienting and eerily pretty, much like the rest of the game.

Still Wakes the Deep is an instant horror classic. It’s filled with heart-pounding terror and laugh-out-loud dialogue, and it all takes place in a setting that’s rarely explored in interactive media. Amid the sneaking, swimming, running and climbing on the Beira D, Still Wakes the Deep manages to tell a heartfelt and powerful story about relationships and sacrifice. Caz and Roy have a special friendship, but they also have family back on shore and returning to these people — alive, ideally — is a constant driving force.

Still Wakes the Deep is available now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and it’s included in Game Pass. It’s developed by The Chinese Room and published by Secret Mode.

EA has announced that it will delist three Battlefield titles from the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 digital storefronts at the end of the month. 

On July 31, the PS3/Xbox 360 versions of Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4, and Battlefield: Hardline, along with their associated DLCs, will be removed from sale. Owners of these games will still be able to play their single-player content, but online support for these titles will end on November 7. The embedded announcement post on X also includes a link to an FAQ to answer additional questions about the sunsetting process. 

While the digital PS3/Xbox 360 versions of these games are going away, Battlefield 3 will still be available to purchase on PC. The same is true for Battlefield 4 and Hardline, and these two titles will also remain on sale for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The PC/PS4/Xbox One versions will remain unaffected by today’s updates.

It never feels good to see games get removed from sale like this. The reason likely has to do with EA sunsetting online support; it wouldn’t be right to continue selling games with popular online modes if that component doesn’t work anymore. For those still logging into Battlefield matches on PS3 and 360, you’ve got a few more months to enjoy the ride.

For more on Battlefield, you can learn about how the next entry is shaping up (which is being made with help by Dead Space remake developer Motive Studios) here.