Life is Strange is now on Linux (Square Enix game) | Hacker News Reader

Life is Strange is now on Linux (Square Enix game)

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168 pointsekianjo62 comments

Another hit indie game just recently released on Linux is Undertale, which you should have bought months ago: http://store.steampowered.com/app/391540/

If you have any familiarity with video game/RPG tropes, Undertale will be your favorite game. It's made by one developer, and the game is better than Life is Strange IMO, although both are very good.

You have just made my day!

(Was planning on picking it up eventually, but hadn't figured out how to negotiate stealing my wife's Windows laptop for a week straight. Now I don't have to! ^_^)

Irrelevant now, but it's worked great in Wine since it was released. Undertale is one of my favorite games of all time, I'm sure you'll love it :)

I got close to installing Windows just for this reason too, but held back because I read that a port was in the works. Super excited to finally play it!

I might be one of the only people who didn't love this game. It was an alright game, but I guess I just wasn't a fan of the style. It all just felt a bit too 'lel i'm random, look, skeletons and robots who think they're on TV shows'. It had some great mechanics that I wouldn't want to spoil for anyone, as well as a great soundtrack. It just didn't click with me like it did for others.

That's perfectly fair. The game's style is based on Earthbound, which had the same issues.

I enjoy playing this game but I cant seem to find a way to make my story save to the cloud via steam. I switch between playing FTL at home and work (during lunch) seamlessly but Undertale doesnt allow for that as far as I can tell.

The game file does not save to Steam Cloud. (Steam Cloud is used by the game, but for something else)

My son has been big into Undertale for a good while now. Since we don't have Windows anywhere, I installed it and run it via wine. It's one of those apps that worked under wine absolutely flawlessly.

> Life is Strange: a Groundhog Day Simulator

I'd actually buy an actual Groundhog Day game. Like a sequel to the film set in the early nineties, wandering around rural Punxsutawney, waking up with Cher on the radio each day until you fulfil the main objective after completing all the daily side-quests.

Arguably, almost any Idle game is a Groundhog Day simulator. You end up doing almost exactly the same thing again and again, but improve over time as you gain in experience and understanding...

But Majora's Mask, is the most obvious one. You have three days to stop the moon from crushing you, and you restart whenever that happens.

This is the game that taught me time management skills as a wee lad. I think it has held up remarkably well after all these years too.

Just curious, this is one of my most downvoted comments and seems pretty innocuous, would love to know why it seems so objectionable? What am I missing?

Not sure. Perhaps misinterpretation of what you mean by Idle game (usually people mean that genre of silly Flash games where you don't do anything, just watch) or (less likely) grammar sticklers who see inappropriate use of the horizontal ellipse (i.e., …) as laziness?

Idle Game / Incremental Game

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_game

One of the best known is Cookie Clicker

There is one called "Garbage Day" but I can't recommend it since the developer doesn't seem to have enough interest in developing it.

If you liked Life is Strange, there was a manga from a few years ago that was recently made an anime called 'Erased' (boku dake ga inai machi).

Without any spoilers, it's about a boy who transports back in time after particular traumatic events occur, preceded by the appearance of a blue butterfly.

He then has to solve why he was returned to that point in his life while making choices that affect future outcomes in sometimes unintended ways, armed with the knowledge he gains in each repetition.

This game was interesting in that you become really powerful, like the traditional video game protagonist, but you are bested not by literal monsters but by an increased awareness of the suffering of people around you. You solve problems by being there for people and guiding them with your insights. Really perspective changing for me; realizing there are constant opportunities to help other people that are mostly ignored.

Well said. I don't remember where I heard this, but it's been said that time travel is really a secondary super power to the player's empathy in this game, and I whole heartedly agree.

Fantastic game. If you haven't already, you should give it a try.

I think the first episode is for free since a few days ago, so there is no reason to not checking it out

The first episode is free indeed - but it's not the best one. It gets MUCH better in second and third episodes.

http://www.lifeisstrange.com/free

For sure.

still a good place to start though ;)

Way to go, Dontnod! This is an amazing indie-movie-flavored game that you should definitely try out if you want some Heathers-meets-Donnie-Darko awesomeness.

I second the recommendation. Excellent game.

It's hella good!

This is one of my favorite games of the last few years. It's similar to Telltale's walking dead in that it's an interactive, story based game, with an interesting mechanic thrown in that helps make this more unique than other games in the genre.

If you like games with a strong narrative, I can't recommend it enough.

Support for game on linux is improving, but there is still few people playing on linux. Sales on linux are so sparse, I wonder if porting games on this plaform is profitable.

If you look at the long tail, it's probably profitable, but for now I am guessing it's not a very lucrative business, compared to developing for other platforms.

What happened here is that there are third party porters (in this case Feral) who take all the hassle off the devs hands, so that it's likely a small chunk of free money for Squenix to have their games ported (this is their fourth so far, and a Linux Hitman is apparently in the workds).

Depends on the choices you make architecturally. If your game uses libraries available cross-platform (i.e., Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux (and thus SteamOS), but optionally also Android and IOS for games suitable for mobile) and your software build doesn't make any hard OS-choices, making your game available on each platform capable of supporting your game is almost always profitable, because the overhead is mostly taken care of by the libraries used, and what remains (some development, quality assurance, support) is easily covered by the added sales.

If on the other hand you use libraries or in-house code that is not that portable, the profitability of making your game available on other OS'es is a matter of a couple of factors. Is the game good enough to garner enough sales to cover porting? Is the market saturated or is the game rather unique on the target platform? Does the game have lasting appeal so it can sell for years? How much will porting cost?

These questions are not unique to Linux, this holds true for Mac OS X as well.

There are benefits to having your game on Linux too; because there are less games available on the whole (although I am not complaining as an avid gamer on Linux) the market is less saturated than on Windows. So depending on the genre you are publishing in and the quality of the game, you may very well sell more copies per capita than on Windows.

What's more important is toolsets that make porting easy or trivial. A lot of Unity projects are very easy to build for a linux target. The Humble Bundle often has linux games (though less-so than when they started).

I've noticed it's only the Humble Indie Bundles specifically that all the games have Linux versions. I've also noticed that they don't happen as often as they used to.

It's funny how it started as a kind of charity / publicity thing and switched over to being a store that runs slightly unusual promotions.

Well HB has decided to go for the quick buck by focusing on more bundles for Windows than anything else. Too bad they lost the multiplatform aspect in the way.

Really? What about the books and comics? I doubt that they are out to make a quick buck, since the sliders for developers, charity, and HB still exist on every bundle. I think they wanted to do this more often, so they had to broaden their lineup.

The Humble Indie Bundle usually has all games available on all three major desktop OS'es as a matter of rule.

In addition to this, they are now offering a lot of other bundles as well, such as ebook bundles or bundles with games from a single developer. The latter often include Windows-only games.

It would help if Linux games actually worked on Linux, instead of only on single version of Ubuntu that's usually a few years out of date, and you have to have libraries X, Y and Z installed, only it won't tell you this, so have to trawl through various support forums. And god help you if you're running something truly bizarre, like Debian.

I usually have more success running the Windows version through Wine than I do running the Linux version. I wish I was joking.

That's interesting, I run one of the more esoteric mainstream distros, Arch, and I almost never have problems with Linux games on Steam. I ran into one issue with Hyper Light Drifter and libxcb incompatibility. Otherwise, everything has just worked to my memory. I remember things were a little rougher years ago, have you tried it again recently?

> I usually have more success running the Windows version through Wine than I do running the Linux version. I wish I was joking.

Glad you find it useful! If you are able and want to support the project financially, buying a copy of CrossOver from my employer is the best way to continue funding Wine's development. Our salaries don't come out of thin air ;)

> esoteric mainstream

Is this slang for hipster?

Heh, fair enough, esoteric doesn't mean what I thought it meant. I was going for something like "unusual" or "non-standard".

That's one of the benefits of Steam as a gaming platform on Linux. It provides a standard set of libraries that games run against, which match those used on Steam OS and Ubuntu.

Occasionally a developer might use a library outside of the runtime and you could run into an issue, but as you say, 99% of the time games will work under any distro. My situation is the same as yours - I run Arch, and almost every game I've run has worked, besides a couple of small issues.

The downside of this is that you might lose out on some performance gains that you could get from newer libraries, but it's an acceptable compromise for compatibility. A lot of the times devs say they don't want to develop for Linux because it's difficult to test against every distro, but I don't think that's an issue. It's fine to test for Steam OS and the last few versions of Ubuntu, and release it for that. With Steam, it'll almost always work anyway, and if there's a few incompatibilities on more complex distros like Arch or Gentoo, users will usually be able to fix them themselves anyway.

Steam Runtime solves that issue. What you describe however happens with GOG games, since they don't have a Steam Runtime-like system to take care of dependencies.

Strange. I run Steam games just dandy on Debian Sid with little to no hassle. The Steam runtime provides a base platform with libraries to build against, which cuts down on the library rot and version mismatches that plagued proprietary gaming on pre-Steam Linux, and I find that gaming on Linux using steam now fits roughly in the 'just works' ballpark.

Sure, I'm technically on my own support-wise, but game devs haven't yet rebuffed me for not having the right OS (I submitted a bug report yesterday for Life is Strange - a GPU issue, not an OS one, and pointing out my OS - and got an encouraging reply from Feral today).

People like me probably don't help. I have a large number of games in my Steam library, and quite a few work in Linux. I'd gladly use Linux for all my computing, but there are just enough Windows-only games that I play regularly to make me keep Windows, and laziness makes me stay on Windows most of the time.

Honestly I think you'd be surprised with how well Steam and associated Windows titles run through WINE. Some are garbage, but games like Rocket League, anything by Valve, or anything by Blizzard tends to work extremely well.

Obviously the choice is yours, but it might be worth checking out if you're really interested in switching over to Linux.

I can't help but think that we have to come up with some other word for non-Android Linux. Because technically, Android is Linux, and people are playing on Android. A lot.

This was one of my favourite games of last year

I got really invested in the story and characters!

Nice game, but a bit too predictable. I liked Firewatch more, but still had a nice evening with it :)

> "Nice game, but a bit too predictable"

Same feeling here :) . Grab a friends PS3/PS4 and give a try to Beyond: Two Souls, it's a hell of a game. Similarly story-driven, but IMHO deeper and more adult.

While we're recommending indie story games, if anybody wants to try out Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, I have a couple of gift copies left that have been sitting around for too long. It's something of an interactive fairy tale.

Requires a controller (for good reason, it's designed around two sticks). If anybody wants to try it, PM your email address to wlesieutre on reddit and I'll shoot you a copy.

> Nice game, but a bit too predictable.

I felt the same. I had more fun playing The Stanley Parable.

At parts I would agree, but at least the first 2/3rds were pretty surprising for me. First episode gives this wholesome teen drama feel, and then suddenly you are dealing with serious adult moral choices that made me put the controller down and reevaluate things.

For those clicking comments to get thoughts on this game...

If you like Twin Peaks, Donnie Darko and more recently Stranger Things (on NFLX) - you should really play this. It's excellent.

How is the video card driver support on Linux these days? I tried to completely switch my home PC over to Arch Linux about a year ago but I found that it was quite difficult to get decent performance on my AMD card due to the lack of quality drivers.

Has this changed since then? Is there a better distro for gaming/driver support? There is something to be said for all of my peripherals "just working" on win10.

AMD did release new open source drivers recently, and they are much better than the old proprietary fglrx, or at least squeeze much more out of my low end GPU and have better stability and fewer glitches.

Yes and mesa support is now at OpenGL 4.3, and soon 4.5.

Strange that they've launched the linux port on Steam, but not the Mac port, which is only available on the Mac App Store.

Check again. There's a mac icon on the Steampowered page.

Oh cool, that's definitely new in the last couple days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFlMoAasW4A

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