Whenever someone says [i]secret[/i] then the Secret Area theme from the BattleBlock Theater soundtrack starts playing in my head immediately.
That said, don't buy.
The people who publish the remaster seem to be of the opinion "[i]Buying Isn't Owning[/i]" and I don't think I need to say the silent part out loud.
The Behemoth has become one of Those™ companies.
This game has [i]had[/i] a Linux version since forever.
Now they've released a remaster, which obviously is great.
Except for the part where they dropped the Linux version, but silently.
First of all, there is no announcement of it, second the icon is still on the store page, and of course every device who had it installed will just be unable to start it unless you manually turn on Proton because this game naturally is registered as a Linux game in all relevant systems.
So you install the Linux version and you get PE [i].exe[/i] and [i].dll[/i] lying in a directory on a machine supposed to work with ELF binaries.
Oh, wait, I stand corrected.
They removed all files in a later update, probably to prevent people from being confused about it not running, because obviously it won't.
So of course, person that I am, I write their support.
Telling them they shipped the Windows version on the Linux depot.
Could be an honest mistake.
They tell me there is no Linux version.
I remind them that it's still advertised as Linux all over on the store page, and that they could just.… y'know.… put the old version on a "beta" branch, like many other games do.
At this point they're actively deceiving customers who buy it thinking it's a Linux game, so like.… do [i]something[/i].
But nah.
So what's the moral of the story?
The old game still ran on my machine just fine.
They removed that, without giving me a replacement that runs on my machine.
[b]TL;DR:[/b] If buying isn't owning, .… you know how this goes.
Are you thinking about commenting on this?
If so, please read this bit here before commenting.
The big point I'm making here is not that having a version run directly on Linux is better.
If you want to argue that a Linux version is much effort or has been made obsolete by Proton then you missed the point.
You're also provably wrong, but you really did miss the point of this review.
Whenever a game dev releases a game which does not run directly on Linux, then that's just a reason for me not to buy that game (and it's a pretty big reason so most of those games I'll never even consider buying).
However if you make a game with support for Linux, and I buy it [i]because[/i] of that, then you are simply not allowed to remove that support.
I bought a game, with my money, because it ran on Linux.
If that game stops running on Linux for technical reasons after it stops getting updates and patches.… sure, that's okay (y'know, like how you can't run games made for Windows 95 anymore without modification either).
If that game has its support actively removed however, that is the developer doing something bad.
It doesn't matter that games run faster without an extra translation layer, or that Proton still requires me to alt-tab out of a game twice because of the way it handles focus.
All of those are issues that exist, but they're not the point of this review.
The point of this review is that a developer went ahead and removed something I paid money for, and I'm not okay with that, and I encourage everyone else to not buy anything from that developer again because they signaled to us that they don't care about customer rights.
If they cared about customer rights but were unable to continue supporting Linux they could've, as I mentioned, provide a version branch for the old version.
Just look at Stellaris' version branches; you can play practically every version back until 2.1.3 (current is 4.3.4).
If a developer (or publisher, mind you) refuses to make the old version of the game accessible despite removing it for some users (and I have an auto-updated empty directory on my disk named [i]BattleBlock Theater[/i]) then that's that.
Stop giving that developer (or publisher) money.
Period.
If you comment on this review trying to defend the change in any capacity, then try defending [i]this[/i] instead of throwing out a generic "but Proton exists".
Also please remember that I've been using Linux exclusively for the past half decade, and primarily for three times that.
If you're trying to give me any technical arguments then the chances are I can invalidate those arguments in less than two sentences.
Spend your time doing something you like doing instead, play Slay the Spire 2 or Baldur's Gate 3 maybe?
Those even have Linux versions [i]including mod support[/i], and they probably invalidate the point you were trying to make <3
