Love to curl up with a good book? Sarawak from Cowleyfornia Studios LLP is out now and it looks fantastic.

Text-based adventures might not be the most flashy genre but, depending on where you look, they're very much alive and well with plenty releasing all the time. Sarawak is a delightful piece of interactive fiction, so you're playing out a mystery game set in Oxford and Borneo.

Watch video on YouTube.com

"Through dialogue choices, you interact with a whimsical cast of characters who help or hinder your progress. The more you unravel, the more conflicted you become as you start to question who's lying and who's telling the truth."

The developer mentioned it will appeal to people who enjoyed the likes of 80 Days, A Case of Distrust, LucasArts adventure games or Agatha Christie novels. While a text-based novel it's not all reading though, as it's very much like a visual novel with you picking answers and it also blends in some creative puzzle solving with discovering secrets, opening locks and doors, hacking into police equipment and more so it plays like a mix of things.

Visually, Sarawak is actually quite wonderful with it's soft pastel colouring that looks like it was all done on paper. The simple styling helpfully enables your mind to wander off a bit into the setting, just like you actually would while reading a good real-paper novel. What I especially liked about it is how each scene was setup on the technical side, as it just keeps on scrolling down giving you a chance to go back up to any point in the current scene you need to. This allowed me to really get into it, and for people whose English reading perhaps isn't the best - it would allow more to enjoy it I think.

Sarawak is a great experience to sit back with a coffee as you get pulled into the mystery surrounding the story.

You can buy Sarawak on Steam and itch.io .

Valve are yet again hitting the spotlight for the wrong reasons following the ruling from the EU Commission over geo-blocking , a lawsuit involving game pricing and now the Steam Controller too.

The lawsuit involved Ironburg Inventions (a subsidiary of Corsair Gaming), who have a patent for a game controller that has back paddles and they've held the patent since 2014. According to the press release , Valve lost the case and so "the jury unanimously found that Valve Corp infringed Ironburg’s 8,641,525 controller patent and awarded Ironburg over $4 million" additionally Valve were apparently aware of it and so the infringement was "willful". Due to this, there's a potential for "enhanced damages up to the statutory limit of treble damages" so the $4 million figure is only the beginning.

Any company that wishes to have back paddles, are then required to license the tech from Ironburg Inventions Ltd which is exactly what Microsoft does for their special Xbox Elite Controller.

The Steam Controller (sadly) was discontinued back in 2019. It was my favourite controller , and I still hope they bring out a proper second generation. Perhaps this was a big supporting reason for why they no longer continued with it? Probably not though, since they're now into VR hardware instead where there's likely a lot more monies.

If they do a second generation, perhaps they will be a little bit more careful with licensing next time and I will be first in line if they do another.

Mixing together FMV with a Visual Novel adventure, The Parrot That Summons Demons will be bringing the deep, dark and unsettling story by the creators of Bloody Service to Linux.

Like a lot of games, they're going to be participating in the Steam Game Festival that goes live later today. However, their demo is already live and they mentioned to us their plan to support Linux with it which we weren't aware of. The game is currently in development and this demo features two small chapters from Samantha's timeline. Full game is going to feature multiple chapters for every member of the McCauley family.

Here's some footage from the demo, to prevent full spoilers it doesn't do the whole thing:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Features Planned:

• Cinematic Experience: Horror Visual Novel with full FMV support.
• Multiple playable characters: Play the game from the perspective of any of the four members of the family.
• Multiple Endings: Unlock every possible ending to understand more about your new pet and... Well, demons.
• Innovative Inventory System: Slots used to keep items may have an impact on narrative outcomes.
• What would Freud say?: Alexander McCauley is modeled after the father of three members of our studio (yeah, we’re six people and three of them are brothers!)

From the demo, it seems like another very promising and quite spooky adventure. The FMV is just as well done as in Bloody Service, giving a much more animated and lively feel to the Visual Novel style they use for the story-telling. It's not the kind of FMV where it's real people though, it's models with lots of effects playing on top for dramatic effect and it works.

Try it out now on Steam .

Chess, it's a classic right? So how about a nice game of Chess? I am in fact talking about Lichess, a free and open source browser-based online Chess game.

You might think it funny but until recently, I had somehow never heard of it. It's been around since 2010, starting off a simple hobby project and it has since grown into one of the most popular Chess websites around. Ten years later it's still kept the original promises of remaining free and open source and it just seems to have continually grown. If you believe Alexa rankings, it's in the top 2,000.

With close to 80K players online at the current time of writing, it's easy to see it's popular and it has every right to be. It works perfectly in any browser I tried (including mobile!), it has no adverts, it doesn't require an account, it's totally open source (even the Android build is open source), it has a ton of puzzles, it can teach you to play and so much more. Lichess is not just a browser-based Chess game, it's a huge assortment of different modes and a big community to back it up. Not only all that, you can also sit and watch games too. If that's your thing.

If, like me, you had no idea it was a thing and apparently you also live under a rock, I hope this was helpful for you.

You can play for free online, against friends and a lot more on Lichess.org .

Ready for your next story-based RPG? The Way of Wrath plans to fully support Linux and it's currently seeking funding on Kickstarter and it does look quite good.

With an open world setting, a full story and a hand-crafted world The Way of Wrath sounds rather promising. Blending together "tactical party-based combat, detailed branching dialogue and a rich, dynamic story (Baldur’s Gate, Divinity: OS) with the interactivity and immersion of 3D open-world games (Gothic, Zelda, Skyrim)".

Check out the trailer:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Planned Features:

• Classless RPG system. Customize your character’s appearance, origin, skills, and reputation.
• Full RPG story experience. Solve complex quests, gather loyal companions, and befriend, antagonize, or romance interesting, characters.
• Handcrafted open world. Explore a beautiful snowy landscape and survive its environmental hazards. Hunt, fish & perform mystical shaman rituals.
• Choice & consequence. Experience the aftermath of every action and shape your story.
• Fort management. Build traps and siege equipment. Craft weapons, armor, and tools of war.
• Turn-based combat. Fight in tactical battles against foes with unique AI tactics, gear, and skills.
• Days are story turns. Each in-game day the map updates with new encounters, quests, and character storylines move forward based on previous day decisions.

Linux is clearly stated as a release platform with consoles being stretch goals:

Current platforms: PC Windows, Mac, Linux (Steam, GOG)

Stretch Goal Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Playstation, X-Box

Fund it on Kickstarter here and follow it on Steam .

They have until March 7, 2021 to hit their €23,000 goal.

Another day another acquisition with Saber Interactive / Embracer Group acquiring Aspyr Media and so we see the continuing worrying trend of consolidation in the games industry.

For those not aware, Aspyr Media are well known for their porting efforts to both macOS and Linux. For Linux specifically they ported the likes of Borderlands 2, Civilization V, Civilization VI, STAR WARS Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords and more.

From the press release:

“ I have been a fan of Aspyr for longer than I have been in the industry. Michael and Ted are true entrepreneurs that have built a business by identifying and exploiting opportunity where no one else saw it. They are a perfect fit for Embracer and I am proud to now call them partners. Together we will be able to greatly expand our development and publishing activities here in the US. Stay tuned for details on some of the amazing games we have under joint development. Today is a truly amazing day for Saber and the entire Group ” says Matthew Karch, CEO Saber Interactive and Director of the Embracer Board.

“ We are thrilled to join forces with Saber and to become part of the entire Embracer family. We are confident that Embracer is the ideal partner for us as we look to accelerate growth and execute on our exciting pipeline. We have been in the games industry for two and a half decades, but it feels like we are just getting started. We look forward to exploring opportunities to collaborate with other entrepreneurs within the wider Embracer Group to bring celebrated games to our fellow gamers around the world ” says Michael Rogers, Co-founder and CEO Aspyr.

See the full release here .

Embracer Group already owns the likes of Coffee Stain, Gearbox Software, Koch Media, Saber Interactive, THQ Nordic and multiple of those also own multiple other studios like Warhorse Studios, Flying Wild Hog, Bugbear Entertainment and quite a lot more.

A big feature players have been asking for a long time is now live in the Factorio 1.1 update, and it should run smoother than ever with big factories.

Blueprint flipping is the big headline feature here, allowing you to pretty much copy and paste creations while also now flipping them around. They repeatedly said no on it but then they wanted it and so they hooked it up in a way that only allows it for blueprints that can flip properly (preventing giving you a bunch of broken creations).

Seems to work okay too:

Lots more than just that arrived with Factorio 1.1 including:

• Spider waypoints and the ability to set spiders to to follow other things. Making controlling the big spider mechs a huge amount easier.
• Smart belt building to lock quick building into a direction, and automatic underground belt traversal. Building belts nicely has never been easier looking at it.
• Multithreaded belts to help boost performance. This will be especially noticeable in the later game stage.
• New Train Overview GUI.
• Much faster saved games.

That's just the basic gist of it, you can see the full details of the 1.1 update here .

Factorio is an absolutely incredible game and I imagine most people who've put a few hours into it will agree. Looking at Steam, it's hit over 87,000 user reviews now and still remains on an Overwhelmingly Positive rating. That's pretty amazing and so hopefully they can keep on expanding it for years.

You can buy a copy of Factorio from Humble Store , GOG and Steam .

Ready for another huge Steam Festival? It shall be returning with the Steam Game Festival, February 2021 edition. Plus there's a fresh Steam Beta that Linux users will want to try out.

For the Steam Game Festival it goes live on February 3 at 10AM PT / 6PM UTC. Much like the previous festivals, it's all about giving developers a chance to showcase their upcoming games. There's going to be tons of demos across various genres for you to try, plus there will also be livestreams where developers will talk about various topics surrounding their games from development to live gameplay.

Watch video on YouTube.com

As usual, we shall be going over to find all the Linux demos worth taking a look at so be sure to come back to GamingOnLinux on February 3 to see what we liked.

You can follow the event page here .

Now onto something related: there's a fresh Steam Client Beta available as of January 30 which polishes up the shader cache and processing system on Steam. This is the feature that is supposed to make games smoother, so it's worth giving it another go. Here's the changelog :

• Fixed a bug where processing Vulkan shaders would run out of memory on NVIDIA Pascal cards and older
• Re-enabled Vulkan shader processing on NVIDIA
• Fixed a bug where NVIDIA shader cache files above 2GB couldn't be loaded
• Greatly improved memory usage and disk I/O when processing NVIDIA cache files (requires driver 460.x or newer)
• Updated to latest Fossilize, picking up some general memory usage improvements

After a new online experience to play with friends and one that's free to play? Untrusted is a new social deduction hacking game with two sides facing off. Now available in Early Access, developer evolvedlabs plans to keep it there until Q2/Q3 this year so they can thoroughly test it with players.

Inspired by the likes of Werewolf / Mafia and other similar types of games with support for 10 to 16 players to join a game online. The idea is that hackers from the fictional NETSEC group are tasked in hacking a specific server on a computer network, while there's a few AGENTS try to arrest them or convincing players to snitch on others. There's a few ways to each side to win and it sounds quite interesting.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Feature Highlight:

• Hacking themed game focused on social interactions.
• Hack into computers and analyze their log to find out who is telling the truth
• Keep your personal log and cross-reference data to find out who are the undercover agents
• Multiple winning conditions for both factions: hack or murder your way to victory.
• 2 Factions and many neutral classes
• 22 Unique classes
• More than 70 unique skills
• Unlock avatars and badges as you win

Find it free on Steam .

The developer added in an official GamingOnLinux avatar, so you can show off a bit if you wish. This needs to be done by redeeming a special code and we have lots to give away for you below:

[giveaway]26[/giveaway]