Perhaps your prisoners in Prison Architect fancy growing something to pass the time? Give them the gift of green in Prison Architect - Going Green and The Glasshouse free update out now.

Most prison tend to a look a bit…depressing. Grey, lots of walls and just terrible. Now though you can give them a splash of colour and of course all this growing comes with its own type of contraband because no prison can apparently be without some kind of special herbs. Here's the list of what's new in the Going Green DLC

• Fruits of Labor: Farming introduces a new type of Prison Labor, allowing prisons to grow potatoes, wheat, apples, and more. Produce can be exported or used as ingredients for inmate meals.
• Room to Grow: Three outdoor rooms facilitate farming: Fruit Orchard, Farm Field and Vegetable Allotment. But that’s not all, players can recruit staff Farm Workers, build a Pantry to store produce, and construct a Shed to house farming-related items.
• Best Buds: Inmates who enjoy nature’s beauty can grow flowers and other plants recreationally. Gardening affects inmates and gives them a positive recreation activity.
• Trouble is Brewing: With new crops comes new contraband. Prisoners can now secretly grow herbs in the fields and swipe kitchen ingredients to brew Booze. Fields can also become Gang Turf, so keep your guards on alert!
• A Greener New Deal: Prisons get an eco-friendly makeover with Solar, Wind, and Solar/Wind Hybrid power sources. Excess power created by these sustainable methods can be sold back to the grid using the Power Export Meter.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Meanwhile there's also The Glasshouse free update that everyone who owns the base game sees. Here's the highlights of what's free for you all:

• New Recycling System
  • Includes new Recycling Bin object

• New Quick Rooms
  • Yard, Grove, and hedge maze

• 2 New dog types
  • Shepherd
  • Bowtie Bandit

• Community improvement: dump/demolish
• Community improvement: Objects Menu Sorting Methods
• Staff alerts
• Job Menu optimization

According to their Twitter team, it should also be having a Free Weekend on Steam so you can try before you buy all weekend long. It's not live yet though it seems as of time of writing but expect it soon.

You can buy Prison Architect from GOG , Humble Store and Steam .

Coming later this Summer the one-woman studio 2054 will launch The Sundew, a dark cyberpunk, retro-styled adventure game. Set in the aftermath of a devastating future war, where the world as we know it was twisted by flames into a terrifying new dystopia, The Sundew follows a lonely beat cop who soon holds the fate of the world in her hands.

"After several years of work and many adventures, The Sundew is finally about to see the light of day. I see this game as a world that players will be able to enter, followed by other games in the same universe. My greatest joy will be to see the players take over this world and make it their own!" - Agnès Vuillaume, solo developer of The Sundew.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Inspired by classic point-and-click adventure games from LucasArts and Wadjet Eye Games, The Sundew pays homage to those with its gameplay mechanics, style, and storytelling. Beautifully drawn pixel-art, stunning minimalistic sound design, environments brimming with atmosphere and interactivity, and a compact, thrilling tale brings this dark future to life and grounds you in a vision of humanity’s progress that is both alien and strangely familiar…

What to expect from it (apart from confirmed Linux support!): alongside classic point-and-click gameplay The Sundew will ask you to make decisions that will change the future of humanity. Playing off contemporary issues, the choices offered are never black and white. Where do you believe mankind’s interests lie, and what means are acceptable to achieve them?

Features

• Guide Anna Isobe, a cyborg cop with a dark past, through the unravelling of a global conspiracy.
• Experience a diverse cast of characters, each with their own secrets and history.
• Explore Shibukawa and the remnants of the old world.
• Make decisions that will change the fate of humanity, for better or worse.

You can wishlist / follow on Steam .

Major updates are going live for Valve's free to play MOBA with Dota 2 nowhaving a CS:GO styled Overwatch mode designed to help sort through all the reports of player behaviour.

Sadly, Dota 2 (and many other online games) end up with a lot of poor behaviour from players. From shouting down microphones, to using every possible slur they can think of in the text chat. It can easily ruin games, and it is quite a big problem.

As noted in the blog post this new Overwatch system allows players to review cases giving them a replay that might show off "negative" behaviour from a certain player, and then choose if that player is "guilty, not guilty, or insufficient evidence".

Eligible players will occasionally be notified below their profile pictures that they have the option to review a case. Reviewers will earn an accuracy score for their efforts, and those who falsely convict will receive a lower score, eventually losing the ability to participate in Overwatch at all. To gather a pool of reliable reviewers, we’ll be enabling a growing number of accounts for participation over the next week or so.

Reporting people has changed in Dota 2 now too. You can report other players directly from the scoreboard, or by selecting someone and clicking a flag on their portrait and you can place markers to show where reviewers can look for it. The system allows multiple reports too so it all adds together to add more evidence.

In another blog post earlier this month, Valve also announced the return of the Dota Pro Circuit for the Winter 2021 season and it's going to have six straight weeks of daily action. To help with this they've also revamped the experience of watching games directly inside Dota 2. You can see a schedule in-game, and see what's currently going on plus more like follow teams directly.

Additionally, Valve will be adding in a way to support your favourite teams in Dota 2 competitive by purchasing some branded cosmetics like in-game effects, sprays, emotes, loading screens and (of course) chat-wheel lines.

Wasteland 3 from inXile Entertainment has a big new free update out with the Robots & Rangers" patch, and it's looking to be a good one for all players.

"In Wasteland 3 you take command of a squad of Desert Rangers, lawmen and women in a post-nuclear world, trying to rebuild society from the ashes. More than a century after the bombs fell, you’re fighting a losing battle to keep your beloved Arizona alive. Then the self-proclaimed Patriarch of Colorado radios, promising aid if you'll do a job he can only entrust to an outsider—rescue his land from the ambitions of his three bloodthirsty children."

Originally released in August 2020, the Linux version came just before the year was up in December and since then they've clearly been busy on fixing up bugs and expanding the game elsewhere. Here's what's new in 1.3.0 "Robots & Rangers":

• New difficulty mode: Tourist - Tourist mode is easier than Rookie, letting you enjoy Wasteland 3’s story, with combat difficulty taking a back seat.
• New cosmetics! New Hair, Beards, and Pants have been added to character creation.
• The Handmade Wizard and Knight costumes will let you roleplay all your Robots & Rangers fantasies. Once players in have completed the quest 'Cornered Rats' they will find that a lootable crate has been delivered to Ranger HQ, outside of the base structure, near the transition waypoint that leads to Downtown Colorado Springs. Equip the costumes at the wardrobe in Ranger HQ or the clothing shop in Downtown Colorado Springs ... and attack the darkness!
• Intelligence now gives +1 skill point for every point of Intelligence spent, up from +1 every other point. This change applies retroactively to existing save games.
• The Book Learnin’ and Answering Machine achievements are now achievable.
  Note: The missing Book Learnin’ note becomes available after passing a Leadership skill check when first meeting the Patriarch and then speaking to Magistrate Silas Watkins in Downtown Colorado Springs.
  The missing cassette tapes "Kidnappers in Trouble" is in the Gett Family Homestead in a new container. "A Proposal" is in the Machine Commune, just west of Vivisecto.
• More actions are now able to be bound to keyboard and mouse, most notably camera panning. The game will also unmap double-bound keys to prevent input conflicts, and warn you about missing keybinds before you leave the menu.

There is quite a lot of additional bug fixes, a few improved animation and sound effects, a balancing pass, UI updates and the list of smaller details goes on that you can see in full here .

Note: for the Linux version, it's been reported that on AMD GPUs you may need to turn off Ambient Occlusion to prevent graphical glitches. Hopefully that will be solved in either a Wasteland 3 patch or a later Mesa driver update. There is an open bug report that needs more testing for AMD GPUs on the Mesa bug tracker.

You can buy Wasteland 3 from GOG , Steam or the Humble Store .

Epic Games don't support Linux with their store, so the community continues building around it with the Heroic Games Launcher that can run plenty of games from the Epic Store. It does so thanks to the power of the Wine compatibility layer, giving you as many options as possible to keep on gaming on Linux no matter where your games are from. A great free and open source project.

New features added in recently released versions include: the ability to repair installed games, notifications support, a tray icon with the ability to close to the tray, it will remember the filters used, a warning on closing when downloading, a download time estimate on game pages, styling tweaks for light and dark themes, new options to enable extra features like MangoHud, the ability to add launch options and more.

Here's what it currently looks like:

The amount of improvements and overall work going into the Heroic Games Launcher really is impressive. It seems to be quite smooth, and makes using the EGS mostly painless.

Note: while it currently supports the Epic Games Store thanks to using another bit of open source named Legendary , they do have plans to expand to cover other stores too so that it can become an all-in-one solution for gaming on Linux. So, eventually it might be a bit like Lutris.

Find it up on GitHub .

Need to be on the bleeding edge of what NVIDIA have to offer? They just released driver version 455.50.03, as part of their Vulkan Beta Driver series . This is actually the second driver released this month, with 455.50.02 appearing on January 19. Here's a look over all that's new in them together.

Today's 455.50.03 release adds in support for these new Vulkan extensions:

• VK_KHR_workgroup_memory_explicit_layout
  • This extension adds Vulkan support for the SPV_KHR_workgroup_memory_explicit_layout SPIR-V extension, which allows shaders to explicitly define the layout of Workgroup storage class memory and create aliases between variables from that storage class in a compute shader.
• VK_KHR_zero_initialize_workgroup_memory

  • This extension allows the use of a null constant initializer on shader Workgroup memory variables, allowing implementations to expose any special hardware or instructions they may have. Zero initialization is commonly used by applications running untrusted content (e.g. web browsers) as way of defeating memory-scraping attacks.

The January 19 release with 455.50.02 added support for linear images in host-visible video memory, had two Windows bug fixes and one for Linux to fix "an issue with OpenGL where imported Vulkan buffers would fail with GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY when marked as resident".

Reminder: This special Vulkan beta driver is where all the shiny new stuff goes in before making its way into the stable release for everyone. Really, it's mostly aimed at developers and serious enthusiasts. Unless you need what's in them, it's generally best to use the stable drivers.

The newest stable versions of the main NVIDIA driver for Linux are at 460.32.03 released on January 7, 2021 from their "Production Branch" series or 455.45.01 released on October 17, 2020 from their "New Feature" series. Confused?

Scarlet Hood and the Wicked Wood is going to take you on an adventure that loops over with twists and turns, featuring a narrative time-loop like some kind of Groundhog Day. Developed by Devespresso (The Coma & The Coma 2) and published by Headup, it sounds pretty Oz-esque and amusing with the recognizable Devespresso Games manhwa-style.

Initially starting off in Early Access, they've now announced it will begin on February 10. The roadmap to release suggests the final version will be live in March with one third of the story chapters already available. They're using Early Access mainly to ensure the full release is nice and smooth.

Check out the new short trailer below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

" Scarlet, the protagonist and a diva in the making, awakes in the realm of Glome after being flung over by a rogue tornado. She discovers an electrifying world brimming with magic, beauty, and artifacts from a mysterious bygone culture. Her strange journey begins when she takes up the mantle of the Red Witch and leads a troupe of Munchkins through the forbidden Wicked Wood. In a world full of riddles and wonders, she encounters witches, a tin knight, talking beasts, monsters, and many fearsome creatures to overcome."

Features:

• Survive a narrative time-loop.
• Solve ridiculous puzzles.
• Follow your own multi-path story.
• Unlock multiple endings based on your decisions.
• Ogle the hand-illustrated graphics.
• Use Scarlet's witching skills to avoid detection.

You can wishlist / follow on Steam .

Love you wild adventures? Critters for Sale is one you should take a look at because this is the second time I've played it and I still have no idea what the hell is going on.

Originally released on itch.io back in 2019 which I mentioned here , and a contributor also took a look later, it's now seen a first episode release on Steam with Critters for Sale: SNAKE. It's so bizarre! A point and click visual novel adventure, one that's black and white with a bunch of animated scenes in the middle of the screen.

Watch video on YouTube.com

"Critters for Sale is a compilation of 5 short stories: Snake, Goat, Monkey, Dragon, and Spider. All of which occur in different eras and locations, touching on themes like time travel, black magic, and immortality. A journey in which you meet characters familiar and foreign to you, ranging from inhabitants of a garden in Earth's orbit, aliens from Neptune, Noid Men from neighbouring timelines, and residents of a certain Reincarnation Palace. "

I don't want to spoil it so I will just say it's truly strange and I still don't understand it. Very unique idea, although I'm not really sure how legal including a real person is in a game in this way…you'll know what I mean if you try it. It's short too, so you won't lose much time by giving it a go and seeing if you like diving into something psychedelic.

Try out the first part free on itch.io and Steam . The full game with all episodes is currently due to arrive on Steam on June 3, 2021.

Note: The Linux version appears to still use an old Unity version, which has issues on NVIDIA GPUs. If you see distortions at the bottom of your screen, the easiest fix is just to add this as a launch option which makes it work perfectly:

-force-glcore42 -force-clamped

For regular Linux gamers, Lutris is pretty much a household name by now. For those that aren't - Lutris is a game manager allowing you to sort through all your games from various stores.

Not only that it also allows you to manage emulators for your favourite classics, Windows games using the Wine compatibility layer and quite a lot more. It's very useful and they continue polishing up the overall experience after a huge update went out late last year.

The latest v0.5.8.3 is a small one which has these fixes:

• Really fix popovers not showing on Wayland without making them non-modal
• Prevent GStreamer based configuration from being applied in incompatible
  wine builds.
• Fix crash when wine runner accesses DXVK versions before they are
  uploaded.
• Prevent init dialog from being closed while it downloads the runtime.

The project itself has been going through some changes recently too, and not everyone has been happy about it from all the discussions I've seen. Lutris is an open source project available on GitHub and the team ended up closing both issue reporting and pull requests for normal users last year, as explained in a Patreon post , to allow them time to sort through everything due to both the amount of requests coming in and patches being offered that didn't align with their goals and all sorts of reasoning.

Now though it's back open as of a few days ago , although contributors who want to submit patches and pull requests now need to adhere to a Contributor License Agreement which can be seen here . Seems pretty reasonable, mostly reminding people to get their code tested properly.