Scarlet Hollow, a rather excellent horror-novel adventure is getting a second paid episode that will enter Early Access with Linux support on June 11. This follows on from the successful Kickstarter campaign late last year, and the free release of episode one which you can play now.

"Trapped in the dying Appalachian mining town of Scarlet Hollow for the funeral of your estranged aunt, you quickly find yourself at the center of a dark mystery that threatens your life and the fate of an entire town. Who lives, who dies, and the fate of an entire town rests on your shoulders."

Watch video on YouTube.com

Features:

• A heavily branching narrative where your choices matter . The relationships you forge and the decisions you make will dramatically alter your journey.
• Terrifying and funny. Charming characters and snappy dialogue flip to pulse-pounding horror at a moment's notice.
• A complex relationship system that changes how characters act around you. Characters don't just like or dislike you. Become friendly rivals, bitter adversaries, best friends, or mild acquaintances with everyone in town based on how you approach the story.
• Trait-based dialogue and role-playing. Scarlet Hollow's dialogue system is driven by role-playing elements that let you choose who you want to be. Are you quiet and observant? Hot and clueless? 21 different character builds change how you interact with the world and how your story unfolds.
• Original monster designs inspired by Appalachian myths and cryptids. You won't find any predictable vampires or zombies here.
• Five romance options. Whether you're into goths, dads, Youtubers, mysterious recluses, or lo-fi beats to study and water your plants to, we've got all your bases covered.
• Dozens of meticulously hand-drawn and traditionally inked backgrounds. Every background in the game is drawn by hand and inked on massive 19x24 inch paper.
• Hundreds of immersive sprites. Each major character has dozens of hand-drawn sprites that interact with backgrounds and capture a full range of lighting, emotion, environment, and outfit changes.

The plan is for the full experience to stay in Early Access until all 7 episodes are done.

Follow on Steam and play the first episode free on Steam too.

Need some more games for the weekend and the coming months? Humble are back with the Humble DeckBuild & Battle Bundle .

This bundle is quite a small one overall, with a selection that's not the best but hopefully by us highlighting it some of you might find a gem or two you've been meaning to pick up. Here's what's included with Linux-supported titles highlights for you to make it easier.

£0.72 / $1 - Thea: The Awakening

Beat the average for: Cultist Simulator and SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech

£8.65 or more to get: Imperator: Rome , NEOVERSE, Thea 2: The Shattering, Fantasy General II

The Humble DeckBuild & Battle Bundle is live for two weeks.

This is also a good opportunity to remind you of the The Humble Heal: Covid-19 Bundle , where 100% of the proceeds will be going to charity. There's tons of great games in that too with four days left.

Increlution is quite unusual and somewhat engrossing, an idle-styled game about survival and seeing how long you can last while doing various tasks.

It blends together elements of an idle game, a clicker and a text-adventure all into one package. It's a little weird but surprisingly it actually works quite well. I've been somewhat enamoured with it, keen to see more as I explore and unlock new activities. The game sprinkles in story elements too as you explore, it's just such a great idea if you love the basic idea behind it.

"Survive the ever increasing pressure of time for as long as you can! A minimalistic idle game about time management that takes inspiration from roguelite games, with a focus on meta-progression. Every generation will have better chances at survival, because previous lives influence its instincts"

Watch video on YouTube.com

Check out Increlution on Steam and try out the demo now.

The release is planned for Q3 2021, with it planned to be in Early Access for 6-18 months while the developer continues to expand what's possible with it.

Press F to pay respects. Remember the Smach Z? A handheld gaming unit where you could pick between Windows 10 and SMACH OS (Linux) - well it looks like it's all over now.

The situation surrounding the Smach Z has always been a bit of an odd one, with the team behind it often going completely silent with plenty of people out there who considered it a scam from the beginning. It's had multiple funding rounds with €474,530 from Kickstarter and a further bunch from IndieGoGo in 2016, and they had pre-orders available since 2018 too. Over time it seems they pulled in some investors too but the well has run dry.

In a forum post from the Founder, Daniel Fernandez, which isn't available to view publicly (but reposted to Reddit ) Fernandez goes on to mention how they "might soon enter bankruptcy" due to their main investor pulling out of the project and they were the only thing keeping it afloat.

Fernandez makes it clear that despite all the money, "the project was way more ambitious than the budget we were managing" and they even had aid given by their government and private investors but "after a few missteps, the investors felt forced to decide to stop supporting the project".

What does Fernandez claim are the reasons? A mixture of COVID, the charging unit failed an emissions test and problems with the batteries heating up too with continued delays that has led to this.

Will anyone get their ordered devices? Considering some have pre-ordered units for close to £1,000, it's a lot of money to lose on your dream handheld gaming device. Sadly, it looks like a no and there's only three people on their team so it's clearly not going to happen. How about refunds then? If they do declare bankruptcy, anything they have left will apparently go towards refunds. They also claim to have been providing refunds "for a very long time" already but they can no longer do it now due to the investor pulling out.

Sounds like a clear message: It's dead, Jim.

Valve / CodeWeavers have releases another update to the current stable Proton series with the 6.3-4 release.

If you're not clear on what Proton and Steam Play are, be sure to check out our constantly updated dedicated page . It's a special compatibility layer for running Windows games and apps from Steam on Linux.

Proton 6.3-4 is a small update that just focuses on fixing up a few annoyances including:

After a long time of waiting with the last proper release in 2018, the Unvanquished team have managed to do it! The next version 0.52 Beta is officially out now and waiting to be played.

What is it? A free and open source first-person shooter with strategy elements, that puts humans vs aliens. It's a fork of the classic Tremulous, think of it like the well-known Natural Selection series with both sides providing very different gameplay overall.

This marks the first Beta release too, as the team explained they "think the engine and the game experience are polished enough to remove the alpha flag and wear the beta one". The game engine used, the Dæmon engine, also saw its own dedicated blog post to explain all the advances over the last two years - as expected there's been a huge amount of changes, including a "single rounding error that was the cause of many bugs" - oops. The amount of work that went into the underlying game engine is simply marvellous, with it being more bug free and advanced than ever.

As for the game itself, the list of what's changed is just as ridiculously long. The new player experience is much improved, there's new presets for different keyboard layouts, the UI now scales with your screen resolution, there's now graphics presets to easily switch between modes, many graphics improvements and the list goes on. It's pretty safe to say that Unvanquished 0.52 Beta is like a different game.

Check it out on the Unvanquished website .

Ready for more retro-infused first-person shooting action? Viscerafest is now confirmed to be launching on May 20 into Early Access on Steam following a successful Beta. The developer, Acid Man Games / Fire Plant Games have been regularly putting out Beta builds on their Discord which have shown a lot of promise.

"Viscerafest is a Sci-Fi Fantasy Singleplayer Arena FPS with minor Collectathon elements. Fight through hordes of aliens and eldritch monstrosities wielding a slew of powerful weapons, juggling your resources, and exploring over 26 intricately designed hand crafted levels."

Watch video on YouTube.com

Features:

• Navigate nonlinear hand-crafted levels, stuffed to the brim with secrets, using key cards, completing puzzles and various objectives to progress. Set across a wide variety of locations, from a space station above the earth, to a realm beyond our reality.
• Wield 9 unique and powerful weapons, from staples of the genre like the bunker buster double-barreled shotgun, to the more unique and offbeat, such as the Pung Cannon.
• Slaughter over 2 dozen different enemy types, from the minor grunts who make up the U.S.C's forces, to monsters beyond your ability to comprehend such as The Soul Hunters. New enemy types are introduced every level, each compounding the challenges you'll face with a variety of attacks and behaviors.
• Juggle your resources, as you fight to stay alive, constantly balancing your use of ammo, health, and armor.
• Move at the speed of light, chaining bunny hopping and dashing together to move at speeds no man would dream of, and with your overbearing air control, dance around projectiles like no other.
• Collect tons of goodies to unlock items such as Cypher keys, and level modifiers to spice up your playthroughs.

The Linux version we tested before release has been running exceptionally well, we think this is one you're going to like a lot if you love arena-styled fast-paced shooters. You need some good reflexes for this one. When we say it's fast - we really do mean it. A lot of fun though punching through everyone. Ammo is limited, so you will be using your fists quite a bit. Wishlist Viscerafest and follow on Steam .

Despite everywhere you look there's always someone pointing to the Google Graveyard, the game streaming service Stadia is still soldiering on in the face of overwhelming competition.

In a new interview with GamesIndustry.biz , Stadia's developer marketing lead Nate Ahearn says the service is actually "alive and well" and went on to mention how they have over 100 new titles launching for Stadia through 2021. They're also continuing to grow their Stadia Makers program where they help Unity developers port to Stadia (with another 20 coming from that) along with continuing partnerships with many AAA studios like Capcom, EA, Square Enix, Ubisoft and others.

A while ago Google shut down the Stadia Games & Entertainment studio, which seemed like a bad sign. Following that, they lost key developers like Jade Raymond, John Justice and a bunch of other staff members recently who all joined Raymond's new Haven Studio. Were those all signs of a service in trouble? Not quite , it's pretty much just the tail-end of SG&E closing. Still, no big first-party exclusive games to pull people in isn't doing the service any favours.

Stadia, much like Linux desktop gaming, faces a huge uphill battle to actually win people over. The tech is there, it just needs a lot more games and people to actually use it. For Stadia especially, they have to fight off the upcoming Amazon Luna along with Xbox Cloud Gaming - both of which will give a much more Netflix-like subscription model rather than buying individual games.

In other news, Stadia recently finally got a search bar and more UI changes planned.

Play Stadia on Linux on Stadia.com with a Chromium browser.

After releasing upgrading their stable drivers with version 460.80 following the release of the the RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti for laptops - a new Vulkan Beta Driver is out now.

Vulkan Beta 455.50.19 is a pretty small one, here's what's changed:

• New:
  • VK_EXT_provoking_vertex
• Fixes:
  • Added support for Vulkan provisional video session picture parameters objects

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 460.80 released on May 11, 2021 from their "Production Branch" series or 465.27 released on April 29, 2020 from their "New Feature" series. Confused? It's a lot of numbers to remember but both Production and New Feature series are fine for normal use.

Note: you should probably make sure your drivers are up to date, especially after the recent security issues .

See the driver page for more .