Help charity, hopefully help save some lives and get some great games too. What's not to like about the Humble Heal: Covid-19 Bundle . This is a 100% to charity bundle so neither Humble nor partners like us make anything from it, all for a good cause.

"To help how we can, we’re doing what we do best; putting together bundles of awesome games, books, and software for you to enjoy. When you pick up the Humble Heal: Covid-19 Bundle, you’ll enjoy a variety of content and the knowledge that 100% of your purchase proceeds are going to Direct Relief, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), International Medical Corps (IMC), & GiveIndia. Help save lives with the Humble Heal: Covid-19 Bundle today."

Here's just some of what you get from it:

• Into The Breach
• Baba Is You
• Undertale
• Euro Truck Simulator 2
• This War of Mine
• SUPERHOT
• Hyper Light Drifter
• Tooth and Tail
• Pinstripe
• Teleglitch
• Saints Row: The Third - The Full Package
• Titan Quest Anniversary Edition
• Stick Fight: The Game
• BioShock™ Remastered
• Portal Knights
• Wargrove
• The Witness
• Death Squared
• Crusader Kings Complete
• Dwarfs!?
• Dead in Bermuda
• Bury Me, My Love

Plus there's also a bunch of ebooks, some comics and more.

There's only one tier, so you pay to unlock the whole thing for £14.43.

If you're interested see the bundle here .

Oddventure is a crazy turn-based RPG about the misadventures of Charlie, a girl trapped in a cursed fairy-tale world.

We previously covered the launch of the Kickstarter, which at the time did not have a Linux build of the demo available. After asking the developer, they promptly put one up. As it turns out, it's using the open source Godot Engine too which we weren't aware of before! Wonderful to see more excellent looking games use it.

"Oddventure is a JRPG about the misadventures of Charlie - a nihilistic and rebellious teenage girl with anger issues and social awkwardness. Charlie searches for her troublesome brother Bonzo and ultimately for a way back home. The setting is the Kingdom of Luxia, a land straight from original Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales with a dark, Nietzschean twist."

Watch video on YouTube.com

One note: currently it seems the battle UI doesn't like the gamepad action button, so you need to use keyboard Spacebar. The developer has been made aware of this.

After playing the demo, I'm absolutely sold and decided to back it personally. It has some good quirky dark humour and an excellent style. Very intrigued to see the full game and I expect this to absolutely be a big hit when it releases in full later in 2022.

You can fund it on Kickstarter and follow on Steam . Download the new Linux demo from itch.io or Game Jolt .

Since it has already hit the goal, we've added it to our Crowdfunding Page .

Games about being homeless aren't new but they're still quite surprising when actually done well, and Hobo: Tough Life actually seems like a reasonably good experience. Note : key provided by the developer.

"Welcome to Praslav, a cold Central European city that grows even colder with the coming winter. Praslav is recovering from the political turmoil that followed the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Communist regime, which held the country in its iron grip for decades.

While most people eagerly awaited the coming of democracy and capitalism, some were unable to adapt to the new socio-economic climate. Soon they found themselves on the streets with nowhere to go.

You are one of those people."

Watch video on YouTube.com

A setting that's not particularly nice to explore but that's part of the point. For a lot of people, this is their actual life every day. Playing it for fun though feels a bit weird but video games have gone to much worse places. As rough a setting as it is, the game though is somewhat enthralling - partly because I've never experienced what these people go through, although I see it all the time even around my own area.

It seemingly has it all. A full skill system to level up, a big open world to explore, a lock picking mini-game to steal goods which drops your morale, use scratch-cards to try and win some change. Your mission is to survive, and build up your own shelter piece by piece. Your not some hero though, there's no special powers here, everything needs to be done with thought and consideration for your basic survival.

Seems it's hit a small fanbase on Steam with the most recent user reviews giving it a "Very Positive" rating.

The Linux version seems to run reasonable well, with it running mostly smoothly on Max settings but it does stutter here and there when entering new areas as it loads bits in. Overall though, perfectly playable. You can play it solo or online in co-op with friends.

You can buy Hobo: Tough Life on Steam .

Ready for some intense Dota 2? The Aegis of Champions is in play once more! Valve has confirmed that The International 10 shall return officially begin in August.

In a fresh blog post Valve mentioned The International 10 will take place this August in Stockholm, Sweden. Beginning with the Group Stage which takes place between August 5 - 8 with the big main event kicking off on August 10 and lasts until August 15.

This is quite a historic event too. Not just because it's Valve and Dota 2, and because of all the delays with this marking something of a return to normalcy for esports - but because of the prize pool. The total has been set at $40,018,195 - which makes it the single biggest prize pool in esports history (beating their own previous record). An absolutely staggering amount of money, one I can't even imagine ever seeing 1% of.

Going along with all this, Valve reiterated their plan to have content released on a more regular schedule, rather than drop everything big in one go for the Battle Pass. They will be shipping two separate events with the first in "mid-to-late June" and the next sometime after The International 10 ends. However, since the Battle Pass funding has already been done, they've added in special Supporters Clubs.

Supporters Clubs are the new way to support your favourites by buying up bundles of badges and seasonal equippable items - 50% of the sales goes to the teams and the content is directly provided by the teams.

Play Dota 2 free on Steam .

While we wait on the first major update to the co-op survival game Valheim, the team at Iron Gate have released a small patch to keep us going.

This is part of the update they teased recently, which includes a nice overhaul to some of the bigger creatures in the game including the Troll and the second and third boss. The Troll, for example, has more hair, nails and more defined muscles making it a bit scarier. Can't imagine meeting it for the first time again now, it was scary enough with the original model when you're quite new to it.

Here's the patch notes:

• Fixed smelter issue when a very long time has passed since visiting (10000 days)
• 30s Pre world save warning added
• Stone stair physics fix
• Inventory screen gamepad focus fix
• Large-creature visual overhaul (troll, boss-2 & boss-3)
• Troll ragdoll material fix
• Harpoon mechanics overhauled
• Engine updated (some stability improvements)
• Draugr archer visual fixes (1 & 2 star draugrs sometimes got the wrong material)
• Fixed issues when crafting station is destroyed while in use
• Creature group spawning adjusted to avoid spawning over total limit (in some cases)
• Credits updated
• Localization updates

Still remaining as one of the most popular games on Steam overall, not just for indies but still beating out many AAA titles months after release. Regularly seeing over 50,000 players each day, it's extremely impressive, although the player number isn't too surprising since it's sold multiple-millions.

I'm personally very excited by the upcoming Hearth and Home update which will bring in lots of new goodies. Once there's a date for it, we will let you know.

Buy Valheim on Steam .

Remember recently we had a release of the reverse-engineered GTA III and Vice City code that worked well on Linux? Which was then promptly taken down by a DMCA notice? Well, it's back.

Not the original mind you, one of the forks on GitHub has returned as the forker issued a DMCA Counter Notice and intends to actually fight it. According to TorrentFreak , New Zealand-based developer named Theo is taking a stance against this DMCA behaviour and has managed to get GitHub to restore their fork.

"It would appear that the code in the re3 repo is reverse engineered, not a straight decompilation. I believe Take-Two’s claim to be wholly incorrect if this is the case, since the code may be functionally identical, but not exactly identical, they hold no claim to the code. I do not agree with how Take-Two handles events like this,” Theo adds, referencing an earlier debacle when Take-Two targeted the OpenIV modding tool. “Taking down code that does not belong to them is abhorrent."

Honestly it amazes me companies, bigger ones especially, don't see how these projects can benefit them and instead send the lawyers. You still need to legally own each game, so it can even help boost sales and gain a renewed interest in the classics without Take-Two needing to lift a finger. So far, no reply from Take-Two on it so it might even remain online this time around.

Find it on GitHub .

Ready for more epic Sonic fan games? Following on from the Doom-powered Sonic Robo Blast 2, we also have Sonic 3 A.I.R (Angel Island Revisited) which has a big new release.

This has been in development for 9+ months, during which Linux support was hooked up in a previous preview version which is now properly live for everyone. So now Linux users can enjoy one of the best Sonic fan games around. As a reminder, we spoke to the developer of this previously who mentioned they built it "directly on top of SDL2, OpenGL and Ogg Vorbis".

I gave it a run myself today for the first time and it's absolutely brilliant:

Watch video on YouTube.com

As for what's actually new in this version (apart from Linux support), some highlights include:

- Added support for directly loading zipped mods (also including multiple mods in one zip file)
- Added HQ3x and HQ4x filters as options
- Changed the two Soft upscalers to adapt better to the actual screen resolution
- Smoother filtering for rotated sprites
- Added options for V-Sync and performance display
- Added option for muffled sound when underwater
- Added an option for the (faster) Sonic 3 version of the continue screen music
- Now using actual emulation for almost all sound effects and emulated music tracks, not just the continuous sound effects as previously
- Added an option to display the lives counter in the upper right corner
- Added a manual game controller selection
- Supporting more keys for custom keyboard bindings (see the Manual for a complete list)
- Reduced LRZ 2 boss hit points down to 8, going back to the original value of 14 is an option
- Larger parts of the cutscenes in HPZ and the start of SSZ are now skippable
- Ported over missing code for a continue screen from S&K when playing as Sonic alone
- Rendering performance optimizations, especially for OpenGL Software rendering (though Hardware is still faster)
- Script / game simulation performance optimizations
- Added support for modded Tails' tails sprites in Time Attack ghosts
- Added support for modded Discord Rich Presence texts
- Modding: Added function "Renderer.drawCustomSpriteWithTransform" for script modding
- Modding: Added function "System.hasPlatformFlag" to differentiate between mobile and desktop versions, and also "PlatformFlags" override in config.json
- Modding: Added support for preprocessor conditions like "#if GAMEAPP >= 0x21050800" so a mod can use newer update's script functions but still stay compatible with the previous update
- Modding: Added support for SMPS audio file playback via S3&K sound driver emulation

Plus quite a lot of bug fixes.

For those curious about how SEGA view fan games, the official Social Media + Influencer Manager for Sonic at SEGA mentioned on Twitter :

Hey Sonic fans - I appreciate you all reaching out with concerns over fan games and monetization! So long as no profit is involved, there is usually* no issue with y'all using our blue boy to hone your art and dev skills. *((for legal reasons I can't promise all content is ok))

Sonic 3 A.I.R. is closed-source freeware and it does require a copy of Sonic 3 & Knuckles from Steam .

Ready for your next real-time strategy (RTS)? Siege Up! from developer Denis Zdorovtsov looks like it could be good fun.

With a cute low-poly style in a medieval setting you will be building up walls, and smashing them down with catapults and various other equipment across a story-driven campaign. There's also going to be an in-game editor, full multiplayer and even some co-op missions too. Check out their older trailer below to get an idea of it:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Asking the developer about Linux support, they confirmed: "This is not going to be a problem for me, because of using Unity3d that supports Linux. I myself was using Linux exclusively during my student times, so having more than enough experience of Linux platform for supporting it."

The release is still some time away, with their current target being early December this year. One that could easily be worth keeping an eye on.

You can follow Siege Up! on Steam .

After already being available on itch.io , the free teaser for Drova - Forsaken Kin is now available on Steam and it's been upgraded for the new release.

"Drova - Forsaken Kin is an Action Based RPG filled with handcrafted open world adventures inspired by the much renowned Gothic game series. A society has discovered the power of a dead empire: to capture the spirits that govern nature and rule over them instead. However, the anger of the remaining spirits divided them. Where will you stand?"

Watch video on YouTube.com

Features:

• Dynamic World
  Journey through a lovingly crafted world filled with danger and mysteries, and witness the lasting impact your actions will have on your environment.
• A Divided Society
  Become a part of an isolated society grown from the ashes of a dead empire. Where will you stand when ambitious factions plunge the world into chaos?
• The Spirits of Nature
  Explore nature and encounter the spirits that rule it. Seal them and learn to use their power for yourself. But be prepared for the consequences of their anger to change your world.

The full version is planned to release in 2023, with this teaser being a very early slice of what to expect. The developer mentioned plenty is still to be added, graphics will be upgraded before the full game and so on - all the usual you expect from an unfinished game. Definitely worth a go now though, especially with the intriguing combat mechanics.

Now that it's on Steam, even more people can try it out who missed it on itch, plus they said the teaser on Steam has some exclusive extra content. Check it out on Steam and itch.io .