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Original Published Date: 2023-04-30
Last Updated: 2023-08-05
In my eternal quest to use OpenBSD as a platform for gaming, which it was never really intended for, I want to share the games that I have completed on OpenBSD. You could say this is meant as proof against the naysayers that look at gaming on OpenBSD with scepticism.
Define 'completed'!
I'm glad you asked. Of course, completion means different things to different gamers in today's world full of collectibles, MMORPGs, DLC etc. I have to be pragmatic here. My time with a fulltime job and OpenBSD porting work doesn't alone to play games to exhaustion. Also, the limitations of some of the commercial games on OpenBSD that don't support Steam achievements or multiplayer features that other, officially supported platforms offer, mean that I can't really 100% everything in many games.
Therefore, the working definition for 'completion' is: At least one run completed until the credits roll, regardless of any remaining side quests, DLC, or New Game+ features.
With this out of the way, here is the list of games that I have completed on OpenBSD, with intent to grow it in the future as I'm playing more and more games. If you contact me with additional completion info from your side, I will try to add this to the list - with your nickname if you want me to. Best way to reach me is probably via mastodon - @thfr@bsd.network; but there are also other ways that you can find... Or just jump on #openbsd-gaming on irc.libera.chat and join the conversation there.
Thanks to LibGDX, as well as some scripts and hints from solene@ and brynet@, I have sunken a lot of time in this revolutionary rogulike deckbuilder. I have finished runs with the 3 original characters (not The Watcher), including beating the heart several times. I have tested the daily challenges, but never really tested the custom game modes. There is a Steam DLC, as well as some interesting mods, but I haven't touched those.
Awesome game that turned a lot of heads. I've been following the DLCs some, and have played some through the DLC content of The Bad Seed. I've beaten the boss with 0 and 1 boss cell, I think even with 2 (not sure about that anymore). There are some online leaderboards and daily challenges that don't seem to work most of the time, but fortunately those aren't a core part of the game.
Another HashLink engine game, like Dead Cells. I played through the Story Mode on the normal difficulty level twice. I own most of the DLC clans, but haven't really played with them. This is a game where it's too bad that online multiplayer depends on Steam networking which doesn't really work on OpenBSD. The Cross of Vidar Expansion Pack needs some updates for the hashlink engine to support WebM video - I got it to work, but adding this to the port isn't trivial. I haven't really played the expansion content, but if you have or really want to on OpenBSD, then ping me - if there is enough interest, we can probably get it added!
Evoland comes in a bundle with Evoland 1&2 called "Evoland Legendary Edition". At least the version on Steam runs with our port of the hashlink runtime (the version on the Epic Games Store doesn't seem to work, sadly). I've played through all of Evoland 1 which is a short and sweet game, but nothing spectacular. It seems like the consensus is that Evoland 1 is meh and Evoland 2 is much more worth the time. I haven't played Evoland 2 yet though...
A neat "Zelda-like" form 2022, made with FNA. It isn't too deep, but the story is charming and gamecontroller support works well enough to make this worth it for a weekend or less. I don't think there's much in terms of DLC or the like, so this is pretty straightforward to report on.
Nice little puzzle platform game; one of the first ones that I completed on OpenBSD in around 2018-2019. It's made with FNA. There is some New Game+ kind of extension of the game, with new or more difficult levels that unlock after the credits roll, as far as I remember. I didn't really touch those, but made it to the credits. I'm currently working my way through Escape Goat 2...
Update (2023-05-03): Inspired by my own write-up and ensuing discussion, I just finished Escape Goat 2 as well... Haven't 100%'ed it, but escaped the tower and watched the credits roll...
Played through this one on a twitch stream, I think. It's easy to run with scummvm from ports. A true point-and-click adventure game classic, and old enough that there isn't any DLC or New Game+ or the like.
This one is also an FNA game. A reimagination of the Castlevania-style games of yore, with the (surprisingly uninteresting) twist that the levels are randomized for each playthrough. Not a roguelike or anything like that. It was a decent play experience, though I found that the leveling up and getting better gear became boring in the last third of the game. Of note, I completed the game shortly after release, and there have been a few updates since, so maybe it's gotten a little more polished since then.
This one is a bit of an outlier, as the only way to play it is in the browser via HumbleBundle's HumblePlay. It's still a decent experience on OpenBSD and the game is just so great that I've finished a couple of runs. With the dependency on the the code loading through HumblePlay, it remains to be seen for how long this will remain available.
This one was kind of weird and campy, but also surprisingly fun for a game that I had never heard of and that clearly was made with a lot of heart and ambition, but showing a lot of rough edges. The turn-based, squad-style combat is fairly basic, but the overall decent 3D graphics make up for it. It was nice to play through, but I have a tough time recommending it because the very indie, XBLIG nature of the game is really not hidden at all. There is a successor, "Miasma 2: Freedom Uprising", but that one has noticeable graphics bugs on OpenBSD last I checked.
Another nice one for a day off or so - a B-movie style zombie story filmed with camera, spiced up with Quicktime events. The humor and heart that went into this make this fun, despite the overly simple game mechanics.
Not sure if this game even has an actual ending, so I'm making somewhat of an exception for this one. I haven't seen credits outside of the menu, but I doubt that there is an ending with credits. I've sunken dozens of hours into it, built out a large farm, beat the mines, checked out some unlockable territory (I think the "oasis" or desert is another dungeon after the mines). So I'm adding this one because it feels to me like I've exhausted the game more than most other games on this list.
Note this was in around 2018-2019 and Stardew Valley has seen many significant updates since then. Some technical issues have cropped up with the switch to dotnet as the default runtime, but as of the time of writing, the GOG downloads include a MAC 32bit build that uses mono and still works.
This was a very interesting one. Definitely adventure game vibes, but rather than clicking through a series of dialogues and interactions, this is a series of murder scenes, tasking you as a detached observer to gather all the clues and explain the events that happened - what happened, who did it, how are the people related, where did events occur. The game got a lot of critical appraisal which I find amazing, given that the art style is... not exactly pretty. It is serviceable, yes, but the character portraits and colors have a bit of an odd character to them. The game has been compared to Return of the Obra Dinn in more than 1 place, which is a game that I have never played (and might never, as it doesn't run on OpenBSD sadly).
I finished the main game with all 12 scenarios (including the epilogue). I am strongly considering getting the first DLC, "The Spider of Lanka", to solve some more puzzles...
Considering the hundreds of commercial and free games that OpenBSD can run at this point, this is an appallingly small number of games. I haven't played much on other platforms in recent years - the most was ~ 40-50 hours of Prey (2017) on a Windows PC, and of course 100-200h of Beat Saber...
At this point, the number of games that are runnable and enjoyable on OpenBSD is overwhelming, and I have to pick and choose what I spend my (still quite limited) time on. Some of this went into a couple of games that I played extensively, but never completed on OpenBSD, even though they run well and are definitely worth playing:
There are also games that I wish to find some dedicated time for, but that I haven't seriously tackled yet (on OpenBSD at least):
If you have more OpenBSD gaming experiences that have worked well for you (or not), then see above for how to share and I will try to add some of this to this article later!
AlaskanEmily:
Hukadan: