shocking and horrifying the player is kind of the whole point of the game

I disagree on the “shocking” part here. DDLC is psychological horror. It does have shocking moments, like the end of Act 1, but this is not the main point. It is way more about relationships than about shock moments. Sadly discussing that part of the game (the later acts…) is massive spoiler territory, so I’ll stop here.

The fact remains though, that it is a horror game, and if the end of Act 1 is already too much, then sorry, but it is only going to get worse. A lot worse. (Or, if you enjoy psychological horror: Better. A lot better.)

I don’t know if that’s still the case, but when this game launched it required you to be online while playing (despite it being single-player), and you had to login with a Ubisoft account.

Afaik you can only develop UWP apps on retail Xbox. Aka Windows Phone apps. Aka “those shitty programs with horrible UI that made Windows 8 everyone’s favourite Windows version”.

I made the mistake of buying the Europa Universalis IV base game, and getting 3 months of subscription for all DLCs… Im playing the Anbennar mod, which is a fantasy total conversion of the game. There goes the little bit of spare time I still have…

They only mention “payment processors”, not Visa, MasterCard, PayPal,… So, this does not answer which payment processor(s) are behind the push.

Sorry for being pedantic, but the only confirmed information in that article is “payment processors”. The author seems to just assume that this means credit card companies (what is a reasonable assumption, as said), but it does not sound like that part is confirmed…

Are there trustworthy sources that it’s VISA/MasterCard, or is this speculation?

I mean, I would not be surprised at all, since they have a history of misusing their power (iirc they were the reason OnlyFans nearly went SFW), but before calling names, I’d like to be certain.

This article has a screenshot listing some removed titles (and I think also a link to the original source): https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/07/valve-gets-pressured-by-payment-processors-with-a-new-rule-for-game-devs-and-various-adult-games-removed/

Near-Mage. It’s a point-and-click adventure from the same studio that also made Gibbous, and set in the same world. However, the theme is much lighter. Gibbous was (while still a comedy) about cosmic horror. Near-Mage is fantasy.

While I definitely recommend the game, it is lacking a bit when it comes to riddles. Most point-and-click adventure games have lots of them, where you need to think, give up, and then just try random stuff until something happens. This is almost completely missing in Near-Mage… There is almost always a quest goal that directly tells you what to do - up to the point that situations that give you a choice are explicitly marked as such.

On the other hand, just like Gibbous, the game is beautifully drawn and animated, and all dialogues are fully voiced. The characters are likeable and - call me a furry if you want - really cute. What keeps me playing is mostly the world - there is always new stuff to discover, even in late-game, and the mix of fantasy and (what I assume to be) Romanian folklore is great.

I now have run into the issue that I myself cannot play Minecraft on my Linux laptop, which is an ARM machine and the ARM Mali GPU does not support the OpenGL version that Minecraft requires. (It also needs some hackery, as the Java-written Minecraft uses some native code libraries.)

I’m now playing VoxeLibre instead, which runs mostly fine on my laptop.

This. So much this.

The “backlog” is not something to work through, it is a lesson to learn: Do not buy a game unless you have time and are motivated to play it that very moment. If you buy it to play it “later”, or “next week”, you very likely are not going to play it, and it is just wasted money.

(The same is true for books, by the way. And when it comes to books, I refuse to learn this lesson.)

What is stopping you from playing Minecraft itself on Linux?

I haven’t played it in a while, but it did work perfectly fine last time I tried it. It is written in Java, after all.

Oh, and just in the moment I hit send, I remembered another gem from the olden times:

Unreal World: Basically the survival game. 99% of today’s survival games are just a pale shadow of this. I mean, nowadays there are even “survival” games without hunger mechanics or proper simulation of wounds… No, this is not one of those easy mode survival games. This is Fantasy Finland, and it’s the Fantasy Iron Age. Available for free or, if you want updates faster, also for money on Steam.

If I weren’t currently at work and would have time to think about the answer, I could probably come up with more titles, but those are the top 2 that come to mind, if I ignore cRPGs (at least that’s how I read your “avoiding final fantasy-esque” requirement):

Settlers 2: It’s new enough to still look decent by today’s standards, and has amazing game design. Available at GoG.

Star Control 2: One of the best early open world games. The graphics have definitely aged by today’s standard, but the humour hasn’t. Or maybe it has, but just a bit. Available for free and open source.