Songs of Styx DEMO on Linux (with Steam)

If you have not yet checked out https://songsofsyx.com/ it's an interesting game. You might find it to be amazing or maybe you think it's an ugly indie game. Nevertheless, you should check out their free demo on Steam and play the tutorial.

If you can get it to run.

One early evening I was craving some Anno 1800, but my almost dead Windows 10 drive freezes/crashes when I try to start that very awesome software called Ubisoft Connect (or whatever it is called right now). Even re-installing it does not fix it, well, re-installing it causes the freeze/crash to happen at the very end of the installation. Which I must say is just great. I paid quite some money to own most of the DLCs and because some base launcher software which is totally non-optional fucks up my PC makes it impossible to play a years old game. The internet suggests to re-install windows / graphics drivers / hang up some garlic and so some weird dance. Long story short, just using my Windows for Anno was not an option and I wanted to immerse myself in a fantasy world and not start figuring out how to run Ubisoft Connect on my nixOS (Linux) machine.

So I ran into Songs of Styx, which I was eye-balling for quite a while. A demo! Great. Downloaded and installed within seconds. Click play. Aaaand I am presented with an ugly Java UI saying my GPU does not support OpenGL 3.3 or something newer. Welp.

There might me some sort of super proper fix for this, but what worked for me was to simply force Proton 9.0+ to be used as compatibility layer for the demo. With this set it just works. I have not bought the full version yet to see if this happens with the regular version as well, but if you should run into this problem: The fix is to force a different compatibility layer in steam.