From Devespresso Games, the team behind The Coma series and Vambrace: Cold Soul plus publisher Headup, Scarlet Hood and the Wicked Wood is their latest game out now. It's something of a time-looping adventure, starting off in modern times as your band tries to hit it big that turns into a weird mash-up of The Wizard of Oz, Brothers Grimm and Groundhog Day.

With plenty of twists and turns, a few light head-searching puzzles and the colourful manhwa-style art that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played a Devespresso title. Check out the release trailer below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

After an encounter with a powerful tornado, the protagonist Scarlet wakes up in the mysterious realm of Glome - a lush, vibrant world brimming with magic, witches and artifacts from a bygone culture. As fate would have it, this world was apparently waiting for her, as some sort of chosen one to take up the mantle of the red witch and use a powerful 'Womping Stick' which amusingly looks like a staff with a big hand on the end of it. There she meets a hapless Munchkin caravan who depend on her for guidance through the perilous Wicked Wood, guarded by the cantankerous witch, LeFaba.

For anyone who has played The Coma or Vambrace, the overall feel is very similar. They've kept the same style and mechanics throughout, with it being another side-scrolling adventure. It's very much like playing a point and click adventure. As a smaller title, sadly there's no full voice-over which would have helped pull me in. Even so, that was one of the only downsides of what was an otherwise satisfying and thoroughly weird adventure.

Feature Highlight:

• Survive a narrative time-loop.
• Solve ridiculous puzzles.
• Follow your own multi-path story.
• Unlock multiple endings based on your decisions.
• Ogle the hand-illustrated graphics.
• Use Scarlet's witching skills to avoid detection.

Based in Seoul, South Korea and San Francisco, USA - this is the fourth full title to come from Devespresso Games to Linux so it's wonderful to see the continued support again as their games are always wonderfully unique.

You can buy Scarlet Hood and the Wicked Wood on Humble Store , GOG and Steam .

Pop!_OS from Linux hardware vendor System76 is set to get a massive upgrade when Pop!_OS 21.04 releases, as they've announced COSMIC - their very own desktop environment.

"We’re providing a honed desktop user experience in Pop!_OS through our GNOME-based desktop environment: COSMIC. It’s a refined solution that makes the desktop easier to use, yet more powerful and efficient for our users through customization. The new designs are developed from extensive testing and user feedback since the Pop!_OS 20.04 release, and are currently being further refined in their testing phase."

Check out their animated mock-up (Credit - System76):

Much like Ubuntu do with their own adjustments to GNOME to add a proper dock, System76 will be adding one for COSMIC too. They say it will be adjustable to be available wherever you want it - be it at the bottom, the left or the right of your screen and you can have it stretch across if you want it to and auto-hide too. Traditional minimizing to the dock will also be a thing, which GNOME also lacks out of the box.

It will have the Activities Overview you get split into two special views of Workspaces and Applications. They say that "the Workspaces view will allow you to view your open windows and workspaces, while the Applications view will open an application picker". Why did they go with this design? The reason is simple according to the blog post as they "found that even GNOME veterans have a tendency to pause in their task after opening the Activities Overview" and that this split view allows "you to access the application picker in a single click, while the cleaner UI design prevents visual distraction".

Much like Pop already does, the team is focusing on letting users decide how to use it. There will be all the bells and whistles for both mouse-driven and keyboard-driven users. According to System76 CEO, Carl Richell, COSMIC will be based upon GNOME 3.38 for the 21.04 release then 40 for 21.10 ( Twitter ).

Since this is a big change, it's also going to delay the release of Pop!_OS 21.04 to June 2021 instead of April. Find out more in their blog post . Those interested in code can see it already on GitHub .

Very much looking forward to giving COSMIC a go when Pop!_OS 21.04 releases.

You've played Slay the Spire, Dicey Dungeons and many other great deck-builder but now it's time for Across the Obelisk to shine and it's rather engrossing. We did some pre-release testing for the developer on the Linux build and it's already great fun even though it's not finished, as this is an Early Access game.

This is a party-based game so you build up a roster of powerful heroes, each with their own set of cards and items they can equip to buff various statistics. What makes it quite different is that you can play it in co-op online with other players controlling different heroes in the party. Quite a refreshing little mix!

Watch video on YouTube.com

Dreamsite Games don't have an exact date length for how long they will be in Early Access, other than a plan to have it ready for next Summer. So we're looking like hopefully a final release between June - September 2021. It's already pretty feature-filled with many characters and hundreds of cards that will keep deck-builder fans amused for a great many hours. It's only been out for less than a week and it already has a Very Positive user rating on Steam. As long as they keep going on the path they've on, we predict a great future for Across the Obelisk.

Feature Highlight:

• Dynamic Deckbuilding Roguelite RPG
• Play solo or co-op with up to three friends
• Sixteen unlockable characters to create your party
• +500 cards and items to choose, craft and upgrade
• Procedural generated system intended to be highly replayable
• Events and quests where your decisions affect how the story unfolds
• Face powerful bosses in tactical combat

You can buy Across the Obelisk on Steam .

Yes this is a real game and yes it sounds hilarious. Developer Max Clark has now formally announced Flock of Dogs, a 1 - 8 player online / local co-op experience and I'm a little bit in love with the premise and style.

Describing it as simply as possible Clark says it's a "top-down, twin-stick, crew game. Most of the time, one player pilots the whale and everyone else rides flying dogs to battle and quest. Players can land on the whale and relaunch when ready. The journey leads to the Flying Festival through procedurally-generated, floating biomes with a mix of creatures, characters, and quests."

It sounds completely wild, and the visuals and gameplay matches up wonderfully to the idea. Inspired by storybooks like Goodnight Moon, The Cat in the Hat, and Go, Dog!. The idea is that each playthrough had you journey to an annual Flying Festival, with each year seeing the skies you fly through being different.

To make it as easy as possible to get going with friends, it will offer up a special built in "Friend Slot", to allow someone else to join you through your hosted game. This is not Steam Remote Play, this is a native built-in sharing feature and you can even purchase more of these special slots so others don't have to buy the full game.

Check out the trailer:

Watch video on YouTube.com

It's crowdfunding on Kickstarter with a goal of $10,000 to hit by May 14, and with nearly $5K already pledged it should easily get funded. Linux support is of course fully confirmed too!

You can help fund it on Kickstarter and follow on Steam .

Raylight Games / Yippee! Entertainment and Kalypso Media have today announced the release of Commandos 2 - HD Remaster for Linux after waiting over a year since the original release.

"Take control of an elite group of Allied commandos who must venture deep into enemy territory and utilize their combined expertise to complete a series of progressively demanding missions. In this World War II genre-defining classic, explore interactive environments and use unique skill sets to complete missions against seemingly impossible odds."

Watch video on YouTube.com

In their press email, Kalypso were keen to point out their "long-standing history of supporting Mac and Linux versions of its games, including heavy hitters Tropico 6, Dungeons 3, Sudden Strike 4 and the recently released Spacebase Startopia." which was nice to see mentioned.

Features:

• Experience the Commandos series in HD for the first time!
• Every tutorial and campaign mission revamped with reworked controls and modernised UI
• Access authentic WWII vehicles, scenarios and weaponry such as tanks and bazookas
• 10 missions spanning 9 day/night environments, all with realistic weather effects
• Steal, climb and swim to accomplish missions within fully interactive environments
• Play as an eclectic cast of characters, including Green Beret, Sniper and Whiskey the dog
• Experiment with skills and approaches in challenging, against-the-odds style gameplay

You can buy Commandos 2 - HD Remaster on Humble Store and Steam .

As expected, NVIDIA continue to be at the forefront of new and improved Vulkan support as they've today rolled out the 455.50.12 Vulkan Beta Driver. This is to go along with the announcement of Vulkan Video and Vulkan 1.2.175 that were put out today too.

Here's all that's new with it:

• Provisional Vulkan Video extensions:
  • An introduction to Vulkan Video
  • Vulkan Video sample
  • VK_KHR_video_queue
  • VK_KHR_video_decode_queue
  • VK_KHR_video_encode_queue
  • VK_EXT_video_decode_h264
  • VK_EXT_video_decode_h265
  • VK_EXT_video_encode_h264
  • VK_NV_video_queue
• VK_EXT_color_write_enable
• VK_EXT_vertex_input_dynamic_state
• VK_EXT_ycbcr_2plane_444_formats
• VK_NV_inherited_viewport_scissor

NVIDIA today also released their own Vulkan Video sample application , which is supported across Linux and Windows.

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 460.67 released on March 18, 2021 from their "Production Branch" series or 455.45.01 released on October 17, 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.

Additionally, if you missed the recent news: Xwayland work for hardware accelerated NVIDIA support has been merged in and will hopefully supported in the upcoming NVIDIA 470 releasing.

Vulkan, the graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs expands further with Vulkan Video and some provisional extensions. What is it? A new expansion years in the making to add in seamless hardware accelerated video compression and decompression into the Vulkan API. It comes with these new extensions:

• VK_KHR_video_queue
• VK_KHR_video_decode_queue
• VK_KHR_video_encode_queue
• VK_EXT_video_decode_h264
• VK_EXT_video_encode_h264
• VK_EXT_video_decode_h265

The Khronos Group say they plan to "add support in the Vulkan SDK with layers for validation and higher-level abstractions that will speed the development of video applications where simple frame-in-frame-out and black-box decoding and encoding is sufficient" along with open source Vulkan Video samples for Windows and Linux. All of this closely integrates "hardware accelerated video processing with Vulkan’s existing graphics, compute and display functionality".

Since this major new feature set for Vulkan is only provisional, it means it is subject to change. The Khronos Group are taking on feedback which you can follow on the GitHub issue . See the full announcement for more.

In addition to the new extensions for Vulkan Video, the Vulkan 1.2.175 release also added these new extensions:

• VK_EXT_color_write_enable - This extension allows for selectively enabling and disabling writes to output color attachments via a pipeline dynamic state.
• VK_EXT_vertex_input_dynamic_state - This extension adds dynamic state support for what is normally static state in VkPipelineVertexInputStateCreateInfo .
• VK_EXT_ycbcr_2plane_444_format - This extension adds some Y′CBCR formats that are in common use for video encode and decode, but were not part of the VK_KHR_sampler_ycbcr_conversion extension.
• VK_NV_inherited_viewport_scissor - This extension adds the ability for a secondary command buffer to inherit the dynamic viewport and scissor state from a primary command buffer, or a previous secondary command buffer executed within the same vkCmdExecuteCommands call.

Even more glorious retro FPS goodness is coming! Wolfenstein - Blade of Agony , the incredible GZDoom story-driven free game will be getting a brand new release on April 30.

"Blade of Agony is a story-driven FPS. The project is inspired by WWII shooters from the 90's and early 2000's, like Wolfenstein 3D, Medal of Honor, and Call of Duty, but with faster-paced gameplay in the spirit of Doom! The game can be played standalone using the GZDoom engine as a base."

The team has been working for quite some time now on the third chapter, which will be releasing on April 30 along with the first two chapters being remastered for this final update. Check out their new trailer:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Some of what it will feature:

• 30 playable and unique levels in 3 different chapters (plus secret maps)
• Orchestra-quality game music
• Voice acting and ambient soundscapes
• Available in 10 different languages (en, de, fr, it, ru, cz, es², tr², pl², pt²)
• A combination of low-poly models and hi-resolution sprite assets to create the perfect retro feeling
• Devastating armaments from the battlefields of WWII
• Interactive NPCs that support the twisted plot's progress and help you understand the game
• Improved enemy AI for more dynamic and challenging fights
• Beautiful special effects (weather, elements, explosions, etc.)
• Modern post-processing shaders (motion & effect blur, noise, flares, etc.)
• Much, much more!

Recently the czech gaming magazine Score did a preview, and gave it a 92% score. You can read it translated here .

While the developers only put out a Windows standalone, it's just a PAK for the GZDoom game engine. So running it on Linux is as easy as another other Doom-like mod you want to play so we expect no Linux-specific issues at release. You can also use the Snap / Flathub packages.