This ‘edition’ (I feel a bit odd calling it an edition, like I’m selling you a newspaper or something) might focus more on some GOG news, so consider this more of a ‘lite’ news version I guess?

Try keep in mind:

  • I’m no professional, I just love gaming news
  • I write these in a certain style: trying my best to replicate ‘old’ gaming sites, forums or articles (which tbh I wasn’t even alive for), since to me it feels that even the better sites covering gaming are constantly vying for your support or showing ads
  • These are image and GIF-heavy posts (sorry!)
  • I’m currently on holiday on a small island off the south coast of Thailand, where ‘velium’ (not valium) is happily handed over the counter like candy with no prescription. So this may make zero sense

It’s Just GOG?

I’ve seen some interesting GOG things these last few days, and thought they deserved some attention. It’s natural in gaming and particularly with the Steam Deck that your focus would be on Steam. But one thing I keep on harassing people about is GOG. I love it, and I love them!

GOG Preservation Program:

25 years after its original PlayStation 1 release, Breath of Fire IV finally returns, available right now on GOG, thanks in part to the (semi-recently revamped) Dreamlist system that GOG has in place

You can grab it and keep it forever now: https://www.gog.com/game/breath_of_fire_iv

This wouldn’t have happened without the support of over 22,000 passionate Dreamlist voters and the fantastic team at Capcom, who trusted us to bring you this masterpiece in its very best form.

And what do we mean by its “very best form”? Well, Breath of Fire IV also joins the GOG Preservation Program. Our release is fully optimized for modern PCs, with Windows 10 & 11 support, both English and Japanese localizations, upgraded DirectX rendering, new display options (Windowed Mode, V-Sync, Anti-Aliasing, refined gamma correction), a reworked audio engine (with restored missing environmental sounds & added new sound configuration options), and more improvements.

Simply put, this JRPG classic is now made to live forever :)

But, GOG didn’t stop with just one. Like last time they brought games to the program, there was a bunch at once. Eight other games, each over 20 years old are now ‘as good as they can be’:

You can find all the new arrivals here with this link

Oh, and we’ve also prepared a special video that goes more in-depth on bringing BoF IV back, as well as introducing all the other titles to the Program. We hope you enjoy it! If you do, consider following the GOG Classics Vault channel for more content like this.

This video can be found with this link!

Gogg Downloader:

A few weeks ago, a user named Hassan Abedi created Gogg: an open-source tool for downloading game files from GOG:

It’s a minimalistic command-line tool I developed to help people download games they own on GOG for offline play or archival purposes. Gogg is written in Go and uses the GOG API. It’s available for different operating systems, including Linux and Windows.

The most recent new version, 0.4.1-beta includes a major improvement for their service - a GUI built with Fyne.

This means you can now choose how you want to use Gogg:

  • Stick with the existing Command-Line Interface (CLI) for scripting and terminal use

  • Use the new GUI for a more visual experience, which might be more comfortable for some people.

Besides the GUI, Gogg still has features like:

  • Downloading game files, extras, and DLCs.
  • Resuming downloads.
  • Managing a local catalog of your GOG games (list, search, refresh, export).
  • Calculating required storage space and hashing downloaded files.
  • Running on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

New release’s download link on GitHub is here

(You can find the latest code and the documentation on the GitHub repository with this link, too)[https://github.com/habedi/gogg]

Planned for the future is support for Safari and Edge

Comet:

A little while ago I convinced my friend imLinguin that Halt and Catch Fire is one of the best TV shows around, and by far the best which is focused on computers - software and hardware.

Without spoilers, there’s something in the show called Comet. And, if you know Heroic Games Launcher (a method of playing GOG, Epic Games and Amazon titles on your Steam Deck, Windows, Mac or Linux desktops with!), you’ll know it uses something called Comet:

Open Source implementation of GOG Galaxy Communication Service for SDK bundled with GOG games

After watching Halt and Catch Fire, imLinguin worked on a little logo for his own Comet, which you can see here:

It’s a nice little nod, and is now something of two things I adore!

Relisted:

Maybe you’re used to the sad news that games are being de-listed. It’s sadly quite common with every platform, and is always due to the publishers, never the store-fronts.

This time however we’re seeing good news, with a few games now relisted onto GOG:

These were delisted in March, but back now. So thankfully it was only a short wait!

Gamesieve:

This one is rather impressive, and has already had a few little changes which help users. I’m just going to format and paste the info here as it is, since the hard work is done for me already (and there’s no room for my own nonsense opinions being thrown in!)

This one is quite long, and detailed, so beware!

What is it?

Full-text search for the entire GOG game catalog, with advanced filters and price-tracking for 12 currencies. I’ve tried to optimize for information-density without reducing usability. I also put a lot of effort into correcting and enriching the data from GOG’s API. Lots more of all of that to come.

Why?

Because I wanted to prove to myself I could, and because I keep discovering new gems on GOG which I wish I’d known about years ago already. The way GOG surfaces games keeps throwing up the same old titles I already know - but there are simply too many games there for me to try and browse through them all without any direction. GOG’s search and filtering is acceptable - but not more than that, while so much more could be done in this space.

Searching:

  • The search field will search through most of the information you see on a GOG game page - though not the reviews or the technical requirements (those I’ll try to expose as a filter at some point down the road).
  • You can use “phrase searches”, which are also useful for searching for special characters, e.g. for ultimate ‘intellectual property’: “™” “®”
  • You can exclude -terms -“and phrases”, e.g. space shooter -warhammer -“star wars”
  • I’ve tried to be intelligent with the way search works - really thinking about which results you might want. E.g. you can search for rpg or roleplaying game and get the same results. I might have blind spots though, so let me know if a search doesn’t return something which you think it should.

Grouping:

  • By default all editions, expansions, demos, goodie packs and bundles are grouped together into a single result for the main game. You can toggle this off in the top left for a more classic search (as on GOG). The one usecase I’ve personally identified where this is really useful is when searching for specific goodies like soundtracks.
  • Search will return a result if any grouped product matches. Filters only apply to information about the “main game”.
  • If there are three or more products grouped with the main game, they’ll be collapsed. (The 3 editions and 65 expansions for Europa Universalis IV take nearly two full screens to show!)

Product types:

  • I’ve manually identified all editions, demos and goodie packs, and given them separate categories. It’s always possible I missed - or misidentified - something. If so, please let me know about it. (N.B. I did apply a broad brush to what is a “demo”. Prologues and similar free “tasters” also got lumped in there.)
  • There’ve been a few cases where I made a call on what’s most useful which goes against the way products are actually structured; e.g. the chapters of Higurashi When They Cry Hou are technically standalone games, but I decided that they make more sense grouped together as expansions. Lust From Beyond (NSFW) is grouped as an edition of the “M Edition” remake (rather than the other way around), and so on. I’ll be happy to discuss the merits of specific cases if anyone cares.

Sorting:

  • Default sorting when browsing (and on the homepage) is percentage difference of current price to the best from the last 365 days, followed by percentage difference of current price to the all-time low, followed by release date on GOG (most recent first; taking the date of the full release for early access games, where possible). So this preferentially exposes the best “new” deals, rather than the same old discounts you see during each and every sale.
  • Default sorting when searching is “relevance score”; that is how similar each matching game is to the search terms.
  • More sorting options are coming very soon.

Filters basics:

  • There are two types of filters:

  1. Regular drill-down filters, which can overlap with each other. You can exclude each of these with the “X” to the right.

  2. Multi-select filters, which have no overlap (with the exception of “never”/“none in the last year” for “frequency of sales”), which allow you to pick multiple categories independently (so that’s effectively an OR operation).

  • All filters are just regular links, so you can open them in a new tab to browse multiple paths. This does mean all filters trigger a full page load (no fancy JavaScript here), which can be annoying if you want to enable multiple multi-select filters. I might revisit this decision, but for the moment the tradeoff felt worth it.

More about filters:

  • The “exclude NSFW” filter is special, in being applied by default (also applying to the recent releases in the sidebar). It’s a single click to turn it off, and that’s remembered for followup searches. Once it’s turned off, the “NSFW” term shows in the Tags filter and can be “required” as usual for any filter.
  • If you’re not certain what a specific filter does, try hovering over it for a tooltip (if you’re not on a touch device), or simply enabling it. The resulting page will frequently have an explanation at the top, e.g. that the “rarely” filter for “frequency of sales” indicates that the game has been on sale 1-3 times in the last year.
  • It’s a lie that I added the “At most 10 expansions” filter from the “About the game” section purely to exclude Paradox games. You can after all also exclude that filter to get all games with more than 10 expansions! (And then you’ll see that of the 30 results, ‘only’ 5 are published by Paradox.)

Price tracking and currencies:

  • I have price history for the US since April 2021, with massive thanks to gogdb for providing that. Whenever you see “all-time low”, that means “since April 2021”.
  • I have price history for Canada, Brazil, the UK, Germany, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, China and Australia since early December 2024. I extrapolate price differences before that based on US price history, but this is pretty crude, so take it with a grain of salt.
  • For the moment I only present price information in a single currency for each country. If you have a usecase for wanting a non-default currency for one of these countries, let me know about it?
  • As far as I know, prices in the entire eurozone are identical, so if you’re from France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, etc, you should just be able to look at German prices. (If anyone knows an example to the contrary, I’d love to hear about it!) At some point down the road, I intend to actually compare prices for all products for all eurozone countries to make certain of this, but for the moment this isn’t a priority.

Data quality:

  • Besides badly chosen defaults (the many release dates of xmas 1991 and NYE 2000 and so on), data entry at GOG is obviously the work of humans who occasionally suffer from fat fingers. I’ve identified and corrected a lot, but I have no doubt there’s a lot more to find. I’ll be happy to take a look at any errors you know about, and since I’m also a human, please let me know about my own fat-fingered mistakes as well! (I’m also thinking about a way to contribute fixes back to GOG, though I suspect I’d really need a more rigorous process for that to actually be useful / something GOG would actually want.)

World of Goo 2:

Available now on GOG! Sadly still a higher price than on other store-fronts, but what can we do. The price for DRM-free joy is higher than the alternatives, I suppose!

Amerzone Remake:

Amerzone - The Explorer’s Legacy has released also on GOG.

Answer the call of exploration as you travel to Amerzone, a forgotten Latin American country, to fulfill the last wishes of a late explorer. Investigate the ruins of this secretive land reclaimed by nature, meet intriguing characters with deep backstories and solve intricate puzzles to uncover the truth. Will you unveil the mysteries surrounding the mythical Great White Birds?

The link to the store page on GOG is here!

Junk Store:

My preferred method of playing GOG and Epic Games titles on my Steam Deck is Junk Store.

I like the UI and how it so closely resembles Valve’s own for the Deck - it feels about as native as I could hope, and like it is an extension of the official Deck’s UI/UX. I love it.

Anyway, Junk Store is turning one year old tomorrow! Since their first release, 12 months have passed. Nice to see that a project which began as a method for playing Epic and GOG for the dev and friends was released to the public.

If you’re interested in some more Junk Store info, then check out:

Top Lists:

The recent bestsellers on GOG are:

  • Breath of Fire IV
  • Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Ed.
  • DOOM (2016)
  • Control Ultimate Ed.
  • Jazz Jackrabbit 2 Collection
  • In Sound Mind - Deluxe Ed.
  • Alien Isolation Collection
  • Homeworld Remastered Collection

The top wishlisted in the last 30 days are:

  • Croc: Legend of the Gobbos
  • Kingdom Come Deliverance 2
  • Silent Hill 4: The Room
  • System Shock 2: 25th Anniv. Remaster
  • Sudeki
  • Baldur’s Gate 3
  • Resident Evil Bundle
  • Dino Crisis Bundle
  • F.E.A.R. Platinum

A Recommendation:

If you’ve not played it before, I can’t recommend Islets enough. Its one of those games to me - which feels uniquely perfect on the Steam Deck (like DREDGE, Art of Rally, Hades and so on!)

Its such a cute lttle indie Metroidvania that stands out thanks to the charming hand-drawn art style, and cozy atmosphere.

The game’s unique hook is its interconnected floating islands, which you gradually piece together like puzzle pieces.

Combat is smooth and satisfying, with upgrades that add depth without silly overwhelming complexity, while the small but dense world encourages backtracking in a way that never feels tedious. Add the quirky characters, and you get a game that’s both relaxing and engaging—perfect for players who love exploration-focused adventures like Hollow Knight or Ori, but prefer a more approachable, breezy experience. It’s a short game, but I just love it.

And Lastly?

If you missed their blog post last year, GOG shared 10 fun facts about GOG themselves. I love these, and maybe you will too, if you’re looking for some quick entertainment!

https://www.gog.com/blog/10-fun-facts-about-gog/

That’s all folks

Sorry its so brief compared to my other efforts. I just thought it nice to focus on a space which rarely gets the attention (I think) it deserves.

I love GOG and their DRM-free stance. I love how GOG takes games preservation seriously, and most importantly I love the color purple - so that means this one wins hands down :)

News Links:

You can check my previous (and far longer) News Posts here - I’ll link them for you so if you’re curious:

Mastodon

If you want to follow me on Mastodon, I’m posting there every single day (typically), so come join in if you’d like:

…anyway, I hope you enjoy some of this! My next News Post will be back to the regular a-little-bit-of-everything content. I hope you’re all having fun playing whatever games you’re loving at the moment, too!

💜

  • xkbx@startrek.website
    20·
    11 hours ago

    It’s been said before, and I’ll say it again: these posts are awesome, I love the thought and effort put into it. Even if nothing within the article sparks my particular interest, the format is so fun and well-made that I happily read it, like some sort of article reading enjoyer of enjoyable articles of sorts

    • PerfectDark@lemmy.worldOP
      11·
      11 hours ago

      like some sort of article reading enjoyer of enjoyable articles of sorts

      This makes me very happy. I know that exact feeling - finding something kinda niche and outside one’s own scope, but then enjoying it regardless?

      Thanks, you’re very kind to say so!

  • Domi@lemmy.secnd.me
    3·
    7 hours ago

    If you like Islets, the follow up “Crypt Custodian” is on sale on Steam and GOG right now.

    Didn’t play it yet since I need to finish Kingdom Come but it’s next on the list.