While Feral Interactive had been delaying the release of Alien Isolation for a while, it was finally released yesterday ahead of the Steam Machine’s launch. Performance issues seemed to have caused the delay. We will need to wait for full benchmarks to see whether the gap in performance for this game on Linux vs Windows is as large as previous titles (such as Shadow of Mordor).

The release coincides with a 50% sale on the title on Steam, making it affordable to celebrate its release. As usual with Feral, AMD and Intel graphics are not officially supported, while it may work (some have recently achieved to run Shadow of Mordor on Mesa without too many defects). They also require the 355.1 drivers from nVidia which are pretty much the latest ones - and you probably need to install a specific repository even if you are under Ubuntu since the default drivers are way behind such versions.

This new AAA release comes after a long break period on Linux/SteamOS without major release (There was BroForce though, and I will come back on that one soon as well) and it now seems unlikely we will see many new titles before November 10th, the official release date for the Steam Machines. Even PayDay 2, which was previously planned for Q4 2015, has now been pushed back to Q1 2016.

I will be coming back on Alien Isolation within the next week, both on performance and overall impressions. Remember: in space no one can hear you scream, but on Earth your neighbors will, so keep things quiet :)