23 Sep 2022

Return to Monkey Island

Earlier this week, Return to Monkey Island was finally released on Steam and other platforms! Monday evening I started playing it, and found it to be well worth the wait. Without revealing any spoilers, the game does a good job of picking up the larger story after the end of MI:2 as well as introducing you to the updated gameplay mechanics.

But, I couldn’t stay up all night playing, as I have this little thing called a job, so I only got a couple of hours in on launch day. Tuesday afternoon I fired up Steam again, and an update for the game automatically was downloaded. After a slight delay, I eagerly clicked the “play” button only to have a black screen pop open briefly, and then nothing. I tried tinkering with the Proton settings and launch options, but to no avail.

Finally yesterday evening I was able to spend some more time investigating this. Digging into the logs, I saw the following items:

[09/19/22 21:16:52] GGGraphics: Selecting Vulkan renderer 
[09/19/22 21:16:53] Version 0.1 build 484640 (Windows)

[09/20/22 23:32:58] GGGraphics: Selecting Vulkan renderer 
[09/20/22 23:32:58] Version 0.1 build 490649 (Windows)
[09/20/22 23:32:59] Graphics Error E04911: Failed to get the memory type for an image.

[09/23/22 01:19:31] GGGraphics: Selecting Vulkan renderer 
[09/23/22 01:19:31] Version 0.1 build 495651 (Windows)
[09/23/22 01:19:32] Graphics Error E04911: Failed to get the memory type for an image.

It was pretty obvious that something in the Tuesday update broke the game under Proton, and I wasn’t the only one who saw this breakage. Several people online are suggesting a protontricks command to install a DirectX library and then change the game’s configuration to use DirectX rather than Vulkan, but that didn’t work for me.

What did work was forcing Steam to go back to the game-day launch version. It’s a little bit hands-on, but very easy to do:

Launch Steam with the “console” option: steam -console
Within the Steam console, run this command to re-download the original version of the game: download_depot 2060130 2060131 6518301106548196498. There won’t be any progress displayed, but once it’s done you’ll see a message.
Close Steam, and then replace the existing game files with the ones you just downloaded: cp -r ~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steamapps/content/app_2060130/depot_2060131/* ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Return\ to\ Monkey\ Island/
Open Steam up, and now the game should launch again. (At least, until another update comes out and you’ll have to repeat the copying step again unless the patch actually fixes the issue.)

With that being done, I’ve been able to continue playing and enjoying the game!
Look behind you, a three headed monkey!