Implementation was rather bad on Linux despite reports and warnings of extreme breakage during the beta, and the legacy client was the only escape hatch for many after they bricked it following force pushing the beta into the mainline client, with no rollback option. If you follow Valve's bugzilla tracker, you will see hundreds of bug tickets over the last month relating to this UI, which didn't account for regressions around CEF, Gnome, upstream Nvidia drivers, focus-follows-mouse, memory leaks, screen readers for the blind, instability with system dependencies (Steam carries around a basket of old dependencies), and more. Here is but one example: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/9805. Steam only targets Ubuntu and seemingly only tests on that platform, and in so doing this causes a myriad of problems. It's not an aesthetic issue.

Speaking of memory leaks, one of the most egregious issues right now is the client rapidly consuming all VRAM within a matter of minutes when the window is interacted with (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/9638), effectively killing the system and making rendering games impossible.

I happen to be two years deep into a playthrough now, and the DLC seems very good. I would suggest you do it midway through your adventure, though, as I got mixed messages from the game's plot/NPCs about what was coming up, so I put the White March questline and some other tasks off till the end, thinking I wasn't at the last chapter and could visit them later. Then I realized I was at the end of the game, so had to rollback my save and I am doing those now, but it seems like I don't really stand to benefit much from it now, since I'm already overpowered, nor does the content feel as relevant. Good luck with the recovery.

Don't play official servers, modded servers (moderated) are where it's at. Many unique, standalone maps like Namalsk and Deer Isle. There are zillions of servers catering to everything from hardcore survival to basebuilding

Laika

Similar reaction. Game looks aesthetically pleasing, but it feels very hard to innovate within the matrix of a sidescroller, so unless you are a diehard sidescroller player, might not offer something amazing. The game also crashed a lot for me so I didn't get very far and just gave up on it. There wasn't a big hook here that would have made me want to persist through crashes.

Jusant

Haven't played this one, but take a look at Peaks of Yore. Make sure to turn off all of the postprocessing so you get simple polygons.

En Garde

Had CTDs with this one, too. Looks like I didn't miss much, but the core concept seems entertaining if they flesh it out.

Lies of P

I need to get around to trying this one. I have this habit of putting off bigger demos till the end.

Looks like a blast, will definitely check it out and hope to see you on there

No coop yet!

Game is as great as it ever was

I always use this as my "control" game on a new PC to calibrate mouse input and other settings

Check out Powerhoof, they have a lot of short games ranging from game jam length (believe some were winners at some game jams) to medium length, and basically consist of prototyping their point and click engine in advance of The Drifter. I recommend the Telwynium in particular

No brainer, it is Max Payne

With Steam you're essentially paying a (sometimes) premium for a whole suite of features: Steamworks (drop-in support for matchmaking and multiplayer lobbies), numerous edge servers on a global CDN (faster downloads), Steam input (plethora of configuration options for any controller or HID), remote play (play local games with a remote player), shared shader caching, upstream contributions to the Wine, Vulkan, DXVK et al stacks, a highly open and permissive API, streaming video of your game while you play it, Steam cache servers (build a local fileserver to cache game downloads), the list goes on. And if you find a bug, you can report it on their bug tracker and someone will actually investigate it. It is a no-brainer.

Other services just give you a desktop shortcut at best. People say, "I don't need these features, I just want games." If they've ever launched a game on Steam, they've probably benefited from these features and more without realizing it.

For Karl

That seems reasonable, although there is no telling what a highly voted post might constitute under new management (is that too paranoid?). I'd personally take a scrap and build approach here, or at least manually approve the incoming results (hybrid approach) if they're being delayed anyway due to waiting on vote generation.