Zanzarah: The Hidden Portal (384570)

Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: Zanzarah: The Hidden Portal
• Steam AppID of the game: 384570

System Information

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti
• Driver/LLVM version: NVIDIA 435.21
• Kernel version: 5.3.0-28
• Link to full system information report as Gist:
  https://gist.github.com/kamikaze-kun/6963d8c4d37e07550e27a3a0ae898930
• Proton version: proton-4.11-12

I confirm:

• that I haven't found an existing compatibility report for this game.
• that I have checked whether there are updates for my system available.

steam-384570.log

Symptoms

The initial setting menu works, but once you want to actually start the game it hangs on a black screen and then crashes.

Reproduction

Just install and then launch the game.

Tested solutions

It is possible to run the game if you replace the original zanthp.exe with the patched one from this post at the Russian game forum Old-Games. After that the game works with terrible graphic artefacts on my system. It may work fine with patched EXE on other systems though.

There is actually a bug and a patch for this game in WineHQ Bugzilla: 17233. The game absolutely playable in Wine 5.1 (Staging) on my system. Tested with Russian retail version of the game and with Steam version too (just replaced Zanzarah.exe launcher with the one from retail version).

Start by reproducing the black-screen crash with Proton 4.11-12 and review steam-384570.log alongside the WineHQ Bugzilla issue 17233. Compare the behavior of the Steam and retail executables and document whether a current Proton version resolves the launch failure without the reported graphical artefacts.