Dead End Aegis (1835830) and Dead End Aegis: Gaiden (1839960)

Compatibility Report

Dead End Aegis (1835830) / Dead End Aegis Gaiden (1839960) – English versions

The first is the main game, the second is a prequel side story. They both use exactly the same engine (only with different assets), which is why I grouped them into one report. That, and DEA Gaiden, being free and SFW, is much easier to test.

System Information

• GPU: AMD Radeon VII
• Driver/LLVM version: Mesa 22.1.5~kisak1~b [Kisak Mesa PPA]
• Kernel version: 5.4.0-120-lowlatency [Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS]
• Link to full system information report as Gist: https://gist.github.com/fallenguru/116961c075c5d5048a7ef28a313b9421
• Proton versions: any recent WINE version (tried Proton 7.0-3 and Experimental, GE 7.29, vanilla WINE 7.1x)

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-1839960.log

Symptoms

The text rendering is broken. The text is too large, so it gets slightly cut off at the top and massively to the right. It doesn't remotely fit the textbox and is therefore completely unplayable. If you look at screenshots (Steam store page, for example), the font is wrong to begin with.

Screenshot [taken with Proton 7.03]:

That's despite the fact that it ships with the font (Neuton.ttf). I tried adding it to the fontconfig path for good measure. Fontconfig can see it and I can use it just fine, but as for the game, no dice.
Hypothesis: Something in the way the font is requested causes the font selection process to disqualify it and fall through to an incompatible fallback.

The issue does not seem to be system-dependent, I've had it on multiple systems, there are matching ProtonDB entries (main game, Gaiden), and at least one report on Reddit.

Reproduction

Start game, start new game. If desired, click to advance. Notice that all the lines are cut off (most are much longer than what's shown).

Start by reproducing the text-rendering failure in Dead End Aegis: Gaiden and inspect the attached steam-1839960.log, focusing on how Neuton.ttf is requested and whether fontconfig selects a fallback. Compare behavior across the listed Proton versions and confirm that the finished fix makes the game text fit its dialogue boxes.