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I was up in Canada a couple of weekends ago, and Tim Horton’s is running a collaboration with the Harry Potter franchise that includes some very tasty donuts and some rather tacky merch.  I ate a lot of the donuts and didn’t buy any of the merch.

If they’d had a T-shirt, I might have gone for one because the collab logo is kinda neat.

I mean, they did have T-shirts with the logo on them but they were employee-only things and I wasn’t going to mug a Canadian for their shirt.  That’s how you wind up tied to a tree with a syrup tap wedged in your sternum.

Nonetheless, it reminded me that I’d gotten Hogwarts Legacy as a free game from the Epic Games Store a little while back, and while I’ve never been the world’s number one Harry Potter fan I enjoyed the movies well enough that I thought I’d take a dive into the wizarding world.

I also looked at this as my opportunity to finally play one of the hundred+ free games I’ve gotten from the Epic Games Store.

This… didn’t work terrifically well.  I don’t have a system running Windows currently, so I play games either through CrossOver (on the Mac) or Proton (on Linux) and CrossOver is typically a bit hit-or-miss whereas Proton is typically rock solid.

I quickly came to find out that there is a massive caveat to that last one, which should include “as long as you’re playing Steam games” because trying to run something off the Epic store was a mess.  I’d either get no controller support, or the game wouldn’t run at all, or the game would run but crash after a few minutes, or cloud saves wouldn’t sync, or…

like I said, a mess.

It was fun during the moments it worked, though!  I rather appreciate their decision to set the thing a solid century before Harry wound up at the school as that lets them stick in a few familiar names in the forms of ancestors of book characters but not go too heavy on the fan service.  Really, the castle itself is the biggest source of that.  AND IT DELIVERS.  The staircases alone!

Oddly enough, the experience on CrossOver was completely plug and play.  Told it I wanted an Epic Games Launcher Bottle, let it set one up, pushed play and off I went.  But I wanted the ability to go between the Linux box hooked up to our TV in the living room and the MacBook Pro on my desk and, well,

Fanatical hooked me up.  And technically this was six bucks for the Digital Deluxe Edition so it comes with …a cool mount? and maybe some other cosmetics? I dunno.

Transferring the same from Epic to Steam was a matter of digging it out of AppData\local in one bottle and dropping it into AppData\local in a different bottle, so that at least was easy enough.

Anyway.  It’s a nice change from horror games.  I’m having a bit of trouble with the combat which is a little too twitchy for my liking, but I am playing on the third difficulty setting so if it gets too overwhelming I can take it down a notch or two.