Game won't launch

[Impsalad]

This game looks right up my alley but I can't play it, and that sucks. While I'm sure it's amazing game-play wise that doesn't change that it's so fundamentally broken (at the moment of posting this) that other people with this same issue can't leave negative reviews because the game closes before they can reach the time required to review it. Keep making new projects, I'm excited to see what comes next, but DAMN if this happens on the next one that's some clown behavior. If I could leave a review, it would be positive, because at that point I'd be able to play the game that's $25 (though I bought it 10% off) on steam. I know I'm not the only one with this issue and from seeing the other people who also threw their head at the wall trying to unsuccessfully fix it I'm sure that it's not an issue on my end, but also that this game is at such quality that we threw our heads against the wall anyways. Hopefully they fix this, I'm excited to see what this game is actually like when it runs for myself.

[KestrelPi]

I have the same issue. Unfortunately this might take a little while to fix as issues like this are very hard to figure out unless the developer can reproduce it. In what seem to be an overwhelming minority of cases this issue is happening, and the likely cause is some random hardware compatibility issue that wasn't caught in testing (very easy to miss unless you have an extremely large pool of testers), or some software conflict which would be similarly difficult to pin down. There are sometimes issues like this that just happen, there's no good reason or easy way to predict, just some quirk of the code that a particular combination of hardware/software doesn't like and can be a pain to figure out. I want to play it too, but it's not 'fundamentally broken' - there's a major issue that would have been difficult to find out about in advance that affects what seems to be a very tiny percentage of people playing (otherwise there'd be way, way more posts about this by now. I've only seen this one and another 3 page one which is struggling to stay on the front page of this forum, even).

[LEM in 2015]

I can't launch the game, a little black screen appears, dissapears and then steam goes from "running" to "Play". I've numerous fixes: I've reinstalled DirectX12, updated all my drivers, restarted my computer, verified the game cache, ran the game as admin... and cleared the download cache. While I find some comments lacking in helpful details, I share the general frustration they convey. From what I've seen, this game appears beautifully crafted, and it's disappointing to miss out on the excitement and the puzzles it offers. I hope resolving these issues is a priority so that many of us can enjoy the

[KestrelPi]

This won't be helpful to everyone, but if you have a laptop or something you can install Steam on, this game doesn't take much to run it. So what I did earlier to start playing the game is to download it onto the laptop and then use Steam's Stream feature to stream it to my PC. It's pretty seamless and my PC controller works fine with it this way. The only minor complaint I have running it like this is that about every 10 minutes or so, perhaps even less than that I guess the audio struggles to keep up with the stream and it cuts out for a few seconds before being fine again. But I'm having a great time with it so if you have a spare laptop you use I'll recommend that approach.

[Eeeville]

I'm having this same issue on my Windows PC, but Animal Well does run on my Steam Deck.

[Sonic the Hedgehog]

I don't know if this helps but I had an issue where the game wouldn't launch when my PS4 controller was plugged into my PC. After starting the game I unplugged my controller and the game popped up right away. Hope this helps someone!

[frerob]

Windows 10 PC, game opens a window when launched then the windows goes away and i'm back at the desktop.
Does this game require SSE 4.2 and AVX?

[Tam]

Originally posted by Impsalad:

This game looks right up my alley but I can't play it, and that sucks. While I'm sure it's amazing game-play wise that doesn't change that it's so fundamentally broken (at the moment of posting this) that other people with this same issue can't leave negative reviews because the game closes before they can reach the time required to review it. Keep making new projects, I'm excited to see what comes next, but DAMN if this happens on the next one that's some clown behavior. If I could leave a review, it would be positive, because at that point I'd be able to play the game that's $25 (though I bought it 10% off) on steam. I know I'm not the only one with this issue and from seeing the other people who also threw their head at the wall trying to unsuccessfully fix it I'm sure that it's not an issue on my end, but also that this game is at such quality that we threw our heads against the wall anyways. Hopefully they fix this, I'm excited to see what this game is actually like when it runs for myself.

Yeah it definitely sucks. It's a pretty small percentage of us, and most of us have done some pretty extensive testing with no luck. As far as I can tell there's nothing on our end we can do to fix the problem. The fix is probably incredibly simple, but finding out the issue could take quite a while.
I'm gonna sit and wait for a while, and hopefully it will be fixed by the two week mark. I would really hate to refund a game I was so excited for and wanted to support, but 30 bucks is a lot for a game that doesn't launch.

[corbin285]

i have intel graphics, same

[digga]

here is the devs message from the latest patchnotes regarding this bug

"Fix for the startup crash is still in progress! I have to order the associated PC hardware so I can attempt to reproduce the issue. I'm very sorry, and again, I really appreciate everyone's patience! In the mean time I will keep seeing if I can figure out what's going on."

[Craxton]

have some of you tried grabbing
oalinst manually and installing it?
the game wouldnt open period for me
(5800x, 4070ti, 32gb ram all updated
on latest drivers) until i installed openAL.
after installing it run just fine...without
any performance issues.
it could also have to do with windows
defender ("app based" protection)
settings, as thats turned off on my pc.
either way, installing openAL is what made the
game OPEN and run for me. hopefully this helps
someone else.

[jungletek]

Originally posted by frerob:

Windows 10 PC, game opens a window when launched then the windows goes away and i'm back at the desktop.
Does this game require SSE 4.2 and AVX?

It's using at least SSE4.1; it crashed on an old rig at startup for me so I stepped through it in a debugger and the first occurrence of the "insertps" instruction crashes the program.

[Fox Beaux]

Stuck in the same boat.

[Weedsmoker]

+1. Animal well like a Cory Chase...