Yeah Shin Megami Tensei is often abbreviated as SMT. I’d say with P5 if you don’t like it by the end of the first palace, then you probably won’t like the rest of it. You’ve seen most of the core gameplay and mechanics by then. I would definitely say play P5R and not vanilla P5 if you have the option. Some mechanics are changed in P5R that make it a smoother experience. The big new additions are mostly at the end, the “Third Semester”.

P5R may not be to your liking then either. I found it to be less front loaded on the narrative than P4G, but it’s still a very narrative focused game. I can say however that I much preferred the story of P5R. I haven’t played P3(any version) yet. That’s just kind of the way Persona games are. They all start kind of slow. At least the two I’ve played. SMT may be more to your liking. I’ve only played SMT IV but SMT seems to be more gameplay focused. That one is at least from what I remember.

Ah I see. I’ve not used bottles so have no suggestions there, but you may be able to use Proton to run the installer. I’ve done that for other types of Windows apps like the Battlenet launcher or Origin/EA App. You add the installer itself as a non-Steam game, run it, go through the install process. Then you add the installed exe as a non-Steam game.

I think the installed files would be in the same location as the installer itself but they may also get their own app ID in your Steam folder. I can’t recall exactly.

No Proton is a compatibility layer for running Windows games on Linux. I’m not at my computer ATM but in the Steam settings somewhere you just flip the toggle on that says something like Enable Steam Play for all games. I think it’s in Compatibility or something like that.

Then any games you own on Steam you can just install and play and Steam will automatically choose the best Proton version for you. You can override it too if you need. ProtonDB is a good resource for looking up how well a game runs on Linux via Proton. Keep in mind it’s limited to games that have Steam releases though.

If you’re talking about playing PS5 games you’ve dumped from a disc with an emulator, which it sounds like maybe you are, Proton and Steam won’t do much for you here. If you’re talking about PC versions of these games that you’ve “acquired” then Steam may help there. You could add the game to your library as a “non-Steam” game and then just run it with Proton that way. HGL may work here too but I’ve only used HGL for games I own on GOG or Epic.

Yeah I agree with all of this. It sounds like maybe you’re trying to learn too many different things at once. I’d pick one thing and stick with it until you’re comfortable.

What games are you trying to play? 99% of the time I’m able to just install a game in Steam and use Proton and be done with it. For any non-Steam games I just use Heroic Games Launcher.

Bazzite is a pretty good distro for gaming since it comes with some of these things pre installed or as an option to install them.

1000xRESIST. I first heard about this game from Balatro of all places. It’s very good. It’s hard to talk about it without spoiling too much and I do think this game is best played with knowing as little as possible. You really need to pay attention to what’s going on. I haven’t played a VN style game in a long time but I’m really enjoying it! Some twists I definitely did not see coming.

Yeah this I don’t understand. I do use immutable distros and quite like them(Bazzite/Aurora/Kinoite) but I would never recommend them to a new user to Linux. They just work too differently than most other distros so like 90% of the documentation you might find for other programs is pretty much useless. Like if you look up some piece of software and it says use your package manager to install, then what? It’s usually easy enough to solve if you read the distro’s docs and use their recommended approach(flatpak, brew, AppImage etc) but that’s already probably way too advanced for someone new too Linux.