I was recently prowling around looking for amusement and ran into Arknights: Endfield via a Let's Game it Out video, and I was sufficiently impressed by it that I felt compelled to write a little thing about it about how to get it running, and what its strengths and weaknesses are. This is "coincidentally" (there's a video for a reason after all) a great time to start as they've just launched a major expansion which completes the game's second storyline.
What
Arknights: Endfield is a third-person exploration combat game spinoff of a prior isometric tower defense title called Arknights, which I've never played and probably never will as I don't really care for that genre in general. That game features characters called "operators" who serve as the defense towers. Endfield has just enough tower defense elements to add some interest, but not enough to drag if you aren't really into that. It was released on January 22, 2026.
The game takes place approximately a couple or few centuries from now on a planet called Talos II, a moon of a gas giant, where pioneers from our planet arrived 152 years prior to the events of the game. Various interesting minerals create assorted phenomena like "blight" and "corruption", and every character in the game except the player character (known as the "Endministrator" (or "Endmin") of "Endfield Industries") has some degree of one of several various set of animalistic characteristics, like a bird, bear, or reptile. Most characters in the game (including both your operators and all of the various NPCs) show only minor aspects, such as small antlers and a deer tail, but a few characters including one operator and one major NPC are classically anthropomorphized animals.
During the course of the game the main player's team of four operators (by default including the main character "Endministrator", who has unusual powers critical to the storyline) will battle in a variety of locations, solve a series of puzzles both in the third person and in minigames, and build factory facilities for story, economic, and supply-producing purposes.
How
I'm actually not going to re-explain in depth how to get Endfield working on Linux here, because someone else did that adequately on reddit already, and I left comments there about how to easily install dwproton. (for steam users, unpack the archive in $HOME/.steam/steam/compatibilitytools.d and [re]start steam.) All you really need to be told that you don't probably already know is that dwproton is currently the proton fork that it runs correctly with.
Install dwproton, install the installer as a game, install the game in the resulting wine prefix, then change the executable from the installer to the game launcher. Naturally you don't have to use Steam, you could use any Proton launcher, but you probably already have Steam right?
Fair warning: I may make some minor spoilers here, which is unavoidable when you're talking about game mechanics, but I will try to keep them to a reasonable minimum
Praise
I actually just wanted to write about why you might or might not want to play this game, and that that's mostly the former. Firstly because it's most immediately noticeable, it's really gorgeous. It's not without visual flaws, and a little more effort could have been spent on making the non-flexible elements of character designs not visibly flex, but otherwise you really get a great feel of running through anime in realtime. Other gacha games like Genshin Impact have also successfully delivered this, so it's not a unique point, but it's constantly enjoyable.
The next point is that the gameplay is enjoyably varied. While Endfield is fundamentally a squad action fighting game with an emphasis on combos and monetized through gacha, you do not need to be good at fighting games to succeed, and even if you aren't it's remarkably non-grindy. You can work through the storyline with little more than prompted button-mashing, though learning how to use the characters and control enemy's status with specific attacks does make a huge difference and will allow dedicated players to punch well above their weight class. It's also worth noting here for people concerned about being frustrated by the fighting mechanic getting in the way of other gameplay that the penalty for death is extremely low.
But there's a lot more than fighting involved; Besides the aforementioned mostly optional tower defense element, there's also a number of other activities including some non-optional factory building, and several small minigames which are used for various activities. The game also uses a lot of Tomb Raider-esque platformer puzzles which are generally very well executed. There's also scanning, bomb-throwing, a flying robot that squirts liquids, another scanning mechanic involving a "lens", and I'm sure some other things I'm forgetting now because there's so many of them.
The factory building aspect is the focus of the LGIO video, and I was extremely impressed by the game's ability to withstand abuse. I've played a whole lot of games where mechanics were implemented poorly enough to make games frustrating to play, and that's really not that amusing to me any more; it's fun watching videos where people exploit those problems in wacky ways, but I really would like games to hold up under heavy use, and Endfield absolutely does. This game is very reliable and you can pile up pipes and conveyors without ill effects.
Factory building is both reasonably simple and rewarding. As you gain access to technologies in the tech tree, points for which are delivered via kiosks topped with air dancer wind sock tube man guys1, trainings become available which explain how to use each factory component and also award you with some of them, as well as blueprints for factory designs using them. As the game progresses you will need a lot more of some of these and will have to produce resources for them in the factory, but this is made reasonably easy as pipes are very forgiving, and no conveyors are needed to transfer solid resources to your base. You will need to transfer power to most equipment as well as some objective targets, and this is a major mechanic of the building system which works differently in each of the game's two regions.
The factory building system isn't actually simple, it's actually quite complex with a broad variety of materials which come as solids, liquids, or gases and can in some cases be transmuted from one to another, and even processes which are more efficient (or only occur) in specific environments you create with gas emitters. But the blueprints the game will provide to you make it simple enough to apprehend, and you can create your own custom blueprints. There is a little bit of grinding to be done here in one of the game's several other mechanics, the stock distribution system. This is also a good time to mention that this game is also complicated on top of being complicated because there's not just one kind of currency involved. Selling items you've produced in your factories or doing delivery jobs produce a region-specific currency called "stock bills" which are needed for unlocking and expanding facilities, and making gear (which is mostly crafted and not purchased.)
The game does make some effort to keep all of this complexity in some kind of order, for example there's an "acquisitions center" where most of the points are spent and converted. You get to most everything through the pause menu, but you can also use hotkeys or hold alt and click on icons with the mouse to access a lot of functions directly from the gameplay screen. There's also other good concessions to convenience, for example you can double-click items in the hotbar to go to construction of more of those items, or you can press the hotbar button twice rapidly.
Another interesting aspect of this game, which I'm only just beginning to explore, is interaction with other players. You can visit and "assist" each other with chores in exchange for various small rewards, and items placed by other players in their game sometimes appear in your world, where they decay over time if not repaired. So far these include zipline pylons, item stashes (which connect to your factory inventory) and defense towers, which are often placed near enemy spawn locations. Repairing them is free and can be done daily, but they only last about 48 hours and enemies will battle defense towers if they aren't dispatched by them (or you) first. This doesn't occur in your absence, and though the time-based degradation does, other items will be spawned in to replace them after they are gone. They also don't require any power in your world, apparently drawing power from their host... instance? dimension? universe? It's hard to say, so far, though this game does give a sort of feel of animating a digital avatar atop that which results from playing any video game with some of its graphics effects, especially around events like characters respawning.
Performance
I have a 5900X/4060 Ti and I can play this game at 4k60 at about 80% settings without frame generation. Even on Linux, you have those settings available to you, but I prefer not to use them. If I max out the settings then I do get frame rates below 60 fps, but I suspect a 4070 is enough to get there. I have mirrored SSDs and load times still aren't great when going between regions, but are otherwise inoffensive.
Complaints
Enough gushing, it's not all perfection and beauty and I do have some complaints. One constant irritation is that they need Talos II-OSHA badly, there's a ton of places where supposedly a bunch of other people have been walking around where there's fall to your death type gaps. Maybe nobody cares in this world where if you fall forever you are respawned at an extremely convenient point a mere few steps prior to your untimely apparent demise by falling into acid or a bottomless chasm, but some of the small gaps which aren't obvious to the eye are a bit irritating and I don't think they add anything of value to the game experience.
For me though the #1 biggest drawback to the game design, which of course is by no means unique to this title, is the use of invisible walls. Almost all games use invisible barriers to keep players in line, but it's one of my #1 pet peeves and frankly this game isn't great about it. There are actually two completely different problems here as well. The first is just the invisible walls on top of some of the visible walls which pen you in, why not just make the wall a little taller so I can't get there? Or just take away the thing I jumped there from? And especially in later areas of the second region, there are places where it looks like you should be able to jump to someplace, but you wind up sliding off one of those walls and into an abyss.
Arguably even worse than that is the inconsistency with how far you can fall. In some specific spots it seems like you can barely fall any distance at all without it being too far, while in other areas you can drop for ages and simply drop gracefully to a knee and pausing a moment before continuing. This again becomes a significant irritant in the second area, where some places look accessible but aren't and vice versa. Videos are going to be your friend for the main blocking mission which follows the last main story mission here. Hopefully they improve this aspect of the design for the next region they introduce. They really didn't have this problem in the first region that I can recall.
This isn't exactly a complaint but I have a suspicion that they've actually made this game too little of a grind (hear me out) to keep it running long-term, so I wouldn't make big investments in the game, which of course makes it less likely to continue to operate. I only just start playing so I don't know if this was a bid to increase the player base because it's been falling, but there just isn't that much content in this game. However, since it's not a bad grind and it's free, and it works easily enough on Linux, this isn't a reason to skip it.
Conclusion
It might be a bad idea to spend money on this game, though that would make its potential demise a self-fulfilling prophecy. But what will determine whether this game can persist is whether they are able to produce sufficient content for it, and continue to introduce new and interesting elements like new factory mechanics or minigames. In the meantime it's entirely worth playing the game as it is today for fun, and it won't cost you anything. At this specific moment there are a lot of people playing and it's a great time to join in. There's a substantial player base which is familiar with the back story from the first game and is excited to see the lore develop, so there's some hope that this game can keep going long enough to get some depth.
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I just threw all the names I could find for these in here in the hopes that this would make sense