God of War: Sons of Sparta on AnyPS5

Screenshots

Posted by testers in the project's threads; the date links to the post. Click to enlarge.

Where it stands

God of War: Sons of Sparta is built on the Unity engine (IL2CPP). One Windows tester on an AMD RX 6800 XT says it boots from cold, plays the Sony, Mega Cat Studios and PlayStation Studios logo movies, reaches the 'press any button' screen, plays cutscenes and goes into gameplay. They say they beat the first Cyclops boss, reached the River area and found a save altar. Saves, audio (through the game's FMOD audio engine) and fullscreen are reported working. Three screenshots are in the thread.

It is not smooth yet. A second Windows player wrote that in two hours of play the game crashed five times, often far from a save point. The first tester agrees it is early and says someone else will have to continue the work on this game. Several fixes that this game needed are merged on main: sharp output on high-DPI screens, smooth intro video, a lighting fix that stopped growing white blobs, Unity garbage-collection hangs on Windows, and Xbox View button mapped to the touchpad. It is not clear which of the tester's other changes are on main.

On Linux the game gets through a long list of start-up problems. Contributors fixed placing game memory where the engine expects it, loading the game's own plugins, passing start-up arguments to them, a locked-mutex abort in the intro, a slowdown that made the intro run far below speed, and combat sounds that were about 20 dB louder than dialogue. One tester now sees the window open, the GPU start up and shaders load, but the game then dies from random heap corruption. A change that was reverted earlier (making only one memory-manager handshake happen when the game ships its own libc) got one tester past the start-up error, so it is the likely next step.

If you want to follow this game, the Windows bring-up discussion is the best place to start.

What is stopping it

• Linux: game aborts at start-up with 'RTLD application heap: cannot replace an active allocator' on current main, because both the game's libc and the system's one register a memory manager. The earlier fix was reverted for another title. Thread
• Linux: even when that is worked around, the game later hits random heap corruption ('corrupted size vs. prev_size') after about 60 to 130 shader workloads. Thread
• Windows: players report crashes every 20 minutes or so, often far from the nearest save point. No cause is identified in the thread. Thread
• Some Unity start-up imports from libc were reported as missing, which crashes the game with an access violation on Windows. The fix PRs were closed. Thread

How it got here

1. 5 Oct 2026Windows fixes merged from a Sons of Sparta test port: sharp output on high-DPI screens, smooth intro video, and Xbox View button mapped to the touchpad. Source
2. 6 Oct 2026A Linux tester finds the boot stops after the intro movies because the game's PSN plugin cannot load, and a module start-up parameter is missing. Source
3. 8 Oct 2026A Windows RX 6800 XT tester posts a bring-up report: full gameplay, a first boss kill, saves and audio working, with three screenshots. Source
4. 8 Oct 2026Fix for white blobs that grew across the screen is proposed (stencil clear draws were being dropped); it is merged on October 10. Source
5. 9 Oct 2026Linux: start-up arguments are now passed to the game's own plugin modules, and a locked-mutex abort in the intro is fixed. Source
6. 9 Oct 2026A Linux tester gets the window, Vulkan device and shader cache up, then hits heap corruption. Source
7. 10 Oct 2026Linux guest memory is placed in the PS5 address window the game's allocator expects, and the intro now runs at normal speed. Source
8. 10 Oct 2026Fixes merged for Unity garbage-collection hangs on Windows and for combat sounds being far louder than dialogue. Source
9. 10 Oct 2026A player reports 5 crashes in 2 hours of play on Windows. Source

Tested hardware