Fallout Shelter, Pentiment, and other Unity games have been delisted on Steam thanks to Unity's security vulnerability

People queuing up to enter a vault
News (Image credit: Bethesda)

A security vulnerability found in the Unity engine, which had laid dormant for almost a decade, was recently patched. Games made using the engine also need to be patched, however, so expect a lot of games you wouldn't expect to still be receiving updates to suddenly download one out of the blue. Overcooked 2, for instance.

Microsoft, which owns so many videogame studios it's hard to keep track, has announced that some of its games will be temporarily pulled from storefronts while patches for the vulnerability are worked on. Which is why, if you look for Fallout Shelter, Pentiment, Wasteland Remastered, or Wasteland 3 on the Steam store right now you won't find them. If you own them already you still have access to them, though Microsoft suggests you "should temporarily uninstall the app."

Even games that weren't made in Unity have been affected if their companion apps and artbook launchers, the kind you often get in deluxe editions, were. Avowed, for instance, which was developed in Unreal Engine 5, has a digital artbook that's a Unity app.

It's worth noting that the security vulnerability in question hasn't actually affected anyone yet. As Unity explained, while programs made in Unity are "susceptible to an unsafe file loading and local file inclusion attack depending on the operating system", malicious files would need to be present on your device already, and "Code execution would be confined to the privilege level of the vulnerable application," which would only be a problem if you were running games as an admin. It's still worth fixing obviously, and it's been taken seriously by plenty of folks.

As soon as Pentiment's back on Steam you should check it out, by the way. It's a brilliant murder mystery.

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Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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