Abrupt failure when starting Shadowrun Returns

A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to playing Shadowrun Returns from my queue of to-play games. The immersion took some time but once I got into it it was great. This is a great game and I would recommend it to anybody looking for a tactical steam-punk game for Linux.

Now, I recently stumbled upon an issue, where my game would fail to launch from Steam entirely. I could not pin point any particular issue. Steam's local cache verification did not produce any results. Therefore, I was forced to check the steamapps data directory itself. Turns out there is an output.txt file in the directory which provides some logging info.

Mine said:

::

Mono path[0] = '/opt/Steam/steamapps/common/Shadowrun Returns/Shadowrun_Data/Managed'
Mono path[1] = '/opt/Steam/steamapps/common/Shadowrun Returns/Shadowrun_Data/Mono'
Mono config path = '/opt/Steam/steamapps/common/Shadowrun Returns/Shadowrun_Data/Mono/etc'
Player is already running

(Filename:  Line: 411)

I was confused about what exactly was meant by Player exactly, but based on the log I figured it assume that this player component is running and therefore the game is and the executable bails. I then figured that Shadowrun returns was perhaps built using Unity, an engine I hate to love. htop and lsof did not result in anything obvious. I could neither locate any other file, flag or lock under the directory to indicate the problem. I therefore decided to nuke the problematic folder 'Mono'. I then launched file verification for the game's data files from the Steam client. It detected that the Mono folder was missing and re-pulled the folder in it's clean state again.

Game launched again. Guess who was a happy monkey? :)