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Sonic Mania Plus may have brought back classic characters Ray and Mighty from the dead, but on PC the expansion pack appears to have also revived the gameplay-destroying horror of Digital Rights Management software Denuvo.

Reports have hit the Steam community forums moaning about issues with slowdown and freezing on the main menu screen, once they install the Plus DLC. According to hacker Voksi, the problems are almost all entirely down to “an insane amount of bloated Denuvo code, compared to the previous version”.

“[Some of the slowdown issues are] caused by a trigger in the time attack menu when you scroll down till the last levels, which is not closed properly, which causes Denuvo to continue writing in its section until the game is closed, which causes massive game slowdown,” Voksi writes on Reddit.

And, while we would certainly never endorse cracking games or circumventing copy or DRM protection on video games, Voksi – during an attempt to do just that with Mania Plus – claims to have discovered a DRM looping issue preventing legitimate users of the game to get past the menu screen.

This isn’t the first time Denuvo has caused problems for Sonic Mania PC players. The original game’s release in 2017 was delayed by two weeks on the platform, compared to home consoles, largely believed to be because of SEGA’s implementation of the DRM… and when it did launch on Steam, fans complained of slowdown and forced always-online features, to name but a few things.

All in all, it sounds like a bad time for PC players, and we hope that a fix is being prepared by SEGA to overcome these issues soon.

Source: Reddit (via DSOG)