Yeah, I regularly play quite a few others (and have played them today, even). I’m sorry I can’t give better feedback but one thing I did notice is that, for whatever reason, the ren’py folders (like the lib/<platform> folders) seem to be quite different from other titles I have here, which is why I suspect some deployment weirdness.
If it did work for your friend, then yeah, maybe it is some more insidious weirdness. I get that error when launching through the shell script (the .sh file) which is normally the way to go with ren py games.
Happy to help you dig deeper and figure this out, though. If it turns out to be relevant, I’m running Arch here. I’ll try and give it another look tomorrow, if you make any tweaks and need me to double check something on my end, just let me know and I’ll give it a go