Thank you for the solution. The game now runs fine.
Also for anyone else running ArchLinux, the needed obsolete package is in AUR named gconf ,if you don't have Steam installed (or don't want to run steam runtime)
Nice. I had trouble in the past compiling gconf from AUR but it seems to work fine now (briefly checked: simply compiled and extracted the library sofile+symlinks to the lib64 game directory from the compiled package).
