Ren’Py is a game engine for visual novels.

Sidenote: I was going to summarize what visual novels are, but I don’t think I could do it justice. I encourage you to explore the medium (or video game genre, as Wikipedia calls it). As a popular example, the Phoenix Wright games are visual novels.

Ren’Py acts as a portable runtime for the game code, which is written in Python. As such, you’d expect games to be generally available on all platforms supported by Ren’Py. However, Misericorde is not available on macOS so far.

Luckily, since the runtime is freely available, we can assemble everything we need to run it ourselves. The biggest issue is getting the game files. If you buy the first game on itch.io it’s straightfoward since you can just download a zip file. Steam is not so easy, as the macOS client refuses you let you install games on unsupported platforms.

The workaround is using Valve’s Steam Console Client. After installing the client and logging in, you can use a command like the one below to download the files for any games you own. Just substitute your username and the identifier of the game in question, which is the number found in the store page URL.

./steamcmd.sh +@sSteamCmdForcePlatformType windows +force_install_dir ./game_files +login your_steam_username +app_update the_game_identifier validate +quit

One way or another, once you have the files, find and open script_version.txt (it should be inside the directory named game) to determine the version of the Ren’Py runtime you need to download. For Misericorde Vol 1 it’s currently 8.0.3, for Vol 2 it’s 8.2.0. You can find the list of all releases here. After that, copy the game directory into the Ren’Py directly, and launch reny.app. The game should get loaded and run automatically.