I remember playing thief:deadly shadows as a kid (early teens?), and thinking it was OK... Until I got to the creepy ass zombies, at which point I noped out and never touched a thief game again.

I have played them but it was ages ago when they were new. I'm not certain the gameplay will hold up for me, to be perfectly honest. I've had this problem trying to go back to other older games.

It's pretty different from that one and unfortunately not on this sale at all, but I presume that you're already aware of Project Zomboid. People get hundreds to even thousands of hours out of it, plus it's a great co-op game.

second thumbs up for this game

Does this have co-op?

Yes, the announcement is new. I think he (or she) mixed it up with the articles popping up that a Linux client might be in work, due to speculation. So it didn't felt like news when it was official.

I use Lutris, and it works really well. A native Linux client would definitely be welcome, though!

Heroic uses heroic-gogdl in the background. Maybe that tool does not support everything the official client would? Would be curious to see what the differences are.