Dexter Stardust on M1 MacBook

Playing this amazing game on my Apple MacBook Air M1 2020 and I am totally lovin’ it. Before being able to play it however, I had to fight with a small error message (note that if you run the game from the UI you won’t see anything, just its icon flashing and then the game shutting down itself)

By opening the terminal and trying running the game with

open DexterStardust.app

The following error is thrown

The application cannot be opened for an unexpected reason, error=Error Domain=NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-10810 "kLSUnknownErr: Unexpected internal error" UserInfo={_LSFunction=_LSLaunchWithRunningboard, _LSLine=2732, NSUnderlyingError=0x600001902250 {Error Domain=RBSRequestErrorDomain Code=5 "Launch failed." UserInfo={NSLocalizedFailureReason=Launch failed., NSUnderlyingError=0x6000019021f0 {Error Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=1 "Operation not permitted" UserInfo={NSLocalizedDescription=Launchd job spawn failed}}}}}

Note this should be version 1.1 of the game. I downloaded it a few hours after it became available on itch.io

In my case the application is already copied in the /Applications folders of my macOS drive. To make it run, I executed, from within the /Applications directory, the following commands

xattr DexterStardust.app
xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine DexterStardust.app

The first command confirms that the file has the extended attribute com.apple.quarantine (just for you do see, not actually necessary to make it work) and the second removes it from the file. At this point a simple

open DexterStardust.app

runs the game!

Basically the com.apple.quarantine is an extended attribute that was added at some point, somehow by something, for some reasons, and that’s what is preventing the game to run. xattr is a command to manipulate extended attributes, -r removes the attributes from all the files within the package (the .app file is a package), and -d deletes the given attribute