Hey, listen — yesterday I went down a small rabbit hole with The Archmage (game), and I figured I’d write this up while it’s still fresh, because it was one of those very macOS-specific problems that looks obvious only after you’ve burned an hour on it.
So the context. I’m on macOS Sonoma 14.3, Intel Mac mini (yeah, still alive), and I just wanted to launch the game, poke around for twenty minutes, see how it runs. Nothing exotic. Download, unzip, drag to Applications, double-click. That muscle memory we all have.
What happened instead was the classic macOS brick wall: “The application can’t be opened.” No crash log, no extra info. Just the system acting like I’d offended it personally.
Naturally, my first move was the lazy one. I tried launching it again. Same dialog. Then right-click → Open, hoping for the Gatekeeper override. That didn’t help either — same message, no “Open Anyway” option. At this point it didn’t even feel like Gatekeeper doing its usual thing. It felt more… silent. Like the OS had already made up its mind.
Next attempt was checking whether the download itself was busted. Re-downloaded the archive, verified the checksum, unzipped again. Same result. The app bundle looked fine, but macOS clearly didn’t trust it.
That’s when it clicked: this wasn’t about corruption. It was about notarization and first-launch permissions. Apple has gotten much stricter here, especially for games distributed outside the App Store. If something touches graphics APIs, input devices, or local files early in the startup sequence, macOS can block it before the window even shows up.
Apple actually explains this behavior across a few places, though not in one neat page. The most relevant overview is their Gatekeeper documentation on support.apple.com, which covers why apps can be blocked even without a warning dialog. There’s also a deeper technical explanation in Apple’s developer docs about notarization and code signing on macOS: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizing_macos_software_before_distribution. Reading that was the moment I stopped blaming the game and started blaming the OS.
What didn’t help, by the way: nuking extended attributes with xattr. I tried removing the quarantine flag from the app bundle manually. Terminal was happy. macOS still said no. That was dead end number two.
What finally worked was less dramatic, but very specific.
Instead of trying to force-launch it, I opened System Settings → Privacy & Security and scrolled all the way down. Buried near the bottom was a small notice saying the game had been blocked from opening because it couldn’t be verified. No popup, no alert earlier — just that quiet entry waiting for me to notice it. I clicked Open Anyway, authenticated, and then launched the game again.
This time it actually started.
Immediately after that, macOS asked for permission related to file access and input handling. That was the missing piece. The system wanted explicit approval before letting the game initialize fully, and until that happened, it simply refused to run it — without explaining itself.
Once past that first launch, everything behaved normally. No crashes. Performance was fine. I even tested a restart to make sure it wasn’t a one-time fluke. Clean launch every time.
Out of curiosity, I checked whether there was a Mac App Store version (sometimes that avoids all of this): https://apps.apple.com. No listing there, which explains why Gatekeeper was extra suspicious. I also skimmed the developer’s official materials to confirm expected behavior, and I found this page useful while cross-checking macOS-specific quirks — I saved my notes here in case I run into something similar again: https://sznurkowo.com/developer/16809-the-archmage.html.
So yeah, nothing was “broken” in the usual sense. It was just macOS being macOS in 2024.
If I had to give myself a short checklist for next time, it’d be this:
• Don’t trust the error message at face value • Check Privacy & Security before reinstalling anything • Assume notarization issues first, corruption second • Avoid disabling Gatekeeper globally — it’s rarely necessary
That’s basically it. Once you know where to look, it’s a five-minute fix. Before that, it’s an hour of mild frustration and side-eyeing your screen.
Anyway, figured you’d appreciate this one. If you ever see a game that “can’t be opened” but looks perfectly fine, it’s probably not lying — macOS just hasn’t been properly introduced to it yet.