Landlord of the Woods on macOS: One Gatekeeper Wall and a Sneaky Permissions Trap

Hey,

Listen, I was tinkering last night with Landlord of the Woods (game) on my Mac, and I figured I’d write this down before I forget the exact sequence of mistakes I made.

I just wanted a quiet, low-stress indie session. Nothing fancy. Downloaded it, dropped it into Applications, double-clicked… and macOS immediately threw the classic:

“Landlord of the Woods can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software.”

So yeah. Gatekeeper again.

You know the drill — Apple blocks apps that aren’t notarized or signed in a way it likes. The official explanation is here, in case you ever need the reference:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202491

At first I did the lazy thing. Right-click → Open. Usually that works because it forces macOS to show the “Open Anyway” override.

This time? Nope. Same warning. No override button appeared in Privacy & Security either. Sonoma (I’m on 14.4, M2 Air) can be inconsistent about surfacing that option.

So my first assumption was: maybe the download was corrupted.

I re-downloaded it. Same issue.

Then I checked whether there was a Mac App Store version, because that avoids all of this nonsense. Didn’t find a direct listing, but if you ever want to check, here’s the generic search page:
https://apps.apple.com/us/search?term=Landlord%20of%20the%20Woods

In this case, I was using a direct build from the developer’s site. That’s here:
https://landlordofthewoods.com

Totally legitimate source. Just not notarized for macOS the way Apple prefers.

That’s when it clicked: this wasn’t a broken build. It was quarantine flags.

When you download an app via browser, macOS attaches a quarantine attribute. Gatekeeper checks that flag and blocks execution if the app isn’t notarized (Apple’s notarization process is explained here:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizing_macos_software_before_distribution).

So what I did next was open Terminal and check the attributes:

xattr Landlord\ of\ the\ Woods.app

Sure enough: com.apple.quarantine.

At that point I stopped fighting Finder and just removed it properly:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Landlord\ of\ the\ Woods.app

After that, it launched instantly. No drama.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

When the game finally opened, it immediately froze on the first splash screen. No crash report, just a spinning beachball. I thought I’d broken something by stripping the quarantine flag incorrectly.

Turned out the issue was completely different.

The game was trying to write save data inside ~/Library/Application Support/, and for some reason my user folder permissions were slightly off. I had previously run another indie build with sudo (don’t ask), and it created a directory owned by root.

So when this one tried to write, it silently failed and hung.

I found the folder:

~/Library/Application Support/LandlordOfTheWoods

And it was owned by root.

Fixed it with:

sudo chown -R $(whoami) ~/Library/Application\ Support/LandlordOfTheWoods

Launched again. Smooth.

No freezes. No stutter. Controller worked. Saves persisted after quitting. Everything behaved normally once macOS stopped being overprotective and I stopped being careless with permissions.

By the way, while I was sorting this out, I found this page useful — my notes here on macOS systems behavior and this specific build:
https://rvfcb.com/file-management/13119-landlord-of-the-woods.html

Mostly just to confirm I wasn’t the only one seeing the launch block.

What I initially got wrong was assuming the first error message explained the whole problem. It didn’t. Gatekeeper was one issue. File ownership was another. They just stacked in a way that made the game look unstable.

The good news is performance-wise it runs perfectly fine on Apple Silicon. No Rosetta required, at least with the build I tested. No weird GPU spikes either. Activity Monitor stayed calm. So once it launches, it’s lightweight.

If I were to do this again from scratch, here’s the short mental checklist I’d follow:

• Download from the official site.
• Move to Applications.
• If blocked, remove quarantine with xattr.
• Avoid using sudo when testing indie builds.
• Check Application Support folder ownership if it freezes at launch.

That’s it.

And no, I didn’t disable Gatekeeper globally. You technically can with spctl --master-disable, but that’s overkill and not something I’d recommend unless you enjoy weakening system-wide protections for convenience.

What I appreciated, honestly, is that macOS wasn’t being “broken.” It was being cautious. The friction just shows up more with smaller games that don’t go through Apple’s notarization pipeline.

Anyway, once it was running, I actually enjoyed it. Calm atmosphere, simple mechanics, no background processes doing weird stuff. The rough part was entirely at the OS layer.

So if you hit that “can’t be opened” message, don’t panic and don’t assume the game itself is junk. It’s usually just Gatekeeper plus a permissions quirk. Fix those cleanly and move on.

Hope this saves you an hour of poking around like I did.