I'm able to get in the game using proton 4.3-2, but if I plug in a gamepad, it crashes in a similar way.
Seems to be an issue where we're initializing mono multiple times in the process.
Tested out Aces Wild on my steam deck and as noted, there are issues where certain sprites appear completely black on Proton stable (Easily noticable on the character select screen with the katana character and other ninjas) These issues do not exist on 5.13-6 of Proton strangely enough, though the protondb report says it happens on every version of Proton released after it.
Tested with 5.13-6
steam-269230.log
Screenshots from Windows how it's supposed to look.


How it looks on Deck (Sorry for the multiple edits, just figured out the Deck screenshot stuff)


Ran another log with the latest experimental
steam-269230.log
Testing again with Proton Experimental rebased onto Wine 8.0, Gene Drift as well as some of the enemy Ninjas are still showing up as black silhouettes in game.
Graphical problems are still present as of latest proton Experimental on steam deck.
@kisak-valve Extremely good news, I tried out the game with proton Experimental now that it rebased to wine 9.0 and my issues with Gene Drift and some of the enemies being completely black are fixed now. Issue was still present on 8.0-5 so I'm sure it's fixed on both OLED and LCD.
Highly recommend retesting this, game played through the first boss fight and it seems to work great now.
Compatibility Report
System Information
I confirm:
steam-269230.log
Symptoms
The game crashes on what appears to be an assertion failure in wine-mono:
This happens soon after loading Microsoft.DirectX.DirectInput, which the game uses for non-XInput gamepad support. FWIW, I believe had this working with wine-mono 4.8.1, so it should be somewhat easy to bisect.
Reproduction