Game audio gets weird if you are using virtual surround sound. I am using a pipewire 7.1 config, and hovering over buttons would make the sound go to the right ear for a short moment, and when in-game I could only hear voices from the left ear, etc. You can check this in pavucontrol: if you uncheck the lock, it will show more than two audio channels/sliders. The fix is to set the default audio as normal stereo (two channels, like regular headphones), then launch the game. After that, if you unlock it in pavucontrol again, it will only show two channels/tracks and the audio works like normal stereo. I haven't had this issue with other games, so I don't know what's going on here, virtual surround sound config makes something go wrong.