Potential Workaround for Startup Crash

[Slateonyx]

Long story short: try opening the .exe in Visual Studio 2015 and then run the game through steam while it's still open in VS15.

Long story: Game ran perfectly fine the first time I played it. Made it through the prologue and two chapters with no issues. The next time I tried to play, it crashed on the first loading screen (before the menu pops up) every single time.

The method to getting it to work I saw talked about the most is to run the game in compatibility mode for a specific earlier version of windows but all this does is delay the crash from startup to around 10 minutes into playing. Not an ideal solution given this game has a save system that doesn't mesh well with sudden crashes.

Absolutely nothing I found online or in the steam forums was any help at all for solving this. I was fed up and on the verge of refunding it, but I'm stubborn and had one last random idea. I wanted to see if I could run it debug mode in visual studio and get any info at all as to why it's crashing. The answer is no, I didn't get any info because the game didn't crash. I have no idea if running it in debug mode that first time was even necessary (it also made me open VS again as an admin) because just having the .exe open as a project and then running it through steam works every single time for me.

Side notes because I haven't bothered to experiment further:
- running in beta mode
- reinstalled it and then made sure not to mess with the settings
- did a disk cleanup of old windows and driver updates beforehand
- this is NOT using any of the compatibility modes
- VS 2019 didn't work when I tried the same thing with it. No idea why this works with 2015 and not 2019

I have no idea why this works for me, I have no idea what is even happening that just having it open in VS suddenly makes the game work properly, but it does... somehow. Can't make any guarantees that this will work for everyone because again.. I have no idea what part of this even makes it work, but hopefully it'll help at least a few people who want to play.

[Klampus]

Interesting...I've never used Visual Studio before. Does this workaround work for the free version?

[Slateonyx]

It should, I have Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition. Here's hoping it works with a fresh install, because if there's any extra things that need to be installed I'm not sure what they'd be.

[Klampus]

LOL, a 7+ gb download for a game that is less than a gig. Well, here goes nothing...

EDIT: Reloaded an old save and played for about an hour. No crashes! But stuck looking for a key in the factory. Anyway, looks promising?

[khermerker]

thanks a lot this is the solution... I will make a spanish video of this for others to follow but thanks to this I can play and recommend this game again ...

[Snoobas]

I opened the main exe on HxD (hex editor) and it worked.
Wtf...