Thanks for wasting my live with that bs save policy

[BMK]

I kept saving at every possibility, had to load once (1 time!) after about 2 hours of gaming and went straight back to where I was 2 hours ago. Totally different level, totally different development stage, no environmental damage, all enemies back. What's the point? Did I miss something?

[cuni]

huh?

[infiniteclone7]

did you even use those hive checkpoint things to save? those are your save points

[BMK]

Yes. That's what I used and the single time I loaded I got teleported back to some really old save that was totally irrelevant and where I would have had to replay 2 hours of gameplay. I realized since that those hive saves seem to count as temporary just in case you die (haven't actually tried it yet though) and that you then in the menu still have to make hard saves that you can actually load manually. I might be wrong though, that's why I have to try it out. In that case the game is very unclear about that function, that you have two different save systems and you have to always do a hive save and then a real save in menu for it to count. Kind of annoying. If there is anyone on this planet who hates to replay for absolutely no good reason then that's me. If there is no replay value, I'm just not doing it. I will give this another shot though, checking if my hypothesis is correct...

[BMK]

Ok I'm done. Requesting refund. Let's see if I get it after this time. I've even made hard saves over and over and over again and when I load I come out in the same old spot very far back in time in a completely different part of the complex than where I last saved. This is broken. Good bye.

[s-m-k]

Not sure what the issue is. You only need the hive savefile (aka checkpoint) to progress. The manual saving only stores the last activated checkpoints for later use (so you can return to your old progress at any time), which is indicated in the menu. The game doesn't support the "save anywhere" functionality known in older games, but the checkpoints store every game object that affects the gameplay. Environmental damage (assuming you mean 'blood and destruction "painted" on the level layer') is not saved by design (it's not permanent in the game), but all the enemies you killed before reaching the checkpoint are saved. You should never be able to lose more than a few minutes of progress.

[BMK]

Thanks for taking your time to answer. Something went wrong when I "saved". I tried on map saving through hives and then I went into the game menu and saved "Last checkpoint". (Funny thing, I restarted the game and had the same issue.) When I loaded my last checkpoint in the last test today I actually came out the same savepoint as I had been coming out the last time - about 1½ hours of gameplay back, with everything returned to normal. So there must be a bug somewhere according to your statement. I deleted the game otherwise I would have sent you the save file. Love the game and concept but effectively I have to finish it in one go if I personally wanna beat it and we know that's not going to happen. The last time I played a non-savable game was when I beat Gianna Sisters on the C=64 and that was in the late 80s.

[s-m-k]

Frankly, it sounds like the game must've attempted to save repeatedly, without success. Should the save file/folder be read-only, the game would surely let you know about that. I'm not sure what could be the culprit in this case. If the issue is on the game's side, it's extremely difficult to reproduce (you're the first unlucky person to report this).

The saves are located in the following folder, so there's still a chance you might have them there:

%USERPROFILE%/AppData/LocalLow/Phobia/Carrion/_steam_{64BitSteamID}/saves

[BMK]

Found them. You want me to send them somewhere? Wait... just checked. The folder is read only, however, it has all the bunch of saves I seem to have made, and they have individual file sizes and everything. What's going on there? With read only there should be nothing in there?

[s-m-k]

If it looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/mdnhqa8.png, then it's likely normal. You should be good to go if you can create files manually there.

But, I've got an idea (could be wrong, though) that it could have been caused by a malfunction of Steam's cloud saves (or any third-party cloud synchronization software for that matter). So, if you still want to give the game a go, I'd recommend turning that feature off in the Steam client (or any third-party program you might use).

Say, the cloud sync got tricked into thinking that the old version of the checkpoint savefile was the most recent one, so it kept replacing the new versions of the file with the older ones, effectively reproducing the scenario you've described above.

I'm not sure if Steam would do that while the game was running. If Windows or any third-party program decided not to let the game save at all (due to lacking permissions or files temporarily locked by a program working on them), you'd get a large error popup right away. It's highly unlikely that the game would let it fail silently. It does look like Carrion saved just fine, but the files got somehow reverted to the old versions.

[BMK]

Yeah it looks like that and I could create files in the folder. Merry Christmas!

[s-m-k]

Merry Christmas! :)