For a minute there, Game Pass was one of the best deals in video games. Aside from easy access to the Xbox catalogue, you’d regularly be served games that you would either never try or tell yourself you would when there was a sale. Lies of P was one of those games for me. Though I have since canceled Game Pass because of Microsoft’s ongoing support of the genocide in Gaza, I wish I had done the sensible thing and bought the game on Steam to begin with, or at least archived my save, because not doing so screwed up my save.
Lies of P: Overture is a DLC expansion that was shadow-dropped last week. I have not beaten Overture, but my impressions based on what I’ve played is that Neowiz still has the juice. The DLC is brutal, they give P a shotgun arm, and the monsters are thoroughly disgusting. So far I’m happy.
But because I had previously played Lies of P on Game Pass, I realized when I got code for Overture that I had to fish out my old save file. I think I had assumed before canceling that I had bought the game on Steam during a sale but no, I hadn’t. Turns out my save file is tied to Microsoft’s service forever. What’s worse, Lies of P is no longer on Game Pass. So if I just wanted to get my save file using a trial of Game Pass, cancelling it, and transferring the save to Steam, I would need to buy the game first. Even beyond the ethics of supporting Microsoft, I’m not going to buy a game on their store voluntarily.
But wait, sometimes the save file is still on your computer! There’s thorough guides on how to convert a Game Pass save file to a Steam one, and I had installed it to play it not too long ago. Maybe it was still kicking around on my hard drive.
Though Game Pass is fine as a service, it is also a Microsoft product, meaning the way it installs on your PC is generally a nightmare. Unlike Steam, which just puts stuff in Program Files like an adult, you have to make sure “hidden items” are visible, go into your AppData folder and navigate to an obtusely-named folder in Packages. Even in ideal circumstances this would be annoying, but when I followed every available guide I was able to find the remnants of Lies of P on my hard drive, but not the one specific folder that would have contained my save. Either something had changed since the guide was written, something happened with my computer, or Windows had deleted the save off my drive.
I am apparently not alone here. I did find at least one other person who had been in the exact same situation on r/liesofp. I contemplated speed running through the entire game, since I have done that multiple times. I got to the end of the first chapter before I realized that I don’t have time to do that. This left one solution: download another person’s meticulously curated save file from NexusMods.
The save file worked wonderfully and contained every available weapon and potential item in the game. This is basically everything I could ask for, and I should state the person who uploaded that save is a saint. But doing that does feel a little wrong. This wasn’t my Pinocchio, and though I can respec him, it felt like living in another person’s skin. What’s more, this file is on its third playthrough, and every added layer of New Game Plus makes the game harder, so even though I am well positioned gear-wise for the DLC, everything in it hits like an 18-wheeler. Apparently, at least one other person is in this situation as well.
At the end of the day this whole mess could have been avoided. Archiving is ultimately my responsibility, and I’m going to start running it on a schedule. I knew the DLC was coming up, and I wish I had had the foresight to just back up my saves or buy the game on Steam to begin with. Because if you play a game on a service where you don’t own the game, can you even say that your experiences are yours?
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