This game can be challenging, but fun. However, we ran into a big game-breaking bug.

My problem so far (6 hours in for them), is that you can lose most or all of your progress just because. We played for hours yesterday, came to a good stopping point, logged off, went to bed, hopped back on and one of our friends (the host) had their character and world reset.

When looking for solutions, it became clear logging in with all progress being lost is a major well-known issue that could happen under many different circumstances (including your game crashing). There is 1 recommended solution and nothing else. These posts were dated 2-3 years ago.

Our run was pretty smooth. We got to the Ward, went to a world, defeated some bosses, explored some areas, went back to Ward, made some purchases and logged off.

When our friend logged back in, it didn't start them where it should've. It didn't start at the tutorial with Ford either (which can happen). It put them in an entirely new world, with a level 1 character with none of the weapons, armor, etc. that we got from the night before. The character has the same archetype but, that's it. They did NOT re-roll the campaign either. All of it is gone.

When attempting to do the recommended backup and cloud save backup fix, the most recent backup save either way was at the intro/character creation so, it would be the same as starting over, which is the only other "fix". There are no manual saves for this game.

In this game, you have to touch a World Stone to save. We did this multiple times throughout our playthrough. Our friend's backup saves didn't capture any of those World Stone points.

There were no patches pushed that could've created this issue (which is also well known). No network issues. No crashes. No prompts for a re-roll. No new game. Seemingly no recent save data points backed up somehow over the course of 6 hours.

The devs have moved on from this game so, if this happens to you, you're out of luck.

I appreciate that they have the save files in more than 1 place, but, if that was your solution, you needed to make sure it was developed properly. How this kind of defect made it past QA is unacceptable.

Playing this with a friend who has never played a Soulslike, and we're both having fun with it. The coop is seemless and we've had no connection or ping issues, despite being on two sides of the world. It's challenging but fun.

This game started off good, was fun, a little challenging.... and then I loaded my save this morning to find out all 6 hours of progress we played in the game was just gone.