Papers please developer

The developer of Papers, Please went above and beyond the call of duty today, according to a user on Reddit. levi4884 claims that he was trying to make space for game saves and in turn, accidentally deleted all his game progress, meaning that he had to star all over again.

After trying many fixes, he headed over to the Steam Forums to get some help on how he could get his saved files back. After making a post and asking for help, his cries of sorrow were heard by none other than the game's developer, Lucas Pope.

Pope, in an act of absolute benovelence, went on to study the problem that the gamer was facing. He then sent levi4884 this response.

Ok, I checked your files. Actually I had to write a bit of code to regenerate the header file that ties them all together. I've been meaning to do this for a while though, so it's not a big deal. Basically, the header file holds all the information about the save "tree" that specifies which save is connected to which and enables the branching save system in the game. Without the header, it's just a bunch of floating day saves.

After regenerating your header file from the saves you sent me, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news: I was able to get a bunch of saves hooked back up. The bad news: Not all the days are there. I think the restore program you used found some previously deleted saves. Even though not all the days are present, there's still too many tracks to fit on the game screen - that indicates some previously-deleted tracks where recovered too.

What I did was restore as many saves as I could, then prune out the old ones on low days to make it fit onscreen. The result is rather weird looking (you'll see), but it should allow you to restore from those late days. You'll still need to delete at least one track if you decide to branch somewhere - I'll let you decide which one to delete in that case.

Pope's act of benevolence is being widely discussed on several gaming forums and many social media platforms. It is very rare to see game devs reach out to their players in such a fashion and offer all the help that they can provide.

For those of you who haven't tried it out yet, Papers, Please can be bought on Steam. Check it out here. The game is being reffered to by many experts and reviewers as "a work of art".

Steam