Returnal – Patch 1.3.4 is Live Now, But You May Have Lost Your Save Data Forever

As great as Returnal is, Housemarque’s roguelike shooter has had a bit of a rough launch, with technical issues being a source of frustration for several players. Recently, Housemarque pushed out another patch to work on some of those problems, but the patch created even bigger issues, effectively corrupting save data for quite a few players. Housemarque immediately pulled the patch, reverting the game to its previous version, but the developer has now confirmed that patch 1.3.4 has now gone live.

Patch 1.3.4 essentially reverts Returnal back to its 1.3.1 state, while also addressing an issue related to Trophies and fixing a keyboard exploit. Meanwhile, if you have a saved game that still works, you don’t have to worry about it being corrupted anymore, Housemarque says. There is a catch though.

As the developer explains, some save files, when corrupted, had their sizes changed to 0 KB. If your save is one of those, that means you’ve basically lost your data forever, unless you have a backup somewhere. You can try and restore a save uploaded to the cloud via PlayStation Plus, but Housemarque warns that depending on your console settings, even uploaded saves may have been replaced by 0 KB save files, which means those won’t do you much good either.

It’s a shame, honestly, that the game’s facing these issues. When it works as intended, Returnal is an excellent game, but for many, it hasn’t been working as intended, which is obviously quite frustrating. Here’s hoping Housemarque can sort these issues out before too long.

The developer has also said that though adding mid-run saves isn’t currently part of the plan, they’re listening to fan feedback, so there’s a chance that the feature gets added down the line.