Soul Hackers 2 – Fix for Endless Boot Screen Bug

Can’t start the game? Stuck on a “spinning crystal of doom”? This guide is for you.

Warning

The steps below are provided only as a courtesy. Proceed at your OWN RISK: this may delete save progress, etc., but is currently the only known way to get past this issue (so you can’t use the save anyway).

The full ramifications of this are unknown – so if you’re not confident, don’t do this step. Just know, that until/unless the devs fix this issue, you won’t be able to launch the game.

Consider also:

If you delete the two files only, it should work to restore access, but you may get corruption again. If you delete the whole SOULHACKERS2 folder, it should then cleanup the cloud save (in theory).

Which way you go is up to you. I couldn’t even get as far as manual save, so I just deleted the folder to make sure EVERYTHING was frickin clean. But if you got into the game a ways, you might want to keep your save, so deleting the two .DAT files should be enough – but again, proceed at your own risk.

The Problem

You were able to play the game; but when you booted this time, you got stuck in a “spinning crystal of doom” boot screen and cannot continue.

Root Cause

Atlus/Sega doesn’t know how to write their software to check the integrity of files and where there’s an issue, correct it. The result is that when you have cloud saves enabled, they end up getting corrupted during sync; you can manually re-sync, but you’re just sync’ing corrupted data files.

Solution

You need to delete the local user data file store for the game. In Windows, you need to navigate to your Roaming AppData folder. If your Steam is installed on the C: drive, and say your login username was “JSmith”, your path would be C:\Users\JSmith\AppData\Roaming. Open any Windows Explorer folder and type that into the address bar to get to the main folder.

Then, go into the SEGA folder, into the SOULHACKERS2 folder, and navigate down into the SystemData folder. So you’re going into (from the path above):

• AppData\Roaming\SEGA\SOULHACKERS2\Steam\150288879\SaveData\SYSTEMDATA

And delete “data.dat” and “systemdata.dat”.

If you have NEVER created a manual save because you never got that far, you should be able to just delete the whole SOULHACKERS2 folder (because you lose nothing and it’s cleaner, just to make sure there’s not some other corrupt file somewhere

Game should run correctly now. If not, you may need to disable cloud save and repeat these steps.