The Xbox live arcade game FEZ is an beautiful and unique game. But it has had a couple of unfortunate bugs – the first one could wipe out your save game c
ompletely, and the latest patch introduced a new one which could prevent you from loading if you saved/exited in the waterfall level.
This is documented at http://polytroncorporation.com/fez-issues:
‘There is one known crash with the patch: if you save in the “waterfall” level and exit and restart the game, it freezes.
The only workaround for this issue is to clear your system cache, the patch will be uninstalled, and your savefile will load correctly. Then after moving to another level and saving, you will be able to reapply the patch and continue your game.
As far as we know this problem only happens in the waterfall level. Should it happen somewhere else though, this workaround is still valid.’
However, this didn’t work for me, to do with the fact that my save game was on cloud storage, and Fez would not load any local game saves. I noticed this when I stopped my xbox gold subscription, I could no longer play Fez as it wouldn’t use the local copy which was synced, and I couldn’t access cloud as that is part of gold.
So in my case, I couldn’t implement the fix, because that meant clearing the cache, so Fez was not updated and couldn’t sign into Live, and it wouldn’t read the local game save. Even when deleting any local save and copying to local storage, it only offered to start a new game.
But, I found that my 2nd Xbox was loading an old local save game with no issues. So what I did was this:
On an xbox which is loading local saves no problems and does not have the patch, copy the cloud save game to local storage (from System/Storage). Use the clear cache trick to remove the updates if it is already updated.
- Run the game, and do not update
- Load your broken/waterfall save from local storage, which should work.
- Go to another level, and exit, which saves.
- Now copy the local save back up to cloud storage
- Then update
- Now run, and I can load from cloud again!
Obviously this requires having access to another xbox, but you could always try this on a friends. I hope this helps someone, let me know if this works for you in the comments.
Hi there,
I’m not exactly sure what my problem is, but when I boot the game without the patch installed it doesn’t recognize that I have a save file. The ‘Continue Game’ option is greyed out. My save file is saved on my hard drive, so I know it’s not the cloud issue you mentioned above. I’m not sure how to fix this. Can someone help?
Also, the game acts as if it’s the demo.. it has ‘Unlock Full Game’ in the main menu. This is definitely wrong, because I bought the game already. So I’m not sure what the problem is.
I figured out how to fix this!!! Basically, for whatever reason, you have a version of Fez that technically thinks it belongs to another XBox (maybe a previous one). So it needs to verify itself with xbox live in order to no show up as a demo. But as we know, when you “skip an update” (which you have to do to make the solution on this thread work) you’re not allowed on xbox live. So UnPatched Fez thinks it is a demo and you can’t continue your game.
The fix is to transfer your license to this console. Go to settings, accounts, billing options and license transfer. And then transfer your software licenses to your own console.
Only THEN go back to UnPatched Fez and it will load your saved games.
From there, follow the advice above.
I had that problem, one of my xbox’s wouldnt load any game and would only let me do a new game. I only solved this by using a second machine – copy the save game to a USB key and go around to a mates house and try and load it on that.
Thanks your awesome