I have a large game library on the EPIC Game Store (mainly all those freebies I’ve been picking up for several years). Many of them work great on my Steam Deck. Thing is, I like moving back and forth between my Steam Deck and my Desktop, so cloud saves are an essential part of the experience for me. It’s gone wrong more times that I can count, but I think I’ve finally worked out the winning formula to make it work with many supported games. Here’s how I do it:
- install the game via Heroic, and start it once
- quit the game and head over to the Heroic Cloud Saves section
- chances are it says it couldn’t find the cloud saves directory (likelihood is 99.9999999%)
- now click the text that reads “retry directory” (might have to do this twice)
- if the game supports cloud saves, and Heroic could work out an existing directory, it’ll find it (yay!)
- switch the download menu over to “force download” and download from the cloud (this will overwrite the existing save game)
- start the game and check if it’s worked
- if everything is fine, enable “sync cloud saves” in that section of Heroic
The above technique works great for anything I’ve so far tried, the latest endeavour was Alan Wake II.
Why is this such a total nightmare?
Good question! That’s actually a Windows thing, not a Heroic thing. See Windows is very pernickety if where it lets apps save data that’s not connected to where the installed files live. As an example, the “Program Files” folder doesn’t have permissions to let apps make changes for security reasons. Hence developers have several other options to save data, but they’re not standardised.
This means that depending on the developer, there’s about as many possible save locations as there are video games on the market. Heroic can’t know this (unless these locations would be stored in a database), so it’ll just have to hunt down where existing data may exist. If successful, it can match that location up with the cloud location.
Also note that every game actually supports this feature, so if you’ve been trying to make it work in vain, it may just be that the title you’re playing doesn’t save games in the cloud.
If all else fails, I do recommend simply buying the game again on Steam to avoid the tremendous time sink this can easily become.