Shadowrun Returns Black Screen – Troubleshooting After First Battle

pcshadowrun-returns

I just recently pickup up this game on the Classics Return Humble Bundle and everything was going fine until I finished the first battle.

After that, I go back to the apartment and I talk some more with Sam Watts and when I say I'll go to Seattle, the screen fades to black and nothing happens.
It just stays black with the mouse cursor on.

If I press escape then the screen comes back and the in-game menu appears but then I just get stuck in the conversation with Sam with the "continue conversation" button greyed out.

How can I fix this issue?

Best Answer

TL;DR - Don't use backslashes \ (on Windows) in the name of your character (or any other special character, if you want to be extra safe).

Explanation - After searching a bit on the internet, I ended up in the official game forums in the post where they detail how to report bugs. There they suggested to check out the unity logs.

So I did, I opened up C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Shadowrun Returns\Shadowrun_Data\output_log.txt.

After a bit of searching I found the following error: IsolatedStorageException: Could not find a part of the path "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Shadowrun Returns\DumpBox\0309_16-53-59_J0h_\__5_\_0\_\__report.csv".

I checked the DumpBox folder and confirmed that the .csv file didn't exist.

Essentially the game creates a .csv file with your character's name in the file name and if you have a backslash in it, it will fail to create and read the file.

This leads to crashing the thread responsible for loading and thus getting stuck on the black screen.

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