This game is breaking my heart

I absolutely love this game, but I fear I’m trapped in a loop, and every time it happens, it breaks my heart.

I’ll start a new lineage, sink time into it and gradually build up a respectable stash, a solid lineage, and maybe even live out a few life goals. I’ll be chugging through the skies, getting ready to pull out of a station and then *it* will happen- my train will get trapped in dock, frozen, as the little ‘saving’ wheel cycles gaily in the corner like a steam-powered ear-flicking mill. I pray the game will let me quit without saving and reload the game, then I have a few minutes to contemplate the void waiting to see if it will work. A few times I get lucky and the save reloads, I breathe a sigh of relief.

Every fifth or so time, however, it will kill my save for that entire lineage, and none of the available bug fixes seem to bring it back.my character might as well be in Piranesi’s laundry room with a kazoo strapped to each hand.

I’ve been playing a session of the game now for a month and, as I type, Sunless Skies is loading after my captain decided that she liked The Empyrean so much she’d stay indefinitely. The last time this happened was two years ago, and it so soured my experience that I stopped playing. All the good feeling, the emotional investment, the passion I had for it turned to bitterness.

The sad thing is, I don’t think I’d have this reaction if the story and gameplay weren’t so damn good otherwise. If it was a hack-and-slash button-mash affair, I’d shake my head and restart, but the emotional investment means I end up with a refractory period.

Has this happened to anyone else?