Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice presents a number of significant challenges to overcome, such as learning how to beat Lady Butterfly in the game's early stages. This level of difficulty means that players will need to put some serious time and effort toward progressing through the title, but an unfortunate issue is forcing unlucky players to start back at square one.
As is currently being reported across a number of community forums, including GameFAQs, Reddit, and Steam, players have been encountering a problem that causes their Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice save files to become corrupted, making them begin the game again from the beginning. This specific issue is only affecting Sekiro on PC, and it typically occurs as a result of Sekiro crashing or a force quit.
It is thus advisable for PC players to take extra care when exiting the game. This means resting at a Sculptor's Idol and then exiting to the main menu before fully exiting to desktop. It is also recommended that these players back up their save data at frequent intervals.
Backing up save data for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is done by navigating to C://Users/"User Name"/AppData/Roaming/Sekiro and copying everything in the folder to a secondary, backup folder. In order to find this folder, players will need to select the option to view hidden files and folders from within properties.
While such meticulousness when exiting the game may feel tedious, and some might find it a nuisance to continually backup their save files, these options certainly beat the alternative of having to start the game from scratch. Indeed, after a player has taken the time to learn how to beat Blazing Bull in Sekiro, seeing all of their progress evaporate due to a corrupted save file could be an immensely frustrating moment.
It seems that those that are playing Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice on PC may currently have bigger concerns than figuring out Sekiro's dragon rot cure. Hopefully for these players, a fix will come shortly, and perhaps it will not only address save file corruption, but will also reduce the frequency of Sekiro crashing on PC.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is out now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.