We’ve all seen it.

The little spinning symbol cautioning players against impatient acts of powering down.

The implication is clear.

Ripley’s places a keycard into a machine marked “Emergency” to save the game.

You will lose all your progress, all your precious swords and accomplishments.

But is this true?

How likely are you toreallysuffer a catastrophic loss of shotgun shells?

A data corruption warning shows during the start-up sequence for horror game Still Wakes The Deep.

Was this a good idea?

I don’t know.

I’m a gamer, not an ideas man.

Hades 2 screenshot of Apollo.

This is not a hugely scientific experiment.

Sometimes the save points will be manual, sometimes they’ll be location-sensitive autosaves.

In all cases I time the powering-down as best I can.

Addair, a rig worker, insults the player in Still Wakes The Deep.

Sometimes I perform the act several times, sometimes I just do it a couple.

It is worth noting I only use the “power off” button on my PC.

Fear stops me short of cutting power at the wall during this process.

A skeleton attacks the player in Dread Delusion.

That is the scarier version of this same experiment.

As we’ll see, it may make a big difference.

Which feels fitting for an experiment which involves repeatedly restarting something.

Judy leans over the player as they sit down in a Braindance studio in Cyberpunk 2077.

But first, let’s see what happened.

Or sweet foxtrot alpha?

Read on to find out!

Hades 2

Mel’s violenthike through hellis often auto-saving.

Statistically, someone out there has had a power cut at the exact worst moment, right?

Every time I started my PC back up and ran the game, I was safe and sound.

It even never knocked me back a single step.

Result:No data loss.

Result:Absolutely fuckaw.

Even after multiple tries there was no corruption, no data loss, no catastrophe.

Result:Getting very bored of entering my Windows password.

Cyberpunk 2077

The saving process inCyberpunk 2077lasts milliseconds.

The little spinny “don’t turn off” icon appears and disappears too fast for me to react.

Result:Regret starting this pointless experiment.

Alien: Isolation

Aha.

The requisite save symbol also appears (in this case, a small cassette tape).

Did the famously crappy machinery of Sevastopol Station corrupt my save file?

Even the idiots at Seegson electronics appear to be able to make a reliable saving process.

Result:Just glad this is over, to be honest.

Game saved successfully

There you have it.

Absolutely no save data horror stories.

So why do games show you this warning?

Have I just got lucky?

So if one file is corrupted it just loads the next most recent one.

But theres no guarantee the game youre playing does this.

In that particular case, the save file may be large or small, I don’t know.

So we DO need to repeat this under harder, “power cut at the wall” conditions.

There is another possible reason this warning shows in so many games you play.

In some cases it may simply be forced on developers as part of the publishing process.

Which would make the warning pretty much unnecessary.

“[It] also could be a historical console requirement,” says Foddy.

It could also be developers following kneejerk convention.

I bet thats part of it."

But, yes, it seems mostly pointless.

At least judging by myscientifically rigorousexperimentation anyway.

Yet science is an open book.

Peer review me, reader!

Have you ever had a save game corruption disaster?

Did you lose 55 hours ofPersona 5to the cybervoid?

What is the most devastating save loss of your life?