Harold is a virus

Hello again everyone! Laura Cough, Internet Lizard’s Firstborn Daughter here, and welcome to your weekly-ish Automaton Lunch post, where I bring you random and obscure fun facts about Luke Vincent’s titles, from the Willful to Walk!

Unfortunately, I don’t have anything spooky to fit the Halloween vibe today, but I do have some interesting information about the save file systems in Harold’s Walk!
On the surface level, the way that the File Select works in this game is that playing any particular level will automatically add it to the file select screen.

(Anyone who read last week’s post will take note of the Debug Room included here.)
And, in fact, anyone who can piece this information together will already have themselves a pretty good understanding of the save file system.
However, the exact manner in which it functions goes a little deeper than that.
Checking the code for the game shows that, when the game loads a level scene for the first time, it gets added to the Level Select Screen and Save File manager.

This means next to nothing for the average user, but can have some pretty funny effects when toyed with using mods. By editing the portal in Water Tower to force the game to load a normally inaccessible object scene, in this case the level geometry for Pink World 2…

…We can cause it to appear in the File Select Screen. Moving this Save File to an unmodded version of Harold’s Walk and attempting to open the level will cause the game to load the Pink World 2 Geometry Scene, which does include the Bytes and Crowns for the normal level, theoretically allowing for 105% game completion. (The level shows as being completely black because the Pink World 2 Geometry Scene does not include the environment and lighting configuration for the level, resulting in Harold walking in complete darkness.)

Using modded save files in the vanilla game and vice versa can have interesting effects, however. In the below screenshot, I’ve loaded a 100% complete save file from Harold’s Walk: Uma’s Dank Rave into the vanilla game. As you can see, the game can read it perfectly well, and all of the levels show up perfectly…

…But attempting to load any modded levels not present in the original game will remove them from the save file until they’re re-added through gameplay.

In the case of Uma’s Dank Rave, specifically, attempting to load any of the Challenge Stages will simply load the vanilla game’s Challenge Stages. This is because both versions of the game have levels that share names.

That’s all I’ve got for this week, though. Join me next week as we poke around in Willful’s asset data to find some fun things.
Cough Out!