IGTAP Lost Progress and Bugs: Recovery Steps

Losing progress in IGTAP hurts more than in most platformers. Your save holds every best time, every clone and the whole upgrade tree, and your income is built on top of it. So the first rule is easy: do not delete anything until you have checked the alternatives.

What the hotfixes actually fix

The first hotfix lists two softlocks and one balance change.

A softlock when returning to the unlock-orbs area with omni-dash active. Fixed.
A softlock caused by a mistranslated box in Russian. Fixed, with the developer warning it may not be retroactive.
A faster endgame. Not a bug fix, but it changes how the late game feels.

If your freeze matches one of those two, update the game first. Steam may still be holding a queued patch.

Three later hotfixes target the save itself, and they are described as attempts rather than as a diagnosis:

Hotfix three (23 September): save files were reinforced and backup saves added, secret counting was reworked so finding a secret with Steam not yet initialised can no longer lock you out of the achievement, and save logging became verbose enough for the developer to investigate future reports.
Hotfix six (28 September): an explicit attempt to fix the save issues reported by players running the game through Wine, CrossOver or Proton.
Hotfix seven (8 October): Steam Cloud settings were tweaked “to hopefully reduce the amount of people losing data through it”, and a rare softlock on loading a save during tree growth was fixed.

What is still reported as broken

Whole-save loss is the serious one. The trajectory is now clear: mitigations arrived, a cause never did. A thread titled around losing all progress twice appeared on the day this page was written, and the pinned bug thread stays busy. Three hotfixes have since added backup saves, a Steam Cloud settings change and a Wine/Proton attempt, so the failure mode is less likely to destroy everything, but no announcement has named what triggers it.

Other open reports include:

A black screen after buying a specific global upgrade in the browser build, surviving a rejoin and a page reload.
A visible mouse cursor while using a controller.
Inconsistent double jumps when a jump clips a ceiling.
Secret upgrades possibly becoming unreachable after finishing the game.

Those last two are community reports rather than confirmed defects. They are worth reading as symptoms, not as diagnoses.

Why a lost save is worse here than elsewhere

In a short platformer, a lost save costs you an evening. In IGTAP it costs you the multiplier behind every clone you own.

Consider what a save contains: your best time on each course, your clone counts, your upgrade tree, your atoms and your achievements. Rebuilding that means replaying every course for a competitive time, not just finishing it once.

That is why the community treats save safety as a real topic rather than a complaint. Any bug that touches the save file is worth reporting immediately.

How to recover before you reset

Quit the game completely. Exit to desktop rather than to the menu, then relaunch from Steam.
Check the cloud save state. Open the game’s properties in Steam and look at the cloud sync status. If there is a conflict, choose the newer copy.
Rule out a queued update. Let Steam finish patching before you conclude the bug is unfixed.
Do not delete local files yet. Deleting locally can propagate to the cloud and remove your last good copy.
Try another slot or course first. A stuck course is not the same as a lost save.
Only then consider restarting. If you do restart, use the upgrade order so the rebuild is faster.

How to report a bug that gets acted on

The developer collects reports in the pinned bug thread on the Steam board and in the official Discord linked from the launch announcement.

Include these details, because each one changes the diagnosis:

Your course and the ability you had just unlocked.
The exact action that triggered it, if you can reproduce it.
Whether you were in the demo, the browser build or the full Steam release.
Your platform, and whether cloud saves were enabled.
A short recording, which is far more useful than a written description of timing.

The Russian localisation softlock is a good example of why detail matters. It took a specific translated box to trigger it, and the developer now knows exactly which one.

Sources: the official IGTAP announcement feed on Steam for hotfixes one through seven, the store page feature list including cloud saves, the public Steam discussion board, and comments on the free browser build.