So today my friend gifted me a code for Lego lord of the rings that he got from Prime gaming. I redeemed the code, downloaded the game and installed it via the separate installer. I personally don't really like gog galaxy I'm more used to downloading games traditionally and making backups on my CDs and such. I installed the game and booted it up. Now one thing I want to make clear as shameful as it is when I was a teenager I pirated a version of the game from some random repack site. I believe the version I got was the gog one but I could be wrong, they usually reupload gog installers I think. Saving worked fine then. I got up to the bit at the inn, which is like the third level I wanna say, saved and shortly after uninstalled the game to download another one. So you'd be as surprised as I was when I started the game today and saw the save was poofed out of existence. I figured I must've deleted it when I uninstalled the game. I start a new one, beat the prologue and left to do something else irl. When I came back to continue the title screen for when you boot the game for the first time played and when I went to load the save it was empty! I never had this issue with the game before, not on console or other PCs and on other PCs my family tended to usually get pirated copies of pc games anyway, cause we didn't yet have a way to purchase games online or physically since we live in Serbia and like only now have a way to pay for stuff thanks to PayPal, and we would install and uninstall them over and over and it always worked fine. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game and it still didn't work. I heard people had the same issue on the steam version too but I figured that's just steam cloud being weird, but like I'm not using any kind of cloud saving thing. Idk if anyone knows what's up lemme know, I wanna grind the game again getting mythril and stuff it's been forever since I played it.

[SOLUTION]

Open up file explorer. Go to "C:\Users\[Insert username here]\AppData\Roaming\Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment" and delete the folder named "LEGO The Lord of the Rings". The game will then make a new folder in the same location and the game should work! WARNING THIS ACTION WILL DELETE YOUR SETTINGS AND SAVE DATA. IF YOU MUST, MAKE A BACKUP OF THE FOLDER AND PUT THE SAVE IN THE NEW ONE. THE SAVES SHOULD BE LOCATED IN THE FOLDER "savedgames" AND THERE SHOULD BE A FOLDER WITH THE NAME "slot1" OR "slot2" AND SO ON. THATS YOUR SAVE FOLDER. You can try and return the backup of the save back into the original to see if it still works. As for if it does or not I'm not sure.

As Gandalf himself once said "Keep it secret, keep it safe."

Did you have the game previously installed on the same computer/HDD?
Try deleting the game's folder under c:\user and then start the game.

Windows Defender might not be allowing your game to save and permission is needed in Windows Security.

1) Go to Windows Security, then Controlled Folder Access.
2) Click on: Manage Controlled Folder Access
3) Click on: Allow an App through Controlled Folder Access
4) Now, on the small rectangle that shows: + Add an allowed app
5) On the drop down, select: Recently Blocked apps
6) Select: Lego Lord of the Rings

Have fun!

That's wrong, since the game wasn't sold on GOG before the current month.

OP probably meant: "the site from which I download(ed) my pirated copies (in general), usually uploads the GOG installers."

Yep. I had it installed on the same hdd, drive d specifically cause that's the one with most memory for video games and such. Looked at the c user folder and found nothing. I even snooped around the documents and appdata folder and subfolders and found nothing relating to lego games, outside of that building program, nor anything related to travelers tales. I know the game saves all save data in the install location but I figured I should check the subfolders too just in case. So dead end on that one.

Gave this a shot but sadly it didn't work. One thing I found odd is that windows security didn't even block the app, supposedly, as it didn't appear in the recently blocked apps. None the less I added the original game exe and the gog shortcut to the list and it made no changes sadly.

That I'm aware of but I could've sworn it was a gog installer. Either that or one of those keygen or codex ones. Either way I got it from a site that is well known by most pirates as really bad site to download games from considering they sneak in sketchy stuff in the files allegedly. So it very much could've been a normal installer or a fake pretending to be from gog. Not out of the question.

I... what?

First, what is "prime gaming"? Some Amazon Prime service or something?

You got a code from Prime (or at least your friend claims so), then you did what, and where exactly?

You can easily check if you have the GOG version, by checking if the game exists in your GOG account. Either with a web browser heading to https://www.gog.com or through Galaxy.

If you can't find the game on your GOG account, I'd take this issue back to your friend and beat the shit out of him. Figuratively and literally, ie. twice, just to be sure.

https://gaming.amazon.com/home

You know - what this thread is about: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/amazon_prime_games_and_drm

Ok so this worked for some reason. Apparently I had to go to appdata/roaming/warner bros interactive and there was a sub folder for lego games and such with all the configs and saves. I made a copy of the folder on my desktop, just to be safe, and deleted the one in the warner bros folder and it did the trick! No clue why but it worked. I'll mark this as the solution for now but if anything goes haywire again I'll open this up again.

Thank you everyone for the help!

That's cause of windows and how its "security" features do nothing but annoy users.
Your previous save folder was owned by that version of the game, which wasn't GoG,
so your new install had no access rights.
So in the future if you have problems saving games or changing options delete the game's folder
in the user area.