I was having the static sound problem described in other forum threads and I quit the game and then restarted it. On restart, my game was gone and it just says "Start New Game."

ARGH! I'm not going to keep playing this game if it randomly loses my data. Does anyone know where the savegame data is and if it can be recovered or at least backed up to prevent this happening again?

Have you clicked the coloured button on top of the egg/watch? What colour is it?

When you first start the game, the watch is blue, with a red button on top. Clicking the red button takes you to the red watch with a "start new game" button in the centre. Clicking the blue button at the top takes you back to the blue watch. You can have up to six such games, with different colours.

Click the blue button to take you back to the original watch, which should still contain your original saved game.

On the hard drive, your first saved game should be in the game folder, called BLUE.EGG. Your second should be called RED.EGG (even if you haven't started it, it always creates an empty EGG file if you switch over to a watch of that colour). So if you want to back up your first saved game, back up BLUE.EGG (or whichever egg file corresponds to the game's colour).

The egg is blue and there is nothing to click except the center which says "Start new game" I can't find anything else to click on. There are a couple of red spots on the top of the center of the egg, but they only start a new game as well. Unfortunately, I tried all of that. The game runs fine, but I still had my game mysteriously lost and can't figure out why. I sent a message to tech support 8 days ago and have received no response.

OK well I guess you first need to see if you can repeat this "data loss". If you have no .EGG files in your directory, then you have to assume your games are lost.

Let's see whether you will lose them again (then there is no point in playing until you fix it) or whether it was just a random incident (then I suppose you may as well play again).

First, when you say you "quit the game" (due to this static sound problem), did you quit using the menu, or just close DosBox? That may have caused it. You should try starting a new game. Then quit the game first via the menu, then by closing DosBox directly. See if the game can be restored. When you played the first time, did you do it all in one sitting, or were you saving/loading before? If you did it all in one sitting, it's possible it never saved before.

If you can't cause data loss again, then you have to assume it was just an isolated incident. You may as well start playing again from the start. Part of the appeal of The Last Express is that replaying it again is a different experience, as you may see and hear some things you didn't the first time. So try and make the most of it; try different things. See what you can learn that you didn't the first time.

I am having the exact same issue as the Op.

Around 10 pm in game the sound cracks -> I click the clock to attempt to go to menu -> game crashes and exits -> I restart and notice the time has rewound back to around 8 pm and I cannot forward so my progress was lost.

I tried everything suggested in this post to no avail.

Interestingly, I uninstalled the game and made sure it was purged completed from where it was installed and then I reinstalled and booted it up -> the game still allowed me to continue from the same 8 pm time as the original install.

So my question is, where the heck is this game storing its save states? Its not in the install location. If I knew, I could at least back up the save state from time to time when the sound is not cracking.

Thanks in advance if anyone knows.

I just had the same problem too, but I managed to fix it (after reading your posts...) !!!

I happened to had the exact same problem with my Fallout savegames and now again with Last Express...

To make things short, you should have two "Last Express" install directories : one where you thought you installed it (something like c:/programfiles/GOG.com/...) and the other one under c:/users/AppData/Local/VirtualStore... and then the same as below (i.e. programfiles/GOG.com) (beware as sometimes the "AppData" folder might be hidden).
Maybe your saves will be there...
Mine were, to be sure !
I just replaced the BLUE.EGG file that was in the first directory with the two others I found in the second : BLUE.EGG and RED.EGG (my actual save ; I just like the egg to be red, don't ask)(and in your case, if your egg was blue in the game, you should logically not find the RED.EGG, so just replace the BLUE one), I launched the game and... Whoopee ! My saves were back !

As you posted 3 weeks ago, I assume you gave up on finding your saves and probably started a new game but I hope this will help others who might encounter this "where are my saves" issue !

Fare thee well, smoothskins !

That didn't helped at all.

The AppData folder contained just the same save that the game continues to use as a starting point for my session after every crash.

Or did I misunderstood the post? Was I supposed to copy the BLUE.EGG save from the AppData folder to the installing folder or all the other way around?

Ok, IT SEEMS that the solution was very simple: I just selected "run as administrator" for both the EXPRESS.EXE and the DROPBOX.EXE applications in the "gog.com/The Last Express" folder.

For now, it all works well. I played the game, tried a couple of steps, returned to main menu by clicking on the blue egg at the bottom-right of the screen and the game didn't crashed. I hope it stays this way.