LISA game difficulty level save hack

I recently bought the game LISA on Steam, and the humor approach is fascinating. Unfortunately, this approach involves being incredible vague, or outright obtuse, at telling you what is going on, or what is going to happen if you do something. The very first choice you have in the game is whether to choose “Pain” mode or “Normal” mode. It doesn’t tell you anything beyond that. Unfortunately, I interpreted this as “Normal” and “Easy”, and so I chose the former “Pain” mode. One of the “features” of pain mode is that you can only use save points once, and there are only 36 of them in the game, spread very far apart. After I was a few hours into the game, and I realized how much of a bother this was going to be, especially because it meant I had to play in possible multi-hour chunks, not knowing when I would get to stop. I didn’t feel like replaying up until that point, so I decided to do some save game file hacking, as that is part of the fun for me.

DO NOTE, this method involves deleting some of the data in the game file, specifically a bunch of boolean flags, which might cause some events in the save to be “forgotten”, so they will reoccur. At the point of the game I was at, the few deleted flag actions that I encountered didn’t affect anything big or of importance. One example of this is the long-winded character repeats his final soliloquy when you enter his map.

So, to switch from “Pain” mode to “Normal” mode in the save file, do the following:

1. Your save files are located at %STEAM_FOLDER%/steamapps/common/LISA/Save##.rvdata2
2. Backup the specific save file you want to edit, just in case.
3. Open that save file in a hex editor. You might need to be in steam offline mode for the edit to stick.
4. Search for “@data[”. Immediately following it are the hex character “02 02 02”. Delete them and in their place, add the hex character 0x73 (“s”).
5. Following the “s” character that you just added are 514 bytes that are either “0”, “T”, or “F”, and then a colon (“:”)
6. Keep the first 110 of these bytes, and then delete everything up to the colon (which should be 404 bytes).
7. Save the file, and that should be it!