Fixing Returnal hanging at a black screen

I’ve been enjoying Returnal recently, but I’ve had a ton of technical issues with it. Half the time when starting the game, or performing certain actions, it would just hang at a black screen. Sometimes, the game would be still running and updating the system resource monitoring, but be completely unresponsive.

Turns out if you’re running Windows 10 LTSC, you lack the VP9 codec, which the cutscenes are in. The black screen is because it can’t play the cutscene properly. (Any bits about DX11/DX12 seem to be red herrings.) The VP9 codec is on the Windows Store, but since you don’t have that in LTSC, you can install it via other means. For example, this dump in the Internet Archive contains the codecs you’re looking for; install them, and after a reboot, things should work again.

Dealing with the vending machine achievement in Control

I was trying to get the last achievement in Control; killing four of the possessed vending machines that drop loot. Unfortunately, it seems that if you die while one is active, they never seem to respawn again. Even worse, the only way to unbreak this is to use the mission select and take you back to the Endgame chapter, which is after you’ve completed the main campaign. Note that said chapter will have your last progress of the AWE DLC; if you’ve had the issue at Endgame, you’ll need to roll back to an even earlier chapter. For me, I had beat AWE at Endgame, but the vending machines were still untouched.

You’ll lose progress, so make a backup of your saves. I found them in this directory (Steam version, on Linux):

~/.local/share/Steam/userdata/<Steam User ID Here>/870780

After you do what you needed to do, you should be able to roll back to your original saved game and get your progress back. I was able to do this and now I’ve got 100% achievement progress with my original saved game.