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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2405 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 16, 2026

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What are some irl parallels to the pleasure of a horror game “save room”?

Off topic but merely finding the save room is not enough to ease my fear. Fake save rooms are in some games. I need to save, then double check the load data to feel at ease.

A little bit of a generational gap I feel sometimes is when I watch streamers/YouTubers playing singleplayer games with multiple save slots using one and exactly one slot for one playthrough, overwriting the previous save each time, without consideration for how they might want to re-load a previous save to get to a better state or that that one save file might corrupt itself and force a complete restart. Then I remember that modern games are overwhelmingly made such that it's impossible to lock yourself out of significant content or to soft-lock yourself by having too low-HP or something, and that corruption on modern SSDs/HDDs is so unlikely that the expected value of using staggered/rotating saves is negative from just the extra time wasted for no gain.

But I can't break myself out of such habits. Even today, the risk of such things in modern games on modern hardware aren't zero.

If a game gives only 30 save slots, you can be sure I'll use every single one.

I recently played thru FF7Rebirth and Mouse: PI For Hire (both around 7/10 experiences; former is not worth the hours, latter is barely worth the few hours which were needlessly extended with boring writing) each of which limited one only to 30 or 50 saves, so I had to juggle jumping to different save slots by the last ~1/3 of the game. I just started MGS: Delta (played 3 on PS2 back when it came out, 2x), and I'm already 10 saves in thru the prologue, and I'm dreading this one having a limit as well. It's maddening that any game made these days doesn't have the save limit as "as many as the drive will store" and decides to put in some artificial limiter, as if it were a live service game that depends on arbitrary limitations for monetization.

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