Instead of trying to prevent save-scumming, they give the player just enough freedom to embrace it, but not enough to abuse it. I’m even doing it as I play through XCOM: Enemy Unknown, but to that game’s credit, it finds an elegant solution to what is normally considered a problem in games. David Cage’s comments about Heavy Rain sum up this mentality succinctly: “I would like people to play it once.” For the record, I’ve only played through Heavy Rain once, but I’ve save-scummed my way through episodes of The Walking Dead, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age multiple times. In this era of “moral choice” games, in which you’re meant to ride out your choices to a customized ending, manipulating the save system is considered breaking the game’s rules or at least breaking some unspoken agreement between player and developer. The save-scumming that Dishonored encouraged evoked a nostalgic feeling in Williams, and that’s not surprising considering how most modern games treat the idea. It’s clearly a negative term, which is appropriate since it’s usually frowned upon in modern games. I’m very familiar with the tactic, but I hadn’t heard a specific term for it before reading this post by Neil Brown about how XCOM: Enemy Unknown handles randomness. The real difficulty level constantly fluctuates depending on how much time the player wants to invest in “save-scumming,” the process of saving and reloading constantly to ensure things go your way.

Its difficulty is actually more varied than just those four general categories. When beginning a new game of Enemy Unknown you’re asked to pick between four difficulties: Easy, Normal, Classic, or Impossible, but this list doesn’t do the game justice. Christopher Williams wrote about remembering to save often in Dishonored, a post that seemed oddly prescient considering my own experience with XCOM: Enemy Unknown ( “Remember to Save Often”: The Meta-Game Tactics of Dishonored, PopMatters, 7 November 2012). On Wednesday, fellow PopMatters writer G.

Xcom enemy unknown how to revive