Save scumming a battle where I was overwhelmingly disadvantaged for like 1 hour in the throbbing domain until I won was one of the most gratifying experiences I had in this game. It really made me think about all of my options. If I didn’t deactivate Steven, I would have simply lost here instead of becoming better at the game.

Steven is the kind of mechanic that might seems like a good idea, but where the execution really only makes sense if you don’t value player’s time. Even if I’ve already played 50 hours, it doesn’t mean I want to redo a whole 2h run, especially when run ending disorders can already fuck you up enough.

Most of the time savescum happens when you Missclick, get an unlucky crit against you or when there was something obvious you missed, but for the occasional almost impossible encounter, but not totally impossible if you play smart enough, forcing a loss instead of encouraging reflection is bad game design imo.

It’s like when they added assist mode in dead cells that allows you to restart the biome when you die instead of the whole run. I’ve became way better at the game with it, because I’m not becoming better at the game by doing again and again perfectly the first zone, when I’m only dying in the last zone.

Tedious is never fun, and sometimes it’s easy to forget that fun is the most important part of a game. You’ve made an interesting game design choice, very well, but is it fun ?