Oh. I didn't have enough healing items for that.

^If you absolutely have to, you can go back to save multiple times. Those ghosts are pretty easy to kill without taking damage if you're careful, and don't get unlucky.

Yeah I suppose, but achievements are way too simple to actually replace something as significant as the game characters.
In the end it's just a tag and "Congratulations! You unlocked the 'Headshot' achievement!" ... well fuck me sideways n' that'll get me a "rimjob" achievement!

Just so everyone knows, Silent Hill: Downpour is only allowed to be casual on Fridays. The rest of the week it's strictly smart business suits and ties.

By order of the management.

Ha! Well that's a load off my mind.

Oh, thank God. XD

Wow, I didnt read all the posts on this topic, but to the original point made I agree. One of the things that adds to the experience is not wanting to die and having to re-do a whole section therefore subtracting from your immersion and ruining your night of silent hill. When your trully loving the story and the experience thats the last thing you want to happen, so you step carefully, use the best strategy, look for ammo and survive, hence survival horror. having auto save checkpoints ruins this. pretty basic stuff really.

Conversely, one of the things that detracts from the experience is having to re-do an entire section if you die. It makes the game tedious, especially if it's hard and death is frequent.

^
Tis' a double-edged blade

Probably one of the main reasons I can't pick up and enjoy the original Forbidden Siren. What a damn shame.

forbidden Siren is a great game but too damn difficult.

Having to re-do the stage in a game like Silent Hill is ridiculous; I don't want to be an arse, it just seems to me that the whole point here is not to torture or bore the player with deja vu battles, but help him procceed to the storyline.

And, by the way, the original trilogy games (expect maybe for the 3rd one) were preety gentle regarding their savepoints. Especially Restless Dreams; I loved how you could peacefully (maybe ignoring several bitchy Nurses) return at the most recently found red letter and just save your game.

That was one of the things I hated about Origins

I don't think so. I want a game to challenge me, but do it by forcing me to be creative to achieve victory, not by penalizing me with repetition for failure. Obviously, death has to mean something, but Resident Evil 4 handed it well by making each separate area a checkpoint. Having to go back and re-do the last half-hour is not the answer. Or, even worse if I happened to forget to save (which is why auto-saving should at least be a standard option in all games in which saving is a concern).

I dunno, the first two Silent Hill games are my favorites and they're both really easy. Maybe if the game didn't have a lot of focus on combat but the combat itself is difficult then I wouldn't mind. I also wouldn't mind a lack of checkpoints in that scenario because there wouldn't be that many enemies between save points so I wouldn't be facing difficult wave after difficult wave, which just wouldn't be Silent Hill and would take the emphasis off the exploration and scenes.

As long as the story and psychological aspect in Downpour comes even a little bit close to earlier SH games, I'll be happy. I almost don't dare say this, but I'm currently playing SH3 for the first time ever. I'm playing on both easy settings, because I'm a casual player. I don't wanna die all the time and play some parts of the game over and over again. I play Silent Hill for the amazing story. Maybe the horror aspect of SH games would be more dominant if I played on normal or hard. But I'm already pretty freaked out even though I know I probably will be able to survive anything the game throws at me.
When you have to start over because you died, it's 100% not scary anymore. Well, that's the way I see it.

And about those save points in survival-horror games:
I agree that it shouldn't be a "save anywhere anytime" kinda deal. I think checkpoints are okay though, but the option to load a checkpoint shouldn't be included. Only "load game" and no "continue game".
But the way save points were done in Resident Evil (the remake for the Gamecube, haven't played the original one) was pretty frustrating sometimes. You had to collect Ink Ribbons to be able to save. The first time I played this game, I played on normal and totally screwed up. I saved my games too often and ended up looking for Ink Ribbons in every single room of the mansion. After I couldn't find anything I started a new game on easy. At some save points there wasn't an item box. So if you kept the ribbons in such a box, you had to go to another save point where there was a box and get them out. Lot of backtracking got frustrating at times.
I played this game all the way through at least 25 times though. Even unlocked the infinite rocket launcher

^ That's how saving is handled in all of the classic Resident Evils.

And it was an extra stupid method of saving games. I'm glad Capcom realized it eight years after I did.

Wow, is this thread still alive? Amazing...

Actually I really like the method of saving from Resident Evil, ink ribbons were a brilliant idea. It was well executed too... you were given way more ink ribbons than you really needed, so you could pretty much save as often as you liked. But just the idea that your saves were limited would tend to make you save cautiously, and because of that you'd always be at risk of losing a little progress if you died. I think it definitely worked well to add tension to the game, and I wouldn't mind if something like that would be added to Silent Hill.

I think my original post might have been a little mis-interpreted... it's not that I think horror games should be "challenging" per say, I just want saving to be limited in some way so that there is the risk of losing some progress when you die. Because of this risk, in order to balance the game so it isn't frustrating the game must in fact *not be too challening.* Otherwise the game would be too frustrating.

The reason I think this is a good idea is because the meta-game plays an important part in creating fear, at least in my experience. No matter how scary the design or how thick the atmosphere, there's only so scary a game can be, so the game mechanics have to help.the fear along. The idea that if you screw up you will lose something creates tension in everyone, and it just seems like this tension is too valuable a thing to waste. I've experienced this lately playing games like Minecraft (which is one of the scariest games I've ever played, regardless of it's poor graphics) and replaying the first Tomb Raider, which because of it's save system is actually a pretty tense game. Every Tomb Raider after 1 screwed things up by allowing unlimited saves, and then turning up the difficulty so that you had to "save-state brute force" your way through the game, and for me that just turned those games into a chore.

Of course, the downside is that if saves are limited, you might not be able to save and quit when you want to, which I guess hurts because today's gamers are kind of used to that. But IMO that's a small sacrifice that's worth it. Perhaps they could introduce a way to make a temporary save where-ever you want, so if you really want to quit from any point you can, but you can't restore from this point when you die. Or maybe a "casual mode" for people who want to be able to save like save-states wherever they want. There's definitely ways of accomodating lots of styles of players, and I think that games of the future really ought to start trying to do that more.