I recently read this blog post about an interesting game design concept, where being able to save game, and restart from that point onwards, is part of the game world, and NPCs friends and foe alike, are aware of this. Fame designer (author of the article) says that the villian would try to make you save in places which where impossible to get out of, or impossible to complete. This if made properly, it would be absolutely amazing and even more revolutionary than games like portal are/were.

However there are a couple of problems. So said villain has bested you and you have saved in a place from which you can't escape, what do you do? Well load up a different one, if the point of the game was saves, I'd spam the save buttons continuously. Why not restrict the amount of saves you can have then? Well that would be a nice idea, but if you save in the wrong place don't you'd have to restart the whole game.

One way around this is perhaps have an autosave, which saves at the beginning of each level/room/stage, one that can't be modified by you, the player. If you've taken a wrong turn, you load up the autosave. But this throws up some problems. How far apart will they be? It would still be frustrating to replay the same level over and over constantly.

As for the actuall mechanism, the only way a imagination-less and uncreative simpleton like myself can see any reason for saving, would be to save if your about to die. To make it that important to save you would have to die ALOT. If you die a lot, the game must be hard. And replaying large chunks of a frustratingly difficult game is not fun.

As for the actual story context, would NPCs be aware that you've saved and played through something a couple of times, with memories of you dying, or would they not remember previous encounters, only being aware that you have this mystical "savé" button and that you may have already played the conversation out 100 times before. If they do have memory then perhaps you would not play through the same bits over and over, with NPCs knowing you won't fall for the same trap twice, they lay a different one.

That sounds like a good idea, but most likely an implausible one. To think of one puzzle that would make sense, wouldn't be easy and at the same time isn't impossible, would be hard. To think of enough for a game would be impossible. To think of enough for a game that has constantly changing puzzles is so absurd that my face melted on to my keyboard and now I can type no longer because my face called up Mrs CAPSLOCK who hit me with a large, but spherical, cuboid, tulip. She also wants me to find her walrus, skin continent. The weather is all four dimensional today as well :(!