Alien: Isolation

Alien: Isolation's borrowed auto-checkpoints removed the fear its horror depended on. The team first used invisible auto-checkpoints because they were easy to build and standard in games like Call of Duty and Bioshock. Death cost only a couple of minutes, so players wandered the station without fear.

Players also found a degenerate strategy: when jumped by the Xenomorph, "a smart strategy was to just beeline it towards to the next checkpoint, get killed, and respawn in safety." Design director Gary Napper said "Often our decisions and choices are coloured by the games we play," and the lesson drawn is to understand why a mechanic works before copying it.

Slow manual save points turned saving itself into a source of terror. The team replaced checkpoints with a few manual save points that take time to activate, leaving players exposed while the alien could sneak up and kill them. Dying before a save meant losing progress, so finding and using a save became tense.

Napper: "The simple act of saving had become supportive to the game's driving factors of terror and isolation." The change altered both player behaviour and emotion, an example of keeping a mechanic only when the feelings it creates fit the game's vision.