itch.io

I do not think we have completely different views... ;-)

You do want to include it with narrative and use that meta tension. Which should help sell this point to the players.

Though from a design choice, it is an outdated concept. It once was a necessity. And it might be only tolerated nowadays with a good excuse. If I remember correctly, Resident Evil not only had only special save locations, but you needed a ressource to save at all. A limited ressource. Plus the game was difficult.

What I've observed over the years, saving restrictions disappeared more and more. Either you could save practically everywhere, or the game design would make saving the game obsolete. A prominent example is Dark Souls.

From your description above, I would rather expect a game with no save option at all. You would save automatically to avoid losing progress when leaving the game or when it might crash. But you could not load previous save games, only "continue" the game. And there might be some kind of milestones or progress points you might be able to return to, when madness overcomes the character. Like, waking up from a nightmare with your childhood toy in hands.

Restricting saving to certain locations does not solve the issue of save scumming. It's not saving you need to restrict, but loading. Restricting it to your safe house or a specific point in an area just makes save scumming annyoing, but it does not forbid it. Your horror meter and the abilty for a game over places your game more into the roguelike category.

I suggest you think about this point: what do you expect the player to do, when game over due to full horror meter or bad choices, etc,  is reached. Redo from last player save. Redo whole game, but with more knowledge on what to do. Redo last chapter. Redo weakened, but not reaching true game over - yet. Something else.

And to a lesser extent, what do you expect players to do, when they made a bad choice, but survive. If they are supposed to play on and still finish the game, you need to restrict loading, not saving. If you just restrict saving, a part of your game mechanics would be to carefully select where and when to save, and redo chapters/chunks till they managed to do it optimal. This of course can be your game mechanic, but it did not seem that this is your intention.