The term 'Save Scumming' comes from the roguelike community, which has long frowned on the practice (most roguelike games prevent this by erasing a save file as soon as you load it however, this puts the player's entire game at risk in the event of a crash) and thus categorized save/reload as one of the many forms of 'scummy' behavior honorable players eschew. note In the finest tradition of an arms race, players sometimes respond by digging into the game's files themselves, either to create backup copies of their saves in places the game can't touch them, or to manually edit the save file itself. Even worse, wiser games will even call you out for actually trying to feed it an invalid saved file or rewrite the game program into autosave mode which disabled loading from savefile. Some games actually detect whether you cheated by Save-Swapping, trying to obfuscate the game which deletes a saved game by manually putting back a copy of said save file right after deletion by the game into its save folder. Another method of circumventing this is to set the RNGs for various events at the start of a new file with nothing else but said events affecting them, resulting in outcomes that are random but cannot be changed by reloading. Some games modify this by giving you limited numbers of saves (similar to Video-Game Lives but perhaps allowing some strategy), bonuses for low numbers of saves, or immediately erasing/saving a game whenever you die or do something important (Iron Man mode). Saving before the branching point(s) lets you go back through from where it twisted at your convenience. Not all games with several endings have New Game Plus as an option, and even if they do, sometimes you just don't want to run through the entire game for the sake of another ending. In a somewhat less depressing way, this might still be practiced if a game has Multiple Endings with identifiable branching points. Hardcore savescummers will go as far as committing their savegame files to a Version Control System that allows the user to create a sophisticated tree of rollbacks and what-ifs. Seasoned savescummers will make multiple saves throughout the game so they can go back to the part that they messed up on. And woe betide you if you save the game after a seemingly minor error that ends up making the game Unwinnable, or makes you miss some Permanently Missable Content. Although sometimes, it might be the only way to even win a Luck-Based Mission, no matter how good you are, or it could be the only way to get a very rare item. Or maybe you just suck, but you don't call this cheating (it's kind of YMMV).

It could be because the game demands Trial-and-Error Gameplay, or perhaps you have a limited number of tries to get the Random Number God to get a favorable result. Basically, you save the game whenever you get a result you like (or before you face a risk), and restore the saved game whenever you get a result you don't like.

Hidden dangerous 2 save game files