I remember reading a discussion of Baldur's Gate shortly after release where someone remarked "Save/reload is the most powerful spell in the game". It's true, it breaks games.

If you use savestates or save files to progress in a game that you can't otherwise progress through, I think it's cheating. Cheating (in single-player games) is fine, have fun however you want, that's what games are for, but don't kid yourself that you're playing the game as intended. I don't feel any sense of accomplishment if I beat a game with savestates.

Examples of when I think it's OK to rely on save games:

* A game's consequences for mistakes are too big. You just misclicked and murdered a shopkeep instead of talking to him, and now you're incapable of shopping for the rest of the game and your reputation plunged into Evil.

* Some insanely bad luck just ruined your game. An enemy got 5 critical hits in a row and perma-killed your best character, and now you're faced with a miserable rest of the game if you continue.

* The game is so unbalanced that save-scumming is the only way to actually do anything, yet you still want to play it for some reason.

* You have goals beyond the scope of the game. In Fire Emblem I set a goal to beat the game without losing a party member. When someone dies, I consider it a Game Over. I think this is fine. I consider each battle a mini-game. Same for X-Com.

Question: Does the existence of Ironman Mode in X-Com give you implicit permission to save-scum when you aren't playing Ironman? I think it kind of does.