Safe Havens in Video Games
A study on the purpose of safe havens and their key elements
In the history of video games, the need of a “place that feels home” has become more and more important in non-story driven games.
The “home” can be implemented and it has been forged in many different ways, but in this article we will not go through the specific history of how some have come to be. Our main focus will be around the concept of “safe rooms” – mostly present in horror games – or “safe hubs” when they meet with the concept of “central hubs” – implemented by games which have a “hub world” such as Super Mario 64.
Safe Havens
A safe room, as the name implies, is a room in which the player can feel safe. The concept comes from the famous “save rooms” of the Resident Evil series, in which they are small rooms in which the player can catch breath, save the game, and manage their items.
On the other hand, Hub Worlds (or “Central Hubs”, depending on context and scope) originate from the need of having a core zone from which to construct the rest of the game. They can take many forms, such as a “glorified level selection menu” as some would call them (e.g. Super Mario 64, Super Mario Galaxy, Helldivers 2) or a place in which to interact with characters (e.g. Demon’s Souls, Mass Effect 1, Elden Ring). In certain cases, they can even become more than just a hub for reorganizing and they will get their own mechanics, such as featuring customization (e.g. Hades, Dragon Age: Inquisition) or minigames (e.g. Fire Emblem Three Houses, Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundered Heroes). Some even believe that certain open world games can be considered a single gigantic central hub (e.g. Marvel’s Spider-Man, Batman: Arkham Knight), but I honestly don’t agree with that view, although I can see their reasons — such as the whole environment being free to rapidely move through safely.
But what we will talk about from now on is what I call “Safety-focused Hubs” or “Safe Havens”, which is a term that includes all hubs and rooms which have “making the player feel safe” as their core concept and purpose, such as those of the Resident Evil series and FromSoftware’s Soulsborne games (Demon’s Souls, the Dark Souls series, and Bloodborne).
And if you’re interested in knowing more about Hub World / Central Hubs in general and what they can be used for, then there are two interesting videos which I suggest to you as a starting point on the topic: “What Makes a Great Hub World?” (Design Doc, 2020) and “The BEAUTY of Hub Worlds” (doggifu, 2023).
Purpose and Necessity
Games nowadays are hardly the same length of a movie or shorter, meaning that a constant sensation of tension – although pretty limited even in the time frame of other media – cannot be kept.
When tension is kept without respite for too long, players will either become desensitized or they will drop the game because it feels too heavy.
Breaks are a necessity. Therefore, whereas checkpoints are meant to be placed at a distance from each other which is right to obtain the desired effect on losing progress (the further away, the more tension, but could also become more frustrating), Safe Havens are meant to paced with a strong tie to the rhythm of the whole game. The two can be one and the same – as happens with many horror games, but they don’t necessarily have to be. Checkpoints are purely for gameplay, but Safe Havens are for much more than that: they define the pacing of the story, of the atmosphere, and of the player’s emotions.
If you imagine a videogame as a TV series or something similar to it, you can think of Safe Havens as the break between episodes. In TV series you have clear cut breaks through the ending and the beginning of an episode, and in books you have those cuts through chapters. But in videogames, you have no clear breaks — although there are some games that use a chapters system (e.g. the Like a Dragon series), yet that is not fully functional for every video game, especially open worlds.
Safe Havens are therefore also a way to communicate to the player when it is intended to take a break. Of course, the player can always decide to take a break anyway, as it happens even with movies by pausing for hours or days in the middle of them, but they will do so aware of the fact that it is not the way the media was thought to be experienced.
Having the possibility to save the game only at Safe Havens significantly enforces the rhythm and how it is intended for the player to take breaks only in those moments, even though I personally believe that mechanic to be too invasive as it ignores the need that a player might have to take a break or shut down the game for any possible reason such as real life unexpected issues.
Also, as highlighted by PC Gamer’s article “The art of crafting the perfect videogame safe room” (Sean Martin, 2020), Safe Havens can also be used as way for player to track progress and for the game to reward them for besting a challenge.
Anatomy
The first and most important element in creating a Safe Haven is, as the name implies, that of the sacrosanct rule of safeness. No matter what, the player has to be safe in there, no ifs and no buts. Even if it is not realistic, this is a pact between the game and the player, which gives a moment of respite in exchange of a suspension of disbelief — which is not even required in some games.
There are extremely special exceptions to that, such as Silent Hill 4 and This War of Mine, yet they break the rule for very specific reasons which are tied to the overall concept and message of the game; disbanding the pact is a core element of those two games, and they revolve around it.
But leaving aside those special cases, the rule is there in order to keep the pacing intact. The moment in which the pact is broken, the player will never feel completely safe again anywhere in the game, therefore fully removing the concept of the Safe Havens themselves and generating issues of desensitization, if not even mistrust towards the game itself and a fracture in the suspension of disbelief or in the immersion.
The second key component of Safe Havens is atmosphere, mostly constructed through visual and auditory elements.
The atmosphere has to be calm, yet both in line and opposite to that of the game. Although it sounds like a paradox, it depends by which exact aspect we are taking into consideration. The general design has to be in line with the rest of the game in order not to give a sense of alienation, yet it has to be capable of contrasting with it. This is obtained by soundtracks, colors and sizes among other things.
When a game is mostly made of wide areas, an enclosed space feels safer, and vice versa. When it is mostly constructed through silence, calming background noises feels safer, and vice versa.
But all of that must be made in line with the style of the game. For example, in a game full of dull and dark colors, having a Safe Haven with plenty of bright and pastel colors wouldn’t feel safe but alien.
Then there’s soundtracks. They are essential to the experience of a Safe Haven, with some of them which immediately recall a feeling of safety in the players, such as the famous OSTs of Firelink Shrine and Majula (from Dark Souls 1 and 2 respectively).
Another core concept is that of familiarity and recognizability: the player must be capable of easily understanding that an area is a Safe Haven. That can be obtained through the previously mentioned atmosphere, and through reinforcing — meaning that if the game has multiple Safe Havens throughout the world, they should be as similar to each other as possible, with key elements that recall one another.
Lastly, we have the ideas of simplicity and secrets-oriented, which are usually in contrast with each other. “Simplicity” would have a Safe Haven to be as tidy and well-observable as possible, in order to make the player feel in perfect control of its surroundings (e.g. Resident Evil). “Secrets-oriented” would need the area to be complex and articulated, requiring the player to explore and sometimes even test their traversal abilities in a safe environment (e.g. Super Mario 64).
Both “simplicity” and “secrets-oriented” can work, but it depends on the context and general atmosphere of the game. Some video games even go as far as having both of them by dividing the Safe Haven in two sections, such as the Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls 1, which has a simple core area surrounded by a more complex secrets-oriented area.
Enforcing or Breaking the Rules
When dealing with a Safe Haven, there are usually four possible scenarios:
There is no way for the player to break the rules;
The player could break the rules, but the game doesn’t allow it;
The player can break the rules, at their own risk and peril;
The game break the rules, negating the safeness of the Safe Haven.
The first scenario is that of some safe rooms in the Resident Evil series, in which the environment is so barren that there is nothing the player could do to make it unsafe.
The second scenario happens when the game wants to make sure that the player cannot break the rules and therefore enforces them gameplay-wise. That can be seen – through the negation of attack inputs – in games such as Elden Ring (at the Roundtable Hold), Helldivers 2, the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series, Bloodborne, Code Vein, Lies of P, and many more.
The third scenario is that of the previous one but without enforcement from the game. This leads to the player being able to perform certain acts such as making NPCs hostile, thus rendering the Safe Haven no longer safe by their own hands. It is a mechanic that is rarely seen outside of Souls-like games such as the Dark Souls series and Demon’s Souls.
The fourth scenario is very rare to see, and even more so to see well-made. The two best games for this that I know of, as previously mentioned, are This War of Mine and Silent Hill 4.
The former — This War of Mine — allows for “enemies” to break into your home, widely enforcing the core themes of the game: the precariousness of safety and the constant peril and danger for civilians in a warzone.
The latter — Silent Hill 4 —handles it extremely well but requires spoilers of the game to be described, so if you’re interested in knowing more about it I recommend you to watch the video “The Silent Hill Game That Changed Safe Rooms” (eurothug4000, 2022).