Losing is rarely ever a good time. From having to watch months of work go down the toilet to receiving irreparable financial (or physical) damage, failure can turn even the most boisterous of braggarts into the weepiest whimpers. Hitting a game over or a failure point is devastating or humiliating, but the experience can also impart some invaluable life lessons.
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Thankfully, in video games, such setbacks are usually only mild inconveniences that, at worst, put the player back to 30 seconds before they flubbed the jump on the last platform or picked a fight with the wrong goblin. Many developers have mastered the balancing act between giving players enough motivation to keep going and softening the blow when they fall. However, a few games have done better by making their failure states helpful, compelling, and even fun.
8Hades, Weaving The Loop Of Loss
If there’s one thing that players can expect to encounter in roguelikes or roguelites, it’s getting bounced back to the beginning after taking a thrashing, a painful experience to be sure,especially in longer titles. InHades, this will happen to players over and over, but thankfully, Supergiant weaved this inevitable pattern into their game. Rather than making death a brick wall for the player to slam into, Hades incorporates the player’s continuous run-ins with death as a part of the gameplay loop and the game’s lore.
OfHades' 21,000 lines of dialogue, many are dedicated to referencing the player’s actions and previous playthroughs, including the many times they met their demise, so the frustration players might feel is offset by some juicy, optional, post-failure content. And since Zagreus can retain some permanent upgrades between attempts, being kicked back to the start isn’t so bad
7Sifu, Come Back Stronger, Wiser
As well as being an extraordinarily kick-ass kung-fu brawler,Sifumanages to make what would otherwise be amomentary checkpoint restartinto a higher-risk, higher-reward gamble. When the player dies, they are brought back older, with more training and tighter-honed abilities. Youth is traded for wisdom, and although the player’s punches hit harder, the vigor of youth is rubbed away, and the player is left with lower maximum health.
Knowing that each defeat makes the main character able to knock down the bad guys faster helps alleviate the annoyance of being beaten inSifu, but the limited available uses of this aging-up mechanic make failure an interesting gamble, as, if the player ages too much, they will die.
InOutward, new players are greeted by the message that they have suddenly inherited debt and must pay it off in less than a week. They must then head “outward"to make enough cash to retain their family home. While roaming the outside, if a player mistakenly loses all their health, rather than reloading back to an earlier save, they are displaced, captured, or sent far away. To escape, the player must engage in a little roleplay, first to find their gear, then to either escape or make their way back to the road.
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The player can miss the window to repay their debt, but the game’s displacement-instead-of-rewinding mechanic makes the player feel like they are on an adventure with stakes. Rather than letting the player kill their fun, the game puts them on another track and asks them to consider their course. It’s certainlyan interesting take on 0 HP reloadsand plays with a trope that has long had a play in other mediums like books and films.
5The Stanley Parable, All Part Of The Story
While it’s possible to argue that there isn’t a failure state inThe Stanley Parable(and only new endings to discover), the annoyance that the Narrator demonstrates when a player fails (unintentionally or not) to follow his instructions highlights that is a “right” way to complete the game.
And according to what some consider to beconventional gaming wisdom, if there’s an “intended” ending, then all other deviations are failure states. It’s just that failure is so entertaining (at the expense of the narrator’s sanity) that the player hardly notices that they’re losing!
4Shadow Of Mordor, Immortal Rivalries
It’s tough to write good villains, but thanks to the nemesis system inShadow of Mordor, the game’s best villains write themselves. When the player beats an orc, there’s a chance that they will return, thirsty for vengeance. However, the same is true of the player.
If an orc defeats Talion, the wraith-imbued ranger, it will be as if they gain XP from their success and grow stronger. The next time the player sees them, they might even gloat about their previous victory, giving the player an unscripted, organic reason to get even.
3Dark Souls, Prepare To “Git Gud”
When FromSoftware tellsDark Souls, players,to “prepare to die,” it isn’t cruel mockery; it’s some good-hearted advice on how to best enjoy their game. Each failure teaches the player something new about a boss, a tricky nook in the environment, or a new piece of equipment. Death isn’t just fair inDark Souls; a learning opportunity.
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Players get a few seconds to look around at their environment and learn something about a trick corner ora particularly hammer-happy bossbefore being loaded back to the last save point. The difficulty curve and the inevitable setback give every thoughtfully-crafted level a real sense of weight. Spurred on by victory at every turn and (hopefully) by a vicarial feeling of upward progression, the layouts of every location inDark Soulsare burned into the player’s memory, creating an experience like a few others.
2The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, Let It Play Out!
With a game map the size of real-world England,Daggerfallwas an ambitious project in many ways. The manual famously stated that “The final history of their [most games] looks like an endless streak of lucky breaks and perfect choices,” but that inThe Elder Scrolls 2, if a player is “caught pickpocketing, [or] if a quest goes wrong, or some other mundane mishap occurs, let it play out.” It seemed that the Bethesda Softworks of 1996had tabletop games in mindwhen they envisaged what would happen to a player after their actions had gone awry.
True to their word, if the player is caught committing a crime, rather than getting a game over, as is the case for many games even today, they are sent to argue their case in a trial. In prison, the player may be offered an opportunity, or at the very least, a chance to escape, allowing players to feel truly immersed in another world rather than hunched over a dime-powered home-arcade machine.
1Disco Elysium, Failing Upward
Losing isn’t just something that happens to the cop inDisco Elysium; it’s encouraged. The game doesn’t just end when the cop does something off-base. It keeps going and going, unafraid to hold back some of its best content despite a general tendency for most players to reload a save, even occasionally rewarding them for their stupid bravery.
For a game about loss, fumbling important dice rolls inDisco Elysiumcan lead to some of themost enjoyable scenes in recent CRPG memory. Many fans will eagerly tell anyone willing to listen that the detective RPG plays as if a real-life tabletop game human GM is present, and that they know the player wants to pick the weirdest dialogue option. Just like a “good” or bad influence, they will constantly egg them on to say it, and even if such a course of action leads to shameful humiliation, the player is rarely discouraged from doing it again.
