Death! It comes for us all eventually, but in most games it really isn’t that bad, or even interesting. For most games dying just means losing a bit of progress and repeating what you’ve just done. For arcade games it means losing all your progress unless you have more money to put into the machine, but that still isn’t particularly interesting in terms of gameplay.
Given that dying is a part of almost every videogame ever made, it’s a shame most developers don’t do anything interesting with it. Today, let’s take a look at how death can mean more than just playing that last level again. What if dying wasn’t just something to be avoided and instantly forgot about? What if you could make dying interesting?
The first game I’d like to talk about is Planescape Torment, wherein you play an immortal amnesiac known as The Nameless One. In this game, the main character’s immortality is a huge part of the story, given that he’s trying to remember his past lives to find out how he ended up in a mortuary with no memories. But Planescape Torment has a bit of combat in it, so what happens when you die?
Planescape Torment
Well you wake up in the mortuary, where you were the last time you died. But it’s not as simple as just having infinite lives. Sometimes when TNO dies he can remember bits of his past and that can lead to stat increases or even unravelling another piece of the story. To be honest, Planescape doesn’t really do much with the mechanic of dying. All you’re really losing is time but it could encourage players to take more risks and avoid save scumming, leading to potentially more engaging gameplay.
The point is that punishing a player simply by making them waste time isn’t interesting and it alleviates that a bit by reducing the punishment and occasionally offering rewards. But of course a game can still make dying more interesting, even if it is punishing.
Sekiro Shadows Die Lots of Times
Sekiro Shadows Die Twice punishes death by taking away your resources. In a similar vein to Planescape, sometimes you get to keep your resources and all you’ve lost is time.
However, there is another aspect to punishing death in Sekiro.
You see, Wolf is also immortal but his immortality comes at a price. When he resurrects, it can cause other characters in the game to contract Dragonrot. Mechanically this also doesn’t do much. Those characters get sick and you can’t complete quests for them until you cure them, which is easily done. However, I think this could be an interesting way to incentivise more careful and skillful play.
If Sekiro made it so characters could actually die of Dragonrot, that’d be a real motivator to play the game better. Whether it’s because a certain character grants a powerful item at the end of a questline or because you’re emotionally invested in them, you wouldn’t want to see them die.
Unfortunately, Dragonrot doesn’t really punish the player and it’s a little too easy to cure. An item can be bought that heals everybody afflicted all at the same time and it’s not particularly expensive. Still, I think it would be an interesting idea to implement it in a game where death is permanent. It would have a lot more emotional impact if your failure caused the death of one of your favourite characters. But then again, you might even want someone to die on purpose.
And that’s something you can do in games like Heavy Rain. Even though it has a heavily character focused story, two out of the four main characters can die and the story will still continue. The other 2 can die at the end of the game and this will result in different endings. But the fact that Jayden and Madison have several ways to die during the game means that more of the story is in the player’s control.
Permadeath and the Fun of Character Murder
Of course most of the time you’ll want the character you’re playing to survive but maybe you don’t think they should. Maybe you think the world would be better off without Jayden or you’re curious to see how the plot progresses without Madison in there. For whatever reason, your failure is made much more interesting than just forcing you to load your last save. Death is still not really incentivised, but it has a big effect on the story going forward.
This can be seen in other games like Fire Emblem. Permadeath is standard in those games as well and although losing a character has less impact on the plot, it affects the gameplay a lot more. Losing your archer could make the next fight more difficult if you really needed one. On the plus side, your other units will gain more experience points and level up quicker as they have more enemies to defeat. In this way, permanently losing playable characters can completely change how you play the rest of the game and, frustrating as it is, I think that’s a lot more engaging than just starting the mission over.
Roguelikes – Dying Isn’t Fun but I Can’t Stop Doing It
Speaking of permadeath, let’s talk roguelikes next. Apart from procedurally generated levels and loot, roguelikes also tend to feature permadeath as a standard mechanic. That is, you’ll lose everything you’ve gained when you die. What’s the point of that? It might seem like that’s no more interesting than losing progress in any other game where you have to start a level again, but the extreme nature of the punishment is what makes it engaging. Most games wouldn’t have you start all the way at the beginning when you die but that’s how it goes in a roguelike.
Knowing that one wrong move could undo everything you’ve achieved can make any game incredibly tense. As difficult as Dark Souls is, you’ll always know that when you lose to a boss you’re only minutes away from another shot at it. Hell, you can even go and buff yourself up to give yourself better odds.
In a roguelike however, like in the Binding of Isaac, when you get to that tough as nails boss, you know you’ve only got one chance so every move counts. Building tension in this way is especially effective the longer your run has been. Losing to the first boss ain’t so bad but finally getting to that last boss and knowing your only options are win or die is enough to scare the pants off anybody.
Of course, it would be remiss of me to mention rouglikes, especially Isaac without bringing attention to the fact that most of them reduce the severity of death by letting you keep certain things on death. In The Binding of Isaac most times you die, another item or powerup will be added to the loot table, meaning it may appear in future runs. Not only does this lessen the sting of losing, it can make the game ridiculously easy after a while. Once you’ve unlocked most of the powerups, you’re almost guaranteed to get a few that work well together and let you steamroll most of the enemies.
How about a roguelike where you don’t really die though? CRAWL is a multiplayer roguelike or roguelite where you and 3 others crawl through a procedurally generated dungeon, gaining power ups along the way and eventually defeating a boss. But this isn’t a co-op game.
You see, 1 player is the human who goes through the dungeon and the other 3 are ghosts that possess objects in each room or spawn monsters to try and kill the human. Whoever kills the human then becomes the human, with the previous one becoming a ghost. This is a super fun way to handle player death. It’s still punishing because only a human character can defeat the boss of the dungeon and win the game but it’s still engaging because even when you die you still get to play the game. You’re just playing it differently.
And playing as a ghost is still a lot of fun because at the end of each floor you get to level up your monsters based on how much damage you did to the human character. And if you’re really tricky, you might want to let the human defeat all the tough monsters and kill them just before they get to the boss. Even in death, CRAWL gives you a sense of progression and I think that’s just fantastic.
Go Kill Yourself: The Game (AKA Reventure)
But what if dying was the whole point of a game? That’s kind of the point of Reventure, the game that inspired this article actually. It presents you with the challenge of saving the princess and getting new items along the way to solve puzzles, like a Zelda game, though it won’t be long before you die and realise that saving the princess isn’t the main goal of the game. There are 100 endings to find, and although they don’t all involve dying, many of them do. So Reventure presents death as a puzzle.
It’s a lot of fun trying to find different ways to end your adventure, whether that be picking up too many items and being crushed under their weight or planting a bomb and waiting for it to explode. Reventure not only incentivises dying by making that the goal, it makes it fun by challenging you to find different ways to do it and rewarding you with comedic cutscenes for each one. Often these endings will leave an impact on the game world too. (For more on Reventure, check out our review)
So there we have it, a whole bunch of games where dying isn’t just starting over again from ten minutes ago. I hope you enjoyed this little analysis and I’d love to hear your thoughts. What are other games that do something interesting with death? You can leave a comment below, or you can share your thoughts with me on Twitter.
