Prince of Persia (2008) is a game where you can’t die. You get a companion, Elika, early on and whenever you are on the verge of dying, she jumps in and rescues you. They even use that mechanic for a little puzzle later in the game where you have to find the real Elika out of a bunch of illusions and the solution is to
spoilerjump of the nearest ledge towards your death, real Elika jumps in and saves you.
All the Wing Commander games featured branching story lines, where things would take different paths depending on if you lost or won a mission. Even if you got yourself killed you still got a funeral cutscene ending your story instead of just a Game Over screen.
Eurofighter Typhoon had an interesting concept where you took controller over multiple pilots at once across a lengthy war campaign. You could switch between them freely at any time, the remaining ones switch to AI when not controlled by you. If one got killed, injured or ended up as POW, you could just switch to another one and continue as usual. The missions you would have to fly were dynamically generated based on how the war progressed and your success and failures. Basically a flightsim with an RTS running underneath, along with story cutscenes for some important moments. The game had some rough spots and arguably EF2000 or Falcon 4 did the dynamic war campaign better, but at least on paper what Typhoon was trying to do was really interesting. Rather sad that 20 years later we still hardly ever see games that do the small scale and large scale simulation at the same time.
In Hylics 1 & 2, dying causes you to wake up in the afterlife where you can take the chunks of meat you get from enemies and put it into a meat grinder to increase your max HP.
In Cruelty Squad dying is just a consequence of living. It happens sometimes. Dying severs your divine light, making the game easier but closing some paths to you. Additionally, if you die too often, you’ll find power in misery, making the game easier again and allowing you to consume bodies to restore 1hp each. This is particularly advantageous because eating bodies dismembers the corpse, allowing you to harvest its organs without having to chase them around (most other ways of gibbing corpses tends to send organs flying). Additionally, you can get death surgery, allowing you to pass through some areas and use a few weapons that were previously too dangerous for you to access. Death surgery also allows you to wall jump.
I love that game. I think it’s the only game that presents dissociation and “functional depression” if that is even a phrase. There is a feeling of an unreliable narrator, but not to the extent of outright lies or hallucinations. Just everything looks out of place, disgusting, ugly and stupid.
Playing the game I feel like I am pretending to be functional in a world I despise, among people I find disgusting or irrelevant.
It’s amazing. It’s horrifying. It’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. It’s one of the most visually and aurally offensive games I’ve ever seen. It’s an immersive sim with stellar gameplay and a nihilistic narrative wrapped in a shitpost and drizzled with a bad acid trip.
It’s set in an anarcho-captialist future that’s become overrun with hedgefund managers, cryptobros and techbros. Morals don’t exist, biotech is out of control, death is a novelty, and there are no good people. You’re a hitman in a gig economy and there’s no penalty for collateral damage, so feel free to fill a cruise ship with acid gas to get your target because somehow they have the ability to put everyone’s jellied remains back together so it doesn’t really matter if they die. Besides, they have all probably done things that’d make Hitler or Stalin queasy, so don’t feel guilty about the medical bill you effectively forced on them. The only reason why they’re not targets is because you’re not being paid to murder them.
If you get into it, make sure you read the mission briefings, try to talk to NPCs before killing or scaring them. Most of the weapons are real-world cancelled experimental weapon prototypes (like the H&K G11), weapons that’d be considered a war crime (like the acid gas grenade launcher or bolt acr that shits out enough radiation to liquify people in real time) or weapons so horrifically bad that they’re borderline useless (the zipgun). Additionally, both the Unibomber’s shack and bin Laden’s compound exist in game.
It looks like a shitpost with how often it uses colors and textures that seem to want to hurt the player with how godawful they look, but if you can get past that, the core gameplay is really good.
In the puzzle platformer Braid you can always rewind time, so any failure or minor mistake can be corrected by rewinding a little bit. Technically there is a fail state where you can die, but rewinding is such a basic mechanic, going back feels seamless.
Kenshi. Though usually that means that your corpse was found by slavers, nursed back to health, and its up to you to find replacement limbs and then crawl/hobble/run away from the camp when no one is looking
Huh, is there an option for being immortal in Kenshi but in the "you are immortal but not invincible" way, so characters never die but they still need someone to come along to save them and fix them up before they can move again? I used to simulate this in Rimworld with the bleeding out mod that kept pawns from dying upon losing most vital organs for a very short time combined with a mod that made them regenerate lost parts at 10% efficiency until it fully regenerated, leaving them unable to do anything but still alive until recovery.
No. But it’s actually kind of hard to straight up die in Kenshi, most of the time you’re just knocked unconscious for a while, sometimes you enter a coma while you heal back up and that can be dangerous as wild animals or slavers might find you and if you’re bleeding out that could be a death sentence. The only real way to just straight up die is to get beat up so hard you get fatally wounded on either your torso or head, but that’s incredibly rare.
I just stopped buying main stream games for the most part. Indie games is where it is at. Often better gameplay loop and comes at a better price and I would rather see my money going to creative people instead of some greedy CEO.
Antichamber was pretty good for this. You would accidentally fall off a bridge or something and expect a game over, only to find an entirely new area to explore. There were no failure states as far as I remember.
I'm not sure if it qualifies exactly as what you're describing, but Metal Gear Solid 2 had a moment where they subvert the game over screen. At some point in the fight a game over screen comes up but it's full of typos like "fission mailed" instead of "mission failed" and there's a small window in the top-left where the fight is still on-going.
Also, notably, all the soulsbourne games kind of subvert the player's death by making it basically required to continue most of the time.
I don’t think this qualifies. That moment you’re referring to is more a “breaking the 4th wall” situation for a sort of comic effect, which is a staple on most of the entries on the series, not an actual reversal of a failure state. Something similar happens on MGS1 on the fight with Psycho Mantis, for example.
I like the term boomer shooter. The reason is the alliteration. But more importantly…
Rookie Level 1 Gamer: “They’re called boomer shooters because they’re old like baby boomers”
Veteran Level 20 Gamer: “Baby boomers thought Doom was satanic, that’s a stupid term”
Enlightened Level 60 Gamer: “They’re called boomer shooters because of the huge debt they owe to the original Doom modding scene and therefore “Boom”, one of the first limit-removing source ports”
GigaChad Level 80 gamer: “Who cares. My ego isn’t so delicate as to have my sensibilities offended by whatever the fuck you want to call it. If you think something like ‘MyHouse.wad’ is something that is for “bOoMeRs” (a.k.a. anyone old enough to know that it’s called a “VCR,” not a “VHS player”) then you’re the one missing out… not me.”
Little Big Adventure 2. Just before the last boss I managed to save myself on the last island without a way to leave it. But I needed to leave and get another Ball or w/e it was to unluck a door. It was my first real pc game experience ever. Dunno why I stuck with this hobby after that tbh :)
Pathologic 2, it's a Russian horror game. There are real, permanent repercussions for dying and loading a save won't help you get rid of them. Sadly saying too much is a huge spoiler, but there's actually a storyline that's revealed with each death. Your deaths also affect the physical world.
OT: what happened to all those beautiful mods? Are they still there? I remember IndustrialCraft, Build raft, there was a mod that introduced bees (?) And another one called Logistic Pipes. Damn I was completely in love with those logistic Pipes
Logistic Pipes also didn’t make it past the block ID change in 1.12, but there are a variety of new storage mods like xNet, Integrated Dynamics, Applied Energistics 2, etc.
My personal opinion is that minecraft modding is a lot quieter than it used to be because Microsoft has been playing down the Java version (the moddable version) and playing up the version you have to pay for addons / mods (Bedrock). But there’s probably a lot of things contributing - aging demographic of the Java version, the fact that the mod API never happened and never will, disillusionment with M$, etc.
Besides all the roguelikes people mentioned, Omikron: The Nomad Soul from Quantic Dream has you possess a different body each time you die, which comes with different conditions. The idea was then reworked much more extensively for Watch Dogs: Legion, where you play as a whole resistance movement you can expand via recruitment and jump to a different member upon death.
That game blew my mind when I played it back in the day. Despite all the clunky mechanics it achieved a sense of place I don’t get from most modern games. I’m surprised they haven’t revisited or revived it in some way.
I mean, Bungie’s remaking Marathon! Anything is possible in this crazed timeline
You’re right, it doesn’t really. But I bet if they revisited omikron it would be the same story, a different genre of game with many familiar trappings.
Kinda like how the newer Doom games purport to be more like the originals while simultaneously getting less like them. Although I absolutely love Doom Eternal, let me be clear.
The space is so saturated it feels like it’s only a matter of time before every game I’ve ever played is remastered, remade, revisited, or given a extremely late sequel
bin.pol.social
Aktywne