What I mean by this, is instead of when you fail and are met with a game over, the game finds some way to keep it going. Instead of being forced to reset to a previous save or an autosave checkpoint, the game’s story continues in an interesting path. Are there any games like this?
Asking because in IRL TTRPG’s, a lot of DM’s will find reasons to keep the story going, no matter how ludicrous because I mean… that’s why you’re there. Do games do this? What are some that do?
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Hades! Whenever you die, you get reborn in the “house” of your father Hades. Dying and being reborn is an integral part of this game and is what keeps the story going. You also get to upgrade and unlock weapons that way. Highly recommend this game if you like fastpaced and smartly designed action games!
That’s basically true of all roguelites, right? The whole genre is built around the idea of playing through, dying, and coming back stronger so you can go farther. I’m thinking Rogue Legacy, Dead Cells, Slay the Spire, The Binding of Isaac etc. etc.
I played Rogue Legacy and Dead Cells combined at least 150h and only a bit of BOI. I know that in RL the shtick is that with every new run another one of your family is the character. And in Dead Cells you just use a new body every run. The stories in those games aren’t very elaborate and the games would just be as good as they are without story.
Hades is different in that the story parts of the game are an important part of the experience (you go around and get to know a lot of different characters and find different ways to upgrade stuff) and that the main character Zagreus doesn’t really die - he is also a god. When you lose all hp you just get transported back to Hades and almost everyone there has new tings to say and the relationships develop over time.
I don’t know how to explain it better but the main idea of a roguelite is clearly there the execution is way more elaborate and story heavy than RL, DC or BOI. Slay the Spire is on my imaginary backlog of games in need to play before I die.
In Outer Wilds, dying is part of the story. There’s no way to save the game either, so when you quit it, it’s the same as if you died.
Your progress is preserved through death, with an in-game explanation that ties into the story.The Stanley Parable also makes you start from the beginning over and over, but don’t be surprised if the game looks different after a restart.
This is an odd one, but Rimworld.
If your colony is close to collapsing, you have a chance for a “Man in Black” event where a stranger in black comes in and, hopefully, turns it all around.
But what if the MiB doesn’t trigger? Hell, what if they’re a pacifist pyromaniac with a meth addiction who wandered into a mass of cannibal sex slavers having a rave over the ashes and dies?
Someone will eventually come. It might take in-game years, but eventually, a pawn will come and want to make those ruins home. You can try to rebuild.
Admittedly, it can be quicker to just call it done and roll up a fresh colony over watching the seasons pass, but I like how even a complete loss doesn’t mean the story is done.
Wait, does that actually happen? I thought that was just a message and no one came, no matter how long you wait.
It can take a stupid long time, but eventually an event should cycle through saying someone wants to join the colony. There used to be mods to force the event after meeting certain conditions, but I have no idea if they’re still maintained.
Atrio: The Dark Wild - has you control a clone with a limited life span. When you die and resume from a new clone, the old clone corpse is lying around and you can harvest it for parts necessary to continue the story.
Sifu - when you “die” your character ages and gets stronger before trying again.
Karateka - plays a lot like a regular game with lives, but it’s not the same life. Every time you have to resume from a new life, it’s a different person attempting to get to the end.
Shadow of Mordor - when you are killed by an orc, you resurrect from a spirit. The orc, however, gets high-fives from all his mates and gets promoted, plus some new skills. Next time you see him he will call you out.
Hades - the entire story is based around you repeatedly failing and dying.
Super Meat Boy - well basically you die and restart, but when you finally beat the level, you get an instant replay with all your failed attempts simultaneously playing on top of it. The effect is more glorious the more you struggled to beat the level.
Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis system is fantastic, and also a shame they copyrighted it, not allowing others using it…
A DC game with the system would be interesting. Not necessarily Batman, but on the street level of Batman. You start with a bunch of known villains and random thugs and as you progress and take out the known fixed villains, you get to see the progress of your own rogues gallery. That would be amazing. You see a villain at the end of the game and know their origin story, which you may have been part of, you know where they earned scars, where they got equipment and what drives them.
You know that’s not Evil McDouchebag that someone directly wrote. That’s the Evil McDouchebag that naturally occured and was forged in your play through.
(I specifically mention DC because WB has the licence, so what’s keeping them)
edit:
Just saw that Monolith is actually working on a Wonder Woman game. Not quite street level, but otherwise I kinda might get my wish.
That sounds fantastic. I would also rather start as a grunt that knows some martial arts or is good with gadgets and have a rockman/megaman mechanic that let’s you learn/open the skill tree from the enemies you defeat.
That would mean that going for a big baddie can give you a big reward, but you’re also risking making it stronger.
Plus it would give a boon to strategize lining oponents as you see what skills you need for defeating bigger enemies.
That would be a dream too.
Not just enemies emerging dynamically, but your hero developing too.
Planescape: Torment is an old PC RPG similar to Baldur’s Gate 1&2. Your character recovers from death in the morgue (which is where the game starts) and occasionally it will trigger memories in your character, who has amnesia of sorts.
Knowing when to die is the key to a puzzle in fact, if memory serves. Possibly more than one.
It’s been a looooooong time since I’ve played, but that sounds about right.
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.
Outward! A relatively low budget but very enjoyable action RPG with surprisingly non-annoying and actually fun survival elements.
Whenever you die in Outward, a random “defeat scenario” occurs. Sometimes you wake up rescued by a stranger, sometimes someone brought you to the nearby town. And sometimes you wake up as a prisoner in a local thug camp and need to figure out how to escape.+1 Outward is actually my favorite game. It’s so so fun!
Is there any scaled/linear progress in it? For example, I loved Subnautica because I loved the gameplay loop of finding a new resource, which let me craft a new item, which let me explore a new area and find new resources to craft more powerful items.
I wanted to like No Man’s Sky for similar reasons, but it’s too sandboxy, and there’s no sense of purposeful progress and growth.
Not exactly linear, but the progress is apparent. There are no character levels. Instead you improve your equipment, learn new food recipes (powerful and very important buffs) and learn new skills. The various types of magic are particularly interesting. One of my favorite magic systems in games ever.
Nice, I was looking at this a while back but got turned off by references in reviews to poor combat and general lack of polish. Sounds like the definitive edition may have smoothed the edges enough to push it across the line. I’ll add it to my list!
The combat is… unusual. Yes, “unusual” would be the best word. Not exactly great but it has its nice quirks. Things like traps and magic really shine. Melee is workable, but nothing amazing. It can be played in coop making traps and magic even more interesting, but it’s perfectly viable as a solo experience (that’s how I played it 90% of the time).
In terms of the polish I’d compare it to how the Gothic games felt back in the day. Low budget but with lots of heart. In addition to that, at first it felt weirdly empty, especially compared to the behemoths like The Elder Scrolls, but in the end I don’t mind having only these 8-10 dungeons per map (there are 4 maps in the base game with 2 more in the DLC) with each one being memorable. Doubly so considering the limited resources of this developer.
Hylics and Cruelty Squad both spin death.
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.
This cruelty squad game sounds more and more my style the more I hear about it.
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 something.
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.
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
Oh, it was going for something alright. None of the pieces of it actually work or hold up at all, because that’s David Cage for you, but I was all-in on the experience, from the open world to the janky fighting game combat to the bizarre David Bowie musical interludes.
I still have my original PC copy, even.
Does slapping the Marathon brand on an extraction shooter count as a remake?
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
Absolutely, the Brand Mines are deep, and no IP will be left unexploited.
There’s a PC game called Ctrl Alt Ego (Steam link) where you play as a disembodied conscience that can project itself into - and control - different entities in the game.
When your current host is destroyed you just become disembodied again and can project yourself into another nearby entity (even the enemy that destroyed your host, in some circumstances). It’s quite a unique concept and almost completely removes the need to quick save/quick load.
If you’re into Immersive Sim games then I would highly recommend it - Stands alongside Prey and System Shock 2 IMO.
Avenging Spirit for Gameboy and Arcade was exactly like that, and I think maybe Messiah had that mechanic, although you spent a long stretch being a plump and frail cherub.
In Thief 3: Deadly Shadows, when a city guard kills you for the first time you get sent to prison instead of dying. It’s a cool “bonus” level many players can miss because city guards are the easiest enemies.
I think it would be a cool idea if they gave other factions (Pagans and Builders) their own bonus levels
I made some heavy mistakes in Act 1 of Baldurs Gate 3 and the game is still continuing, now with fewer options for characters that I can include in my party, because one died permanently, one left and one even refused to join.
If that’s want you meant?
Did you raid the grove?
Also I think what they meant is, that on a total-party-kill instead of having to reload a save, the game continues with a path to resurrection sub-plot or something like that.
No. Just killed too many Tiefling.
First they held my friend Laezael hostage.
Then they got aggro when I tried to read their mind. Then they wanted to imprison me for looting the corses - as if the corpses had any use for their possessions any longer. And in the end they interfered when I wanted to bring Zazza home through the remains of the Tiefling camp. As if they had not learned to that point…
But even though i helped defend the grove (and the few surviving Tieflings) and they showed great gratitude to me for helping them, Karlach was no longer willing to join my team.Odd, I got TPK’d in a regular combat encounter and it just prompted me to reload a save.
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.
Most of the comments focus on death states, as far as I recall you can totally beat TES 3 Morrowind after an essential npc dies. The game will tell you it’s doomed and will prompt you to load a save, but you are largely able to continue, just have to live with the consequences, it might be a pain to do or rely on cheese, but apparently technically possible.
Yeah, there’s a “back path” that was originally intended to be found with a breadcrumb left if you went rogue and killed Vivec, but thanks to UESP’s documentation, you can find your way there at any point. Very fun for roleplay.
All of the Grand Theft Auto games have you respawn outside of a police station or a hospital.
Yet often you have to repeat the mission, and often said missions have concrete failing states (don’t be spotted, don’t miss the car, don’t let x die) and less opportunity for branching from a failure.
I mean I guess that’s an answer but at least the ones I’ve played have you restart the mission and you lose cash upon leaving the hospital.
Leaving the hospital with thousands of dollars gone is just US developers adding realism.
