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!
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
88 points (100.0% liked)
Gaming
30428 readers
395 users here now
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Rogue Legacy! You are a knight invading an evil wizard's castle. When you die, your children take up your mantle and try again.
Dying means you get to try again with a descendant that has different quirks, like "being left-handed" or "dwarfism"
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.
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.
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.
+1 Outward is actually my favorite game. It's so so fun!
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.
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
spoiler
jump 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.
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.
Project Zomboid is less narrative than what you're looking for, I think, but when you start again in the same world you can find your previous character as a zombie.
I've only played through it twice, but iirc Detroit: Become Human is like this. Even if you have a main, playable character die, the story just keeps going, and there a good amount of paths to take depending on the choices (and QTEs, bleh) that you make for the characters. On my second playthrough, I may or may not have repeatedly and purposely got a character killed just to see how much it would affect an certain NPC. 😬
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.
Odd Giants is based on the old MMO Glitch, and in that, when your character succumbs to empty stamina, you go to the underworld to recover. It's a truly special game.
Katana ZERO. The fact that your character can fail and "die" and yet be able to control the flow of time to return and try again is not only contextualized through the game's lore and your character's usage of a drug, but becomes basically the entire story by the end of it. Brilliant game.
In Chernobylite, when you die (either by getting killed in specific circumstances or by committing suicide in a special device), you get a chance to alter the past by changing decisions you made in the game, which will end up in changing the story and a whole lot of things like companions’ attitudes, weapons at your disposal etc.
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.
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.
They're oldies, but both of the Soul Reaver games and the Raziel parts of LoK: Defiance have a two tiered death system. (Minor spoilers going forward, but I'm talking spoilers for the opening cutscene from Soul Reaver, so I'd argue not real spoilers.) See, after having his physical vampire form thrown into the well of souls and falling through an endless abyss for several hundred years, Raziel exists first as a structurally sound spirit in a world where most things don't maintain any resemblance to their corporeal forms after death. After being salvaged from the well of souls and set on a quest, he gains the power to create a corporeal form that resembles wretched wraith he has become in spirit. But that new corpse isn't him, and destroying it doesn't kill him. It just releases him back to the spirit realm, where he can regain his strength and manifest a new corporeal form. You can be killed in the spirit realm and sent back to a checkpoint, but the spirit realm is by and large far less dangerous than the physical. Very few threats can follow you, and the soul scavengers who populate most the spirit realm are little more than fodder for a creature like Raziel to slay and eat at his leisure. So you regain your strength, find a nexus between the worlds, and manifest a new body. It's probably my favorite unconventional handling of death or failure in a game because of its comprehensive and essential connections to the story and lore of the series. Raziel is the beating black heart of the mythos of the series.
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.
Death stranding
Monaco is a fun example where stealth frequently fails and yet, you just have to scramble to do something and ruuuun. You can end up hiding and trying again but short of getting everyone killed, it's hard to get a game over. Your friends can revive you, as long as they don't get caught and killed themselves.
It's a good mechanic where it's more "let's go save Dave" then "thanks Dave now we need to restart".
No I don't know any Dave's, names have been changed to protect the guilty.
Rogue Legacy has this as its whole gimmick. The second one is pretty good!
[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
Getting over it?
Bioshock games (and System Shock before them) have in-game systems for reviving protagonists after death. Sometimes they're Quantum Reconstructors that need to be turned on in each level to use them, sometimes they're Vita-Chambers ready to use, sometimes it's your all-in-one utility companion Elizabeth with a medical bag. In all cases you're free to continue the fight after your death, though sometimes with penalties like restored enemy heath or monetary costs.
Assassin's Creed. They are basically games inside games.