20 Video Games That Secretly Reward You For Failure

20. Defender's Medal For Death - XCOM

XCOM is a turn-based strategy that wants to be a battle against alien invaders, but in reality it is a struggle with the game's unfair RNG.

An XCOM player needs to get used to three things: their 90% accuracy shots missing, the enemy's 30% shots hitting critically, and the combination of the previous two resulting in your squad's sudden death.

Losing a soldier can sting, but you secretly want to doom at least one person on your team to this fate, as this is how you get one of the most useful medals in the game.

Introduced in XCOM: Enemy Within, medals are unique upgrades that soldiers can wear that you unlock by completing special challenges.

The Defender's Medal is both the easiest and the hardest upgrade like this to unlock, as it simply requires one of your soldiers to die from a critical wound (the hard part here is the mental anguish of watching the aliens obliterate your character).

As a reward for failing to watch over your soldiers, you get the Defender's Medal, which helps you to prevent similar tragedies from happening by either healing an additional 2 HP whenever the wearer is healed or preventing them from panicking when one of their teammates dies.