10 EXACT Moments Video Game Fans Tapped Out

4. No Autosaving - Returnal

returnal haunted house
Housemarque

This one divided those who did and did not tap out based on their non-gaming life commitments. Those who were able to dedicate chunks of time to gaming didn’t see it as a problem at all and those who scrape out precious morsels of video game breaks in their day were so broken down by it that they had to give up on Returnal whether or not they wanted to.

The drama was that at launch runs in the 2021 roguelike Returnal had to be completed all in one go without abandoning the console.

Okay, you could technically pause it, but if you turned off the game or suffered a power outage you would lose your progress. This being a pretty brutal punishment in a game that’s already very far from easy. In some cases your runs could take up to an hour of precision shooting and platforming so losing any ground to something that wasn’t your fault felt like a loss you couldn’t or didn’t want to recover from.

Though the game now lets you suspend your progress and safely turn off the console should you like to, plenty of fans tapped out before this implementation.

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Contributor

Jess has been a journalist and content creator in the games industry for over 15 years and has been WhatCulture's resident Australian import and sorry cop since 2020, upping the quotient of swearing and apologising in WhatCulture Gaming's annual blooper videos considerably. She previously worked at GameSpot for 10 years, most notably hosting GameSpot News in addition to E3 live shows, and PAX panels. She regularly livestreams a variety of games on her 'jessmcdonell' YouTube and Twitch channels and hosts the 'Do It On The Day' podcast. She has won awards for her news and feature work in gaming as well as an accolade for her comedic writing (likely an admin error). She can be found on X at @jessmcdonell and Instagram at @jessicamcdonell sharing her current videogame fixations, industry insights, and videos of her cat, Karma.