10 Times Video Games FORCED You To Lose (And Punished You For It)

No one likes to lose, but it’s even worse when someone forces you to lose. Unfortunately, this can be a pretty common trope in the world of video games, and sometimes it does more than just force your downfall—it will also punish you for it!

Seeing as video games are skill-based challenges, you expect them to treat you harshly but fairly, rewarding and punishing you according to your own abilities. However, sometimes the plot of the game, or a developer’s whim, demands otherwise. No matter how much you try, the challenge ahead of you is rigged from the start, and you just have to give up.

But if this humiliation was not enough already, some games like to punish you for your mandatory failure as well. Yes, the game wanted you to lose, but it will still make you suffer for it anyway, by taking away your stuff, leaving a shameful mark in your journal, or making you watch your favorite character die.

Games don’t have to be fair. At the end of the day, what happens is up to the developers and how much they want to punish their playerbase.

Most missions in Skyrim are stupidly simple and almost impossible to fail. Unless the game bugs out or you make an absolutely dumb mistake, you’re basically guaranteed to fulfill whatever objective the game throws at you.

Well, except there is one mission in the main storyline of Skyrim that forces you to fail: the quest for the horn of Jurgen Windcaller.

After your character meets the Greybeards, the monks ask your character to retrieve the horn of their founder. Finding the artifact is as easy as traversing a linear dungeon and defeating a few draugar, but the problem is that when you arrive at its location, the horn turns out to have already been taken by someone else!

Now, this is normally when the game would recognize that you’ve reached an important point in the story and completed the objective. However, because the developers wanted you to feel like you’ve been outsmarted by Delphine, the horn’s thief, they made it so that, just this once, your objective gets marked as "failed".

Sure, it wasn’t your fault, and it’s part of the story, but who cares? Here’s your red “X” of shame anyway!

Thanks, Delphine! As if everyone didn’t hate you enough already!