10 Video Game Cliches That Need To Die

7. 'The Princess Is In Another Castle' Structure

Games are inspired by movie storytelling devices, but the length of a title - even the shorter ones - is often way longer than a film, and writers and designers have had to come up with ways of elongating the experience without muddying or changing the central objective.

Nintendo's Mario franchise infamously used the 'Princess is in Another Castle' trick, where players would make it through levels to rescue Princess Peach, only to realise at the end that they'd been barking up the wrong tree, and needed to investigate another area.

Now, obviously it's not always literally a Princess players are looking for and it's not always a castle they're exploring, but the general idea of having these roadblocks and extensions placed onto the plot to pad the runtime has never really vanished.

Even God of War, one of the best games of the last decade, adopts this structure to an extent. Your entire journey is tied to reaching the highest point in the nine realms, but that's dogged at every turn. You reach the door to where you need to go, but it's locked. You return with a key, but find out this isn't actually the highest part, and you need to go even higher.

Games have gotten better at hiding this formula, but you can still identify when it's being used.