10 Video Games That Punish You For Dying

Death is a part of video games just as it's a part of life - it forces the player to reconsider their strategy moving forward, or perhaps not-so-gently lets them know that they're not yet equipped to take on this challenge.

Most games will simply let you resume play at a nearby checkpoint, though, with little in the way of tangible punishment beyond some lost time and a slightly bruised ego.

But some games dare to take death a little more seriously, and will introduce stakes - for better or worse - that ensure the player wants to avoid dying at all costs.

These punishments range from making the game tougher each time the player dies, to forcing them to sit through an excruciatingly long resurrection cutscene every time they perish.

In some cases it absolutely suits the design philosophy of the game as a whole, while in other instances it might prove infuriating enough to actually turn players off the game entirely.

Whether a "good" punishment or a bad one, these 10 video games all rustled up some unique penalties for taking a digital dirt nap...

There's something distinctly passive-aggressive about video games which make you sit through a lengthy, unskippable cinematic before getting back to the action, and there's perhaps no better example of this than Too Human.

Upon dying in Silicon Knights' ill-fated action-RPG, you're forced to sit through an almost 30-second animation in which a Valkyrie descends from the heavens and resurrects you, allowing gameplay to resume.

Given that you're likely to die a lot in the game, and again this is a bafflingly unskippable cutscene, it turns death from a mildly irritating triviality into a deeply rage-inducing punishment.

To make matters worse, there isn't even any variation to the cinematic at all, and Silicon Knights even had the audacity to include an achievement which required you to die 100 times, in turn forcing you to spend around 50 minutes of your precious existence sitting through this infuriatingly overlong cutscene.

In light of the vocal feedback, Too Human designer Denis Dyack doused further fuel on the fire by suggesting that the complaints simply implied that players were desperate to get back into gameplay as fast as possible, while revealing that making the cutscene skippable would be "an easy change."

The change never came, though, and to this very day anybody who commits the grave sin of perishing while playing Too Human will have to sit through that Valkyrie animation again and again. Hateful.