10 Video Games That Punish You For Dying

The XCOM franchise has been lauded since its inception for its remorseless level of difficulty, which forces players to consider the damaging potential of every single move they make.

The rub is that any soldier who dies in duty is permanently dead for the remainder of your campaign: there's no way to save them or use your resources to generate more of the exact same unit.

As such, losing experienced soldiers during a skirmish can be massively demoralising, forcing the player to push ahead with less-skilled personnel who will almost certainly fall to the alien enemy forces.

Basically, the name of the game is keeping your best guys alive at all costs, because once you start to lose them, a cascade of death and failure is all but inevitable.

Such is the agony and the ecstasy of XCOM, and that's without even getting into the punishing Ironman mode, which limits players to a single save file in order to prevent save scumming. Yikes.