The One Video Game Feature Everyone Is Sick Of

It’s Permadeath, Jim, But Not As We Know It

It’s easy to see how a mechanic as oppressive as permadeath could be an issue, which is why a lot of titles that implement it will try to limit its effects in some way.

Permadeath isn’t only found in Roguelikes. Nintendo’s iconic Fire Emblem franchise, for instance, is notorious for breaking players’ hearts by getting them invested in the storyline and character progression, only for a favourite cast member to bite the dust on the battlefield and be lost forever. These are far from the expendable mass-produced units seen in a lot of turn-based strategy titles.

As such, Fire Emblem: Three Houses added the Divine Pulse mechanic. With this, gamers had the limited capacity to rewind turns in battle to save units (positioning them out of range of the attack that previously killed them). The game also offered a more forgiving difficulty setting that meant lost units would simply reappear at the end of a given battle.

On the flipside, several titles only offer permadeath as a higher difficulty mode and/or optional challenge. In Blue Manchu’s spacefaring rogue-lite Void Bastards, the player takes the role of an unlimited series of prisoners, tasked with exploring nearby craft for supplies and equipment.

Should the player die, they’re simply assigned another prisoner (with their own randomly assigned abilities) and the cycle continues. For an extra challenge, though, gamers can enable iron man mode, which gives them only one character/life. Death both ends the game and instantly deletes the save file. Many games take similar routes.