The One Video Game Feature Everyone Is Sick Of

Sick To (Perma)Death Of This Feature?

Long-time gamers are more than familiar with the concept of cheap deaths. From bottomless pits and insta-death spikes in the Mega Man titles to Dark Souls’ brutally difficult areas and bosses, there are a thousand different rage-inducing ways to lose a life or be defeated in a given game.

The difference, however, is that even challenging games like those offer outs to the player. They’ll have multiple lives, say, or allow The Ashen One to respawn at the nearest bonfire completely unscathed (save for a need to retrieve any Souls that were lost). The concept of permadeath offers for few such concessions.

With this feature being so central to the roguelike experience, it’s something that genre fans have long since learned that they’ll have to deal with. Runs will go terribly and be cut short thanks to all manner of misfortune and RNG at times. That’s just the way these games function.

Does this make the frustration any more palatable? Perhaps not. There are a lot of tropes in gaming today that have certainly started to wear thin with some gamers (the aforementioned Metroidvania, pixel art and so forth being among them), but permadeath is something that can be altogether more difficult to deal with.

Whether gamers are emotionally invested in a character’s backstory in Fire Emblem, they’re losing a beloved party member to an unfortunate string of events in Darkest Dungeon or they didn’t draw a hand that could’ve saved them in Slay the Spire, so many have felt the sting of permadeath in its many forms.

The issue is, like stylus minigames in the early days of the Nintendo DS, permadeath is sometimes added to a title where it doesn’t really add much, simply for the sake of it. When implemented well, it can up the stakes and the sense of accomplishment severalfold. It’s just striking that balance that proves incredibly difficult.

Still, if there’s one thing Hades’ success has proven, it’s that there are still creative and effective ways to tie this tired mechanic in with a gameplay loop and entirely revitalize it. Here’s hoping that developers take note of this going forward.