Death in video games is an interesting conundrum. To create a sense of tension and reward for winning, you have to be able to lose.

However, as soon as a game tries to tell any story about human nature, this very act of a ‘game over’ is about as immersion-breaking as the game crashing.

The more the story of a game tries to make you care about a character’s difficulties and instil within you the hope they can overcome them, the more a game is at risk of tripping over itself when it comes to the mechanics of a game over.

Breaking The Immersion

Take an RPG like Persona 5 Royal or the recent GOTY Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, for example. Both games have huge stakes attached to their characters, with so much attributed to them as either being ‘special’ or carrying on in the face of adversity.

But what I have always found hard to square away in my mind when playing games such as these is that the game doesn’t acknowledge unscripted death at all.

Persona 5 Royal: Thou Hast Fallen

When Joker falls in Persona 5 Royal, the game fades to a game over screen and you’re told that you’ve failed. This could be a great continuation of the themes of the game, with say, one of your Personas being lost or a powerful enemy being spawned in the palace of the enemies’ mind, as recompense for you letting Joker lose.

Instead, the game scolds you with words and red text, saying that you have ‘lost your life’ and become ‘but a cog of the strong’. It goes as far as to say your ‘rehabilitation endeth incomplete’ but then pretends as if nothing has happened when you press restart.

As if this isn’t bad enough, the game also allows any other character to fall and just faint with 1 HP, causing undue pressure on the player to keep Joker alive, without any reason outside of an arbitrary and mostly harmless slap on the wrist.

Personally, I’d have the other characters pull Joker out of the Palace and make them lose a day recovering, as there’s this time limit mechanic already in the game, which would provide ample reason as to why you should be careful with Joker.

I remember when this happened to me in Persona 5 Royal, and I felt compelled to create my own punishments in-game by releasing some Personas as I didn’t feel I’d been punished enough for the mistake. For a game which is so immersive, this was really difficult for me to continue from, so much so that this Atlus hit continues to sit in my backlog.

Now, my reaction to Persona 5 Royal’s game-over is more exaggerated than I’d have for most other games, due to how much it creates so much immersion in other areas. This caused the scales to crash when this ‘game over’ happened to me out of the blue, but other games still fall foul of this game-over mechanic.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: Expedition Failed

As I mentioned above, Clair Obscur is another game that treats a game over as a simple ‘Expedition Failed’, asking you to restart. And it is another game which can’t align this video game mechanic with its story in the slightest.

Given that the lore of the world is that a new expedition would take the place of the old one, and from these incremental achievements, they could eventually learn from the mistakes of the past and succeed where others failed, to make it so you can just restart seems at odds with the message of the game.

Surely, they could implement a system where, for example, Lune is able to magic them away to safety at the moment of danger? Something to continue the idea that they are an Expedition surviving at the edge of collapse, never quite giving up?

Final Fantasy X & The Last Of Us

Some games get closer to keeping the immersion with a game over screen, be it from story beats or punishing you for the death.

For example, in Final Fantasy X, there’s a cutscene where Wakka gives a Phoenix Down to Tidus to revive him after Sin attacks.

This presumably means that when characters fall in battle in the game, they can be revived by any passers-by and aren’t actually killed, providing at least a small relief to the themes of being able to carry on where others have fallen, as they are lucky to have the revives with them.

On the other side of the coin, you’ve got games like The Last of Us or Resident Evil, which provide such gory deaths that there can be no question that the character couldn’t survive, and so you need to restart to continue after a game over.

I don’t have as much of a problem with these, as you have the punishment of the gruelling death, and I am left shaken before having to carry on.

Full On Permadeath

Now, some games take this issue in gaming logic and run the complete opposite way, making it so each life is individual. Take games like Zombi U, Battlefield 1 (for the opening level) or Watch Dogs: Legion.

All three make it so that when your character dies, that’s it, they’re gone, and you start playing as another character.

You’d think this would fix the issue, right? And in certain contexts it does, but of course, video games aren’t movies and are subject to the skill level of a player. And some players lose. A lot.

They can’t give each character a full-on story arc and personality, as there would have to be an infinite amount of them, which just isn’t feasible.

So while the game-over screen is less immersion-breaking, there’s the issue that the rest of the game is also not very immersive, as you don’t have the time to sit with a character before they’re replaced by someone else.

Therefore, we’re stuck with archetypes or stories that revolve around side-characters and NPCs instead, with your character being reduced to more of an idea. So how do we solve this problem?

Well, there’s a genre which has exploded in recent years and one which I think does a pretty fantastic job at removing this hole in gaming logic. And that is the roguelite genre.

Hades: There Is No Escape

Hades was one of the first games I played, whereby I felt truly content with losing and trying again, as every fibre of its story and gameplay is wrapped around this central concept.

When you lose a run in Hades, you get sent back to The Underworld, with the other NPCs either encouraging, joking with or actively hindering you as you try and break this impossible loop.

Having the game over loop as the central concept removes the immersion-breaking nature of it, while still providing ample reasons why you should aim to not lose, as you lose all your weapon upgrades and boons between runs.

I’m not saying that every game needs to have this loop as its central concept; we’d quickly run out of stories after all. However, it’s nice to see some developers taking the time to explain their gaming logic and keep it as tight as possible, especially as the stories in games are getting ever more complex.

Soulslikes – A Further Evolution?

Soulslikes share a similar concept, though they reduce the loop to each checkpoint in the run and ask you to reach and fight your past self to regain the experience/power before it’s lost forever.

If you don’t, then you lose it all, adding extra pressure to every other death as you’re at risk of losing everything.

So there’s the benefit that once you reach a checkpoint, you’re locked in and don’t have to restart completely, unlike in a roguelite, as well as the immersion fixer of showing where your game over occurred and giving it more impact outside of a slap on the wrist.

Related: This is officially the worst time to be a Kingdom Hearts fan

While I’m sure I’ll eventually get back to Persona 5 Royal, especially with it now being on every console known to man, I’ll always have this itchy feeling in the back of my mind that I’ve somehow failed the team, and I’m not sure I’ll ever fully get over that.

This idea of allowing players of all skill levels to play a game and still keep the game logic consistent is one of the reasons I continually recommend roguelites and Souls-like games to anyone, regardless of their experience with games.

What roguelites are currently in your rotation? Do you mind about game-over screens in immersive games? Let us know in the comments.