Games That Seriously Punish You For Dying

Video games are meant to provide you a challenge, but some are just downright brutal. From the inception of the gaming medium to today, almost every game in some way is about staying alive (uh uh uh uh staying alive, staying alive). Though many games have punished you for failing to keep your life bar filled, few are as mean as the ones that made this list.

All old school gamers know this to be true: beating Mike Tyson in Mike Tyson's Punch Out!! is a badge of honor. Right up there with getting 120 stars in Super Mario 64, scaling the difficult ladder that is Nintendo's seminal NES boxing hit is a masterful achievement.

Think about it—you play a dude no taller than five feet taking on hilariously-named heavyweights like Super Macho Man, Bald Bull, and King Hippo. Even once you beat those guys, you're expected to topple the champion of boxing, Tyson himself, whose only giveaway to the punch he'll throw is the wink of an eye? No wonder there's a secret code on the main menu to skip right to Tyson. Yeesh.

Oh, XCOM—how easy it is to love you and so desperately hate you at the same time. If you're unfamiliar with Firaxis Games' slick reboot of the turn-based strategy classic, XCOM, it's a game about building a crack team of skilled soldiers to do battle with Earth-invading aliens. All of whom will die. Good times!

Forget the fact that the game is just genuinely punishing on any mode above Easy (and even then it doesn't always play fair), but whenever a soldier dies in battle, they're gone forever. You may have known Colonel Bootlicker (yes you get to name each one) for only a few minutes, or even days, but when he falls to that sneering Martian across the battlefield, you really feel it. And when Marshall Mallow is sniped running to his aid, controllers get thrown.

It's that sinking feeling in your stomach that returns again and again in XCOM. Don't worry, when all of your good characters die, the game does you a favor and pretty much makes victory an overwhelmingly impossible task. Now you can do it all again!

Sometimes, a threat is all you need. After dying once in Hellblade: Senua's Paradise, the player's warned that, if they keep failing, they'll permanently lose their save file. To show how close the player is to losing all of their progress, the game's hero, Sesuna, starts rotting. With every death, the rot climbs a little higher. In the game's fiction, when the rot reaches Senua's head, she forfeits her soul. In real life, that's when Hellblade will delete the currently active save file, forcing the unlucky and struggling player to start over from the very beginning.

That's the story, anyway. In reality, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice isn't quite so cruel. While rot does slowly take over Senua's body as the deaths pile up, players who committed virtual suicide repeatedly report that the decay never actually consumes Hellblade's Pict protagonist. Hellblade's threat is a bluff. Even if you die over and over again, your save file is safe.

It's an effective form of torment regardless. Unless you trawl internet message boards, you'd have no way of knowing that Hellblade is all talk and no action. As a result, watching the disease slowly creep up Senua's body is remarkably tense. Hellblade may not actually pull the trigger, but when you think it's going to, every death feels like a major event. Not only does Hellblade's big lie force you to sympathize with its cursed hero, but it makes the game unbelievably tense—and for many gamers, that extra bit of stress is punishment enough.

Before World of Warcraft there was EverQuest. Like Blizzard's massively multiplayer juggernaut, EverQuest dropped players into a medieval fantasy world, let them create a colorful and unique character, and sent them out in search of experience points and loot. But unlike in World of Warcraft, EverQuest doesn't treat death like a minor inconvenience–it's a major hassle.

In modern times (yes, almost 20 years later, EverQuest is still running), death isn't too bad—when you bite the big one, you'll respawn with all of your gear, while you can summon your corpse to your current location to recover any lost experience. But in the old days, dying sucked. Originally, when your EverQuest character died, your body stayed where it perished with all of its gear still attached. If you wanted your stuff—and given how hard you worked for it, you probably did—you'd need to fight all the way back to your body completely naked. That meant traversing dangerous territories completely unarmed, ultimately facing down the same monsters that killed you the first time—this time, without any weapons.

As Ultima Online designer Raph Koster explains, the whole idea of so-called "corpse runs" originated in the text-based online role-playing games known as MUDs that had a major influence on EverQuest. But, Koster explains, there's a big difference between a text-based game and a graphical one. On MUDs, a corpse run is a petty chore. In an MMORPG, it can be a multi-hour experience, and a major drag on the game's pace. Ultimately, both EverQuest and the MMORPG industry generally phased out the corpse run concept. In most cases, dying is punishment enough.

In most story-based games, when the player fails, that's the end. The narrative can't continue without its main characters, and so the game resets and the player gets to try again. The interactive slasher flick Until Dawn isn't nearly as forgiving. When one of Until Dawn's teenage cast members dies, the game keeps on going. You just won't see the victim any more, thanks to them being, well, dead.

So don't get too attached to Nashville star Hayden Panettiere's Sam, Mr. Robot lead Rami Malek's Josh, or Mike, played by Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Brett Dalton. There's a good chance that none of them will make it to Until Dawn's blood-soaked conclusion. Don't bank on being able to load an old save in order to keep them alive, either. Until Dawn autosaves after every major decision and setpiece. The only way to revive a deceased character is to start the game over from the very beginning.

Creative director Will Byles claims that developer Supermassive made that decision in order to ramp up the tension, and not just to be "not just to be mean or petty." But we're not convinced. After all, going through the entire ten-plus hour adventure without your favorite character is a pretty sever punishment for making one bad decision.

Lose/Lose–billed as an art project dedicated to "exploring what it means to kill in a video-game"–is much more than it seems. On the surface, it's a fairly standard shooter in the same vein as Space Invaders and Galaga. Dig a little deeper, however, and you'll find that Lose/Lose is much, much more insidious. Not only can a round of Lose/Lose wreak havoc on your computer, but once you die, you can't play any more. Literally. When the player's ship explodes, the game deletes itself, ending the game permanently.

Maybe that's for the best. See, in Lose/Lose, the alien ships that scroll down the screen aren't just random enemies. Each one represents a unique file on the player's computer, and killing the incoming spacecraft deletes the file for good. All those old vacation photos or college term papers or folders full of MP3s—or, more crucially, the system files that your computer needs to run? They're all fair game. As a result, not only does the player's death carry a big, big penalty, but enemy deaths do, too, and block the game from running entirely, although that hasn't stopped some masochists from going for the top score anyway.

While some virus scanners classify Lose/Lose as a Trojan horse, the game is still available if you're brave enough to try it out. Just remember: the only real way to win Lose/Lose is not to play at all.

If you're one of the millions and millions of players who love Fallout, you owe a big debt to Wasteland. Released back in 1988, a full nine years before Interplay created its unofficial sequel, Wasteland is a fully-featured open-world RPG set in a burned out post-nuclear wilderness. As you explore, unraveling mysteries and battling irradiated foes, you'll also recruit a number of characters to your party. But be careful: if they die, they're gone for good.

See, like Fallout 4 and some other open-ended RPGs, Wasteland takes place in a persistent open world. In other words, when Wasteland's setting changes, it stays that way—in this case, literally. Computers in 1988 didn't necessarily come with hard drives, and so in order to preserve players' in-game actions, Wasteland rewrote the game data on the floppy disks that powered the game while you played.

On the plus side, that means that players' actions really do have lasting consequences. On the negative, unless you make a copy of the game disks before you start playing (something that Wasteland's developers actually recommended), you can never start over. The idea that everything that you do is permanent is thrilling—right up until you make a mistake. Then, as you look over your virtual friends' digital corpse (or, at the very least, read about it in the game's mandatory manual), the real horror sets in.