What I mean by this, is instead of when you fail and are met with a game over, the game finds some way to keep it going. Instead of being forced to reset to a previous save or an autosave checkpoint, the game’s story continues in an interesting path. Are there any games like this?
Asking because in IRL TTRPG’s, a lot of DM’s will find reasons to keep the story going, no matter how ludicrous because I mean… that’s why you’re there. Do games do this? What are some that do?
Hylics and Cruelty Squad both spin death.
In Hylics 1 & 2, dying causes you to wake up in the afterlife where you can take the chunks of meat you get from enemies and put it into a meat grinder to increase your max HP.
In Cruelty Squad dying is just a consequence of living. It happens sometimes. Dying severs your divine light, making the game easier but closing some paths to you. Additionally, if you die too often, you’ll find power in misery, making the game easier again and allowing you to consume bodies to restore 1hp each. This is particularly advantageous because eating bodies dismembers the corpse, allowing you to harvest its organs without having to chase them around (most other ways of gibbing corpses tends to send organs flying). Additionally, you can get death surgery, allowing you to pass through some areas and use a few weapons that were previously too dangerous for you to access. Death surgery also allows you to wall jump.
This cruelty squad game sounds more and more my style the more I hear about it.
I love that game. I think it’s the only game that presents dissociation and “functional depression” if that is even a phrase. There is a feeling of an unreliable narrator, but not to the extent of outright lies or hallucinations. Just everything looks out of place, disgusting, ugly and stupid.
Playing the game I feel like I am pretending to be functional in a world I despise, among people I find disgusting or irrelevant.
It’s something.
It’s amazing. It’s horrifying. It’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. It’s one of the most visually and aurally offensive games I’ve ever seen. It’s an immersive sim with stellar gameplay and a nihilistic narrative wrapped in a shitpost and drizzled with a bad acid trip.
It’s set in an anarcho-captialist future that’s become overrun with hedgefund managers, cryptobros and techbros. Morals don’t exist, biotech is out of control, death is a novelty, and there are no good people. You’re a hitman in a gig economy and there’s no penalty for collateral damage, so feel free to fill a cruise ship with acid gas to get your target because somehow they have the ability to put everyone’s jellied remains back together so it doesn’t really matter if they die. Besides, they have all probably done things that’d make Hitler or Stalin queasy, so don’t feel guilty about the medical bill you effectively forced on them. The only reason why they’re not targets is because you’re not being paid to murder them.
If you get into it, make sure you read the mission briefings, try to talk to NPCs before killing or scaring them. Most of the weapons are real-world cancelled experimental weapon prototypes (like the H&K G11), weapons that’d be considered a war crime (like the acid gas grenade launcher or bolt acr that shits out enough radiation to liquify people in real time) or weapons so horrifically bad that they’re borderline useless (the zipgun). Additionally, both the Unibomber’s shack and bin Laden’s compound exist in game.
It looks like a shitpost with how often it uses colors and textures that seem to want to hurt the player with how godawful they look, but if you can get past that, the core gameplay is really good.