In the vast majority of video games, death is a bedrock mechanic, if not a particularly novel one. You fall down a pit in Super Mario Bros., you lose a life, you go back to a checkpoint, that’s it.
One of the only game genres that consistently does something different with the concept is roguelikes, wherein every death both resets your progress and potentially helps you unlock new abilities or story bits.
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However, while roguelikes do interesting stuff with death more consistently than other genres, that doesn’t mean others don’t experiment once in a while. Various game genres have taken the concept of dying, respawning, or resurrecting in mildly or overtly unusual directions.
Some games add an extra wrinkle to the process of recovering from death, while a few may eliminate it from the equation entirely. Even if it’s only in a small way, these games do a little something extra with the mechanic of death, particularly in a way where you still regularly encounter it.
Someone’s Gotta Clean Up This Mess
InKiller7, every member of the titular syndicate is considered a “persona,” transforming into one another as necessary and occupying the same little slot in reality one at a time. I’ve played this game three times and I still don’t completely get it, but it’s cool thematically, so whatever.
Here’s the thing, though: if one of your personas dies out in the field, you can’t just have anyone else go and pick up the remains. You need a certified cleaner, someone who’s used to this. This is Garcian Smith’s lone job, and the only reason you should ever select him in Harman’s Room.
When a persona dies, they leave a severed head in a paper bag in the spot they bit it in. Garcian needs to run from the last Harman’s Room you visited to the spot where that Smith died and retrieve the head. Afterward, he’ll bring it back to Harman’s Room, where it can be revived with no further fuss.
Thanks to Garcian’s cleaner skills, you may die pretty much endlessly, so long as you can safely make the trip to pick up their head. The only way to get a true game over in Killer7 is if Garcian is killed in the field.
7The Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver
Where Else Were You Going To Go?
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered
InThe Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, our protagonist Raziel has had a bit of a rough go of things, what withgetting murdered by Kainand resurrected as a bony wraith. Still, being only mostly-dead does bring with it certain perks, particularly the fact that Raziel can’t really die again. After all, where’s he going to go?
In Soul Reaver, whenever Raziel is killed while traversing the physical realm, he’s automatically shunted back into that locale’s counterpart in the spectral realm, otherwise no worse for wear.
This can be frustrating if you’re trying to get around, as you can only return to the physical realm through special portals, but if you know where they are, it’s a mild inconvenience at best.
Even if Raziel is killed while in the spectral realm, all that happens is that he gets dumped back in the Abyss. This also happens if you just load a saved game, so it’s something you tend to get used to pretty quickly. Nobody ever said being dead was convenient.
6World Of Warcraft
Where Did I Leave That Body…
World of Warcraft
Making a good player resurrection system for an MMORPG is a tricky prospect because it needs to be balanced against the regular gameplay. You can’t just let players bounce back right away, or they’d endlessly pummel all enemies.
But you also can’t inconvenience them too much, or no one would ever win a raid.World of Warcraft’s approach to death and resurrection attempts to meet a middle ground by having you put some legwork in.
Whenever you die in World of Warcraft, you’re revived as a ghost at the nearest allied graveyard. At this point, you’ve got a couple of options: your best case scenario is to run your spectral self back to where you died and rejoin with your dead body so you can get right back into the action.
If you can’t get to your body or don’t feel like waiting, every graveyard has a Spirit Healer that can resurrect you on the spot, albeit at the cost of gear durability and a debuff.
You can also be revived on the spot by an ally with certain items or abilities. However, if you die multiple times in rapid succession, it’ll start taking longer for your ghost to spawn and become revivable.
5Shovel Knight
You Can’t Take It With You
Shovel Knight
Shovel Knightis a game design chimera, takingcues and concepts from a myriad of titles across gaming history. I’m sincerely glad Shovel Knight doesn’t incorporate lives and checkpointing systems from one of its big inspirations, Mega Man.
While you can’t run out of lives in Shovel Knight, however, that doesn’t mean dying is without consequence, as it takes a page from another game: Dark Souls.
Whenever you die on Shovel Knight, whether from running out of health, touching spikes, or falling down a pit, a gaggle of large sacks suspended by little white wings immediately flies out of your body.
Those sacks contain a large portion of your accumulated gold, and the only way to get that cash back is to return to where you died and grab ‘em. If you die again before reclaiming the sacks, they’re gone forever.
There are a couple of distinctive wrinkles to this system. Firstly, when the sacks appear, their positioning around the screen you died on is randomized. This means it’s possible for one to spawn in a spot you can’t reach.
Additionally, if you destroy a checkpoint, you’ll get some cash, but it’ll cease functioning. That means, if you die, you’ll be sent even further back to your last active checkpoint.
4Ghost Trick
Once More, From The Top
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
As part of Sissel’s established abilities inGhost Trick, both he and any other ghost milling about have the ability to possess the body of someone recently deceased and travel back in time to the moment of their death; four minutes before the moment of their death, to be precise. It’s a Japanese pun, look it up.
Amusingly, nine times out of ten, the person who died will actually join you in the past as a ghost themselves to offer some advice or insight into how everything went down. Of course, manipulating the past by making random objects jiggle around isn’t easy, and there’s a good chance you’ll botch it.
Luckily, due to the weird rules that govern this whole “four minutes before death” thing, you can wind the clock back another four minutes as many times as you want, usually with a little extra hint from your companions to get it right next time.
What’s especially cool about this mechanic is that it’s not just gameplay convenience, it’s a recurring plot element. Without spoiling anything, the entire trajectory of the plot hinges on the fact that any ghost can return to any corpse’s moment of death.
3Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Death Perpetuates Rot
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Fextralife Wiki
Despite being a FromSoftware game and utilizing a handful of the design norms of the Souls series,Sekiro: Shadows Die Twicedeparts from those games in one big capacity: when you die, you can’t reclaim what you’ve lost.
Every time you die, you lose half your money and half your earned experience, unless you’re lucky enough to receive Unseen Aid.
You might think, “well, if I only lose half and can’t get back what I lost anyway, it’s not that big of a deal,” right? However, you might want to be a little less self-centered in your perspective, because you are not the only one being hurt here.
Due to the way Wolf’s immortality works,every time you die, the disease known as Dragonrot proliferates further throughout the land.
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Also, whenever you revive at a checkpoint, there’s a chance you’ll receive a Rot Essence. This indicates that somewhere in the world, an NPC has become debilitatingly ill with Dragonrot.
While an NPC is sick, you can’t interact with them or progress on their quest, which could potentially lock you out of some portions of the game. The only way to alleviate the plague is to use a Dragon’s Blood Droplet and cleanse everyone all at once, though this won’t prevent them from becoming sick again.
2NieR: Automata
Get A Boost, Get A Helper
NieR: Automata
InNieR: Automata, our heroes 2B and 9S are Androids built using semi-disposable bodies. It’s a big benefit for a force fighting a proxy war when their soldiers can’t truly die, at least unless someone forgets to back up their save data to the cloud.
Whenever 2B and 9S are killed in the field, their backed-up memories, equipment, and general appearances are copied onto fresh Android bodies at a transfer point. However, there are some critical bits left out.
When you die, you lose any experience you gained since your last save, and more importantly, your Plug-in Chips are left with your old body
To get your chips back, you have to return to the spot where you died andfind your body. Just interacting with the body is enough to get your stuff back, but there’s also an additional perk.
After finding your old body, you may choose to either Retrieve or Repair it. Retrieving the body will restore the experience you lost before, while Repairing it will turn the body into a temporary AI-powered companion. You won’t get your experience back if you Repair, but it might just help you out more to have a buddy for a tough fight.
1Mutant Football League
Talk About Good Health Coverage
Mutant Football League
American football players get pretty good health insurance, at least compared to most jobs. That’s good, because it’s a high-impact, potentially dangerous sport where people get lasting injuries on a semi-regular basis.
I’m guessing NFL health insurance doesn’t cover resurrection from sudden, violent death, but that’s just one of the spots where the MFL,Mutant Football League, differs.
In Mutant Football League’s Dynasty mode, you need to manage and lead your team of freaks and monsters to victory on the gridiron. Thing is, mutant football iswaymore brutal than regular football, what with all the explosives and chainsaws and giant sandworms.
Your players being killed on the field isn’t just likely, it’s borderline expected. Luckily, the MFL has an excellent benefits package, so any killed players can be revived from the dead between games with a quick bolt of lightning.
The catch is that revival ain’t free. Bringing any player back from the depths will cost you at least a few hundred thousand dollars a pop, and that money’s coming out of your match winnings alongside all your living players’ salaries. If you may’t afford to bring back your ace, you might just have to stick it out for a couple of games until you can.
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