when you die in a soulslike, it's usually because you're in a very difficult and dangerous area

which is stressful to go through

and if you die a lot, the thing to do to not tilt is to back off and explore somewhere else

the souls run mechanic says

"fuck you for changing your mind"

"you have to go back in there and get your shit"

"at your tilt moment the only thing you can do to avoid being penalized is to re-engage with the thing that is making you tilt"

"but now the stakes are way, way higher"

let me leave without throwing all my exp in the trash

I propose this as an alternative death system:

When you die, you are sent back to the last checkpoint, and all the enemies come back

yeah this always seemed unappealing enough to be a reason I haven't played them yet

Lies of P tries to make it less punishing by making your soul pile not disappear if you die again, only losing a percentage of its souls

but you know what? actually worse.

because it means that if you die trying to get back to where you died

then you still aren't free

you still have to go back in there even though you failed to retrieve your souls

they aren't gone you can still get them back. go fetch, asshole

this is what remnant 2 does

nothing is lost on death, all that happens is that a marker is placed on the map where you died

and in fact dying intentionally can be used as a tactic

perfect

AI Limit takes like 25% of your souls and then doesn't have a retrieval mechanic

love it

you can back off and try something else, nothing lost

because sometimes it's faster to take liquid death to go back to a checkpoint to explore a different branching path

instead of backtracking while low on health/ammo/resources

the only thing you might lose is items that have dropped that you didn't get the chance to pick up

but if it gets into your inventory then you're golden

some games try to mitigate it with quality of life features

like blasphemous has places you can pray to absolve guilt and restore yourself to full power

hollow knight has the rancid egg guy who can retrieve your ghost for you for a cost

and what I say to these is

what you've done is put in a bad mechanic, then also added a way to make it less bad

just don't put it there in the first place

here's a knife with a handle covered in thorns, and here's a special glove that makes the thorns hurt less when they stab your hand

give me a knife with a normal fucking handle

i understand your feelings completely

Shovel Knight is also guilty of this - sometimes landing the moneybags in places you cannnot get them back at no less!!!

Feels so bad.

I just think that having to do the area over again is sufficient penalty for dying

I know what you mean but a glove holding. Knife handle with thorns is metal as fuck to me unfortunately

you're right and you should say it

this was always a bad mechanic and it sucks that it became popular

the only time i've seen a similar mechanic implemented in a way i didn't hate was in Final Fantasy Origins

because 1) the levels are fairly linear so you'll most likely have to go back through that section eventually anyway, and 2) the thing you drop that you're in danger of losing permanently if you die without recovering it, isn't that hard to regain

you start every level with 2 bars of MP and slowly build it up to 6 bars by killing enemies. if you die, you go back down to 2 bars, and can recover the rest by reclaiming your soul in the spot where you died

but you can also recover it....by fighting enemies, like you did the first time, it's not that hard

so dying is a mild inconvenience, mostly

and that's the problem all the other "lose your shit when you die" mechanics have - they make it way more punishing than a mild inconvenience

(another important factor is that FFO is arranged in discrete levels. so you can in fact just go "alright this level sucks i'm gonna go do another one" and lose nothing, because you start every level with 2 bars of MP regardless)

anyway it sucks that these kinds of mechanics got so popular because 99% of the time they just drag the game down

i especially hated it in hollow knight because you could die in the middle of an extremely long and difficult platforming challenge

and then have to do half of the challenge again to reclaim your ghost

hey, HK, why don't you just spawn the ghost at the entrance of the fucking room

and of course the worst implementations of this mechanic will have you die in a boss fight and then drop your body past where you get locked into the boss fight

so there's literally no way to retrieve your body without beating the boss that keeps killing you

it's a bad gameplay mechanic, it's good as a meditation on the ephemeral nature of wealth and power