I've been thinking a lot about "unfair deaths" in video games lately, especially video games that send you far back if you fail. This problem has popped up for me while playing Persona 3 Portable and Separate Ways Remake on their hard difficulties, where an encounter designed with RNG as a major component could absolutely screw you over and make you lose up to half an hour of progress if things are not designed to have guaranteed results. While this kind of design feels ridiculous, I think playing through Termina right before both of those games has made me question the value of bullshit like that in games. Roguelikes like Spelunky have systems where, if you get unlucky, enemy mechanics can become so overwhelming that there's nothing you can do to avoid taking lethal damage. However, it's arguable that such unfairness leads to incredible game situations, where you mitigate as many dangers as possible and somehow scrape your way out of a situation you know feels like it could've easily turned unfair if your luck just wasn't good enough.
Fear & Hunger is a series that was probably introduced to a lot of people with this design philosophy in mind. In Termina, there are plenty of consequences for not avoiding an encounter you can't win, for saving at the wrong time, for missing a hit, for saying the wrong thing, for trapping yourself in a corner etc., but the game also offers plenty of consistent freebies if you follow the wikis or explore around enough. I'm curious if this will be a game I come back to more, especially if content expansions start coming out. It would be cool for more character moments to really flesh out their missions. I played a lot of this game on the ADarkRaccoon Easy Mode mod, and it feels like the real challenge of the game isn't from individual encounters (unlike the aforementioned P3P and RE4 remake where I had to reload some saves several times) but from one wrong move sending you back for hours. So when I do come back to this, I want to try doing everything without sleeping and see if that finally gets me the experience I was hoping for from this. Or maybe I just need to dive into the Masochism mode where I seem to have no hope of killing anything at the start.
Fear & Hunger is a series that was probably introduced to a lot of people with this design philosophy in mind. In Termina, there are plenty of consequences for not avoiding an encounter you can't win, for saving at the wrong time, for missing a hit, for saying the wrong thing, for trapping yourself in a corner etc., but the game also offers plenty of consistent freebies if you follow the wikis or explore around enough. I'm curious if this will be a game I come back to more, especially if content expansions start coming out. It would be cool for more character moments to really flesh out their missions. I played a lot of this game on the ADarkRaccoon Easy Mode mod, and it feels like the real challenge of the game isn't from individual encounters (unlike the aforementioned P3P and RE4 remake where I had to reload some saves several times) but from one wrong move sending you back for hours. So when I do come back to this, I want to try doing everything without sleeping and see if that finally gets me the experience I was hoping for from this. Or maybe I just need to dive into the Masochism mode where I seem to have no hope of killing anything at the start.