In recent years, we have become accustomed to games holding our hands, tutorialising, making sure that if we make mistakes, nothing bad will happen. Watching TV in the background is not an option. You have to keep on your toes, exercise caution, pay attention to every visual and audio cue. Knowing that death could be just around the corner is a powerful way to engage the player.

If it is easy to stay alive, there is no tension in the game. The most obvious effect is introducing a sense of danger to the game. So what’s happening here? What exactly does frequent player death bring to the gameplay design table?ĭeath comes quickly in FTL - Faster Than Light Yet despite sharing an almost unhealthy love for flashing up the Game Over screen, it’s these titles that we keep coming back to. Day Z takes all of this, and adds adds a dollop of PvP and an object lesson in the dark side of human nature into the mix. Keeping your ship together long enough to augment its defences enough to survive even a moderate attack in FTL is difficult. Super Meat Boy delights in sudden player evisceration, gleefully depicting your character explode into bloody chunks. Super Crate Box takes a similar approach, readily handing out sudden death, with the added cruelty of making it entirely your fault in the case of disc gun misuse. Lasting more than 30 seconds may sound like a given in most video games, but achieving this in Super Hexagon will take some practice. Yet both Dark Souls and its precursor Demon’s Souls have become big hits. Terry Cavanagh’s Super Hexagon is even more difficult. This is a game (whose tag line, remember, is “Prepare to Die”) which positively revels in killing the player. Let's start with the most famous recent advocate of frequent player death: Dark Souls.

Super hexagon free to play