I’m a casual gamer so perhaps this has been made hundreds of times and I just ignore it.
So let’s say you play your game, things don’t go well so you go back and reload a save. Now, with your current knowledge you can get things right and that’s usually how it goes with games.
Is there any game that takes this into the plot as something necessary by design (say for example, the main character is supposed to be clairvoyant or something)? You play, your character gets things wrong the first time, but now when you reload your character will obviously do everything right, almost as if they were clairvoyant/psychic/etc because that’s exactly what your character is. The only way to beat the game is to explore a variety of outcomes in order to gather information until you get it right, but instead of this being immersion breaking it’s actually supported by the plot itself.
Not sure if I’m making sense here or maybe I ate the wrong kind of cookies, you tell me…
This gimmick instantly reminds me of The Stanley Parable. It isn’t really related to saving and loading but it does “reset” you all the time. I find it an absolute gem of a game.
Undertale.
In Fable 2 when you purchase shops that earn you money it accrues in real time. If I plugged in my 360 I’d probably have 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 gold or something now haha
It likely uses the Internal clock. Just set it to the year 3000 and retire.
There was an upper limit on how much you could earn like this. I know, because you could also just disconnect from the internet and set the clock forward.
Not quite the same, but the save points in Chrono Cross exist in universe and a twist later in the game reveals they’re being used to alter people’s memories.
Also running on low sanity in Eternal Darkness when it’s been a while since you’ve last saved may cause the game to pretend to corrupt your save files or act like the GameCube lost power.
Shadow of Mordor and it’s sequel, Shadow of War. The nemesis system makes death a part of the game, so a random orc that kills you gets a promotion.
Isn’t that just Undertale and Deltarune?
I don’t know, you tell me. Never played either
Yes.
Yep, narratively Undertale uses the exact concept you’re talking about.
It’s not much of a mechanic for most parts of the game though.
Yes, IIRC Undertale it will only taunt you a bit at first, you have to play almost to the end before you really notice. But then it masterfully beats you against the 4th wall, hard, several times. (Speaking about eating the wrong cookies, yes it does feel like that.)
And then, when you start a second play-through, the 4th wall stays broken. (Personally I didn’t care enough for the game for a second play-through, but if you read it up it’s a whole thing, the game will not simply reset.)
Thanks for providing some context! I’m definitely intrigued now, I’ll keep this one for my wishlist
The Demon/Dark Souls formula is essentially this. The idea that (depending on the game and boss) you actually canonically tried and failed countless times before finally winning. I want to say there is an indie game that is approaching that from the perspective of the boss (Many a True Nerd did a video on it. it looked “fine”).
Warframe has also played with this in a different way. The 1999 update is about a time loop where you get to know (and romance) the characters involved. And over KIM (like AIM but legally distinct!) they outright acknowledge that they don’t know how many loops have occurred but trust you about it and blah blah blah.
And Undertale/Deltarune and Doki Doki Literature Club (among many others) also play with this to some degree.
But ACTUALLY keeping track of when you reload a save? I am not aware of any. Mostly because it would make the mechanisms that save files work by MUCH more complicated.
Inscryption
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1092790/Inscryption/
Don’t read into it too too much. It’s better experienced knowing as little as possible, but things are absolutely not as they seem
This one rings a bell… I can’t remember much but I’ve heard it’s a good game
Prince of Persia on the GameCube (I think? It was a long time ago!) had a mechanism very like this, where you manually rewound time after you died/failed. More Action/Adventure than an RPG, though.
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You had to kill enemies and then stab them with a special dagger to extract special sand that filled up an on screen guage.
That guage represented how far back you could rewind the game if you died or did something you wanted to undo.
My favourite part about this is that the entire story of the game is a giant flashback story as told by the prince.
Every time you died, the prince would say something like, “No, no, no, that’s not what happened. Let me tell the story again.”
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It’s been a long while but IIRC in one of the early Metal Gear Solid games there was a baddie who would threaten to (and could) corrupt your save file, completely breaking the fourth wall in the process.
Psycho Mantis didn’t corrupt your save file, but he would read your memory card and reference other games you’d played. Given the creepy vibes of the scene to begin with, this freaked out many an unsuspecting player.
Closer to OP’s question, there was a villain in Metal Gear Solid 3 named The End, a sniper who was a very old man. If you saved your game during the fight and then waited over a week (in real-world time) before loading the save again, when you returned to the fight you’d find he’d died of old age while waiting for you to do anything.
Most rougelites kind of do this.
For “big” FPS games Deathloop kind of does it. You and the main villain are aware of a reset that happens when you die or the two day timer runs out.
Every loop you gain more knowledge, and every miniboss gives more power.
But to actually beat the game, you need to do a bunch of tasks in the right order in the right timeslots.
I don’t think I ever finished it, but it was a fun concept
I would have never thought of a roguelike… Are we talking about stuff like shattered pixel dungeon? Hardly enough depth of plot and definitely a different run every time so repeating is nearly impossible.
As for Deathloop, that sounds really cool! That would fit the bill, cheers!
Hades is a great example of this. You start out as the son of Hades, lord of the underworld. You want to escape his realm, so you try to fight your way out. Along the way, you will die and fail, and you just get sent back down to your father’s house, and he gives you a bit of a hard time about how weak and ineffectual you are.
The plot unfolds as you interact with various gods and other figures in the underworld, over the course of your many attempts. Saving and reloading isn’t really a thing, as such, but the plot continues to unfold, even as you die over and over over and over.
Edit:
This is a great time for me to rave about how much I love the storytelling in Hades. In a book or in a totally linear game, the story looks like this:
You start at the beginning, you proceed directly to the end. You have no choices in how the plot progresses. This is fine in a book, and I’m sure there are some games where it works okay, too.
Most games with “choices” go like this:
You might make a few choices, but a lot of them either end in a false ending or take you right back to the ending that the writers planned all along. It can give the illusion of meaningful choice, but it can also start to feel hollow once you see where the railroad tracks are.
Hades works like this:
All of the characters in the game (and there are a lot of them) have their own linear plot that is unfolding as you play the game, and you are learning about any one of them at any given time. You don’t have many meaningful choices to make, but it still reads as a very compelling plot because all of your interactions deepen your relationship with each character in turn. It saves us all from the fake choices that a lot of games stick us with. It’s genius.
Okay, belated thanks for your artwork. You are a good visual communicator. I think I read your comment before you added the images. I’m intrigued now
