What happens after dying in tutorials?
Inspired by my long-ago try at Witcher 3, during which I died in the tutorial by falling off a platform. Yeah, definitely one of the lamest deaths possible. Gotta wonder what the others present thought about the legendary Geralt of Rivia dying from a simple fall, like geez isn't this guy supposed to be a living legend who's faced giant monsters that could fell armies?? I'm pretty sure the tutorial was a dream of a memory so his death didn't matter, but since then I've wondered:
How screwed would various video game worlds be if the hero dies during the tutorial of all things?
Figured this might be a fun question to ponder since there's so many possibilities. So think of any game with a tutorial where you can die, and then think about the consequences! Maybe you did die, maybe you didn't or came close. And maybe those potential deaths were super lame and super anticlimactic, leaving the other characters to just stare blankly because this guy casually walked right off a cliff, as if expecting some invisible barrier to stop them.
It's just fun to think of how the rest of the cast moves on without the protagonist—you know, assuming they can actually survive the game's plot without you. Or maybe they'll actually be better off...
Oblivion - you are given an amulet by a.dying/murdered emperor. This amulet will save the world. If only you are not killed by a rat because the emperor's guard left you alone!
Morrowind suggests an alternative: The Hero is the one who succeeds. If you didn't succeed, you weren't the hero. There's a whole cave full of the spirits of failed Incarnates (the role the PC fulfills to finish the main quest; seems sort of rude of Azura to shackle the ghosts of a bunch of her adherents and champions for the purpose of, basically, serving as an object lesson to others, but whatever).
Yeah, this was one of the many themes that cement Morrowind as (probably) the best in the series.
After overcoming so many trials and tribulations, and finding the Urshilaku and gaining an audience with their wise woman, telling your story and letting them weigh your worth...
"You are not the Nerevarine."
Deflation.
"...But you are one who may become the Nerevarine."
<Distant drums of the main theme.>Many fall, but one remains.
I love Morrowind. And its tutorial. Oh, wait...
"Well, not even last night's storm could wake you. I heard them say we've reached Morrowind, I'm sure they'll let us go."
I love how streamlined the tutorial is.
You really can't miss anything important.
Hilariously, it's actually possible to escape the Census and Excise courtyard before talking to Sellus Gravius (which enables, among other things, saving the game). I don't think this makes the game strictly unwinnable (you have inventory access, which the 2:30 glitched main quest speedrun will show is all you really need to finish the game), but it sure isn't something you'd ever want to do.
All the game bugs and features are hilarious. It is a game from another era, it seems. I love it and its mechanics that you can shape to your needs. I like being that free in a game.
Curious that Bethesda decided to remaster Oblivion, whose original version is still quite playable on somewhat modern consoles, instead of Morrowind, which is basically only playable on PC these days. I'd certainly play Morrowind if I had a good way to do it, especially if it had prettier graphics and possibly a slightly better combat system.
It is strange. But Oblivion is probably more recent, people know more about it. And while I think it actually didn't need remaster (as I fully played and finished it just a few years ago, even thoug I bought it on launch day) I kinda understand they wanted to remaster the game that pushed them into mainstream. Morrowind was even at the time of release still kinda hardcore, it didn't play that well with many peoplw, while Oblivion did. And to be honest - I'd rather Bethesda don't touch Morrowind. Their score at their newer games (that is newer than Oblivion) is not that good in my eyes and they would probably fuck up big time.
I guess if you die stealing the limeware platter, that might count? Don't know how you could die stealing Fargoth's ring.
Stealing? Why are you using such a rude words? I was just moving the limeware platter to Arrille's shop. And besides that - nobody really cared that I gave it to it's rightful owner... for appropriate reward, of course.
Well, if you drop it, it's legally yours after all.
I'm a gentleman, I still gave it to Arrille. He was so grateful that I had to accept the coins he gave me.
I also returned Fargoth's ring. Too bad it went missing again during the night. Poor Fargoth should take better care of his belongings.
Makes me wonder how many worlds were doomed by a rat or spider or slime...
That could make for a fun game plot. Where you play an NPC that witnesses the hero die, and you're looking around like wait, that wasn't supposed to happen was it? Then you take up the mantle but you're not the hero, so the game is mostly you bumbling along while evil steamrolls good in the background. It ends with you surviving but everything is in ruins, maybe worse than if it had only been the villain.
It could be full of moments where villains prepare elaborate plots to subvert a hero, but instead they get you and realize they don't need all of the dungeons and minions.
Alternatively, every time the hero dies, a nearby random NPC suddenly becomes a PC and takes up the quest.
This actually has a lot of fun potential, especially if you take the different "heroes" into account with the writing. Special dialogue shown only for certain characters, and all sorts of hidden endings.
Imagine the dialogue from the final boss when the latest "hero" reaches them. "So, you're the one causing all this trouble—wait, hold on, aren't you like, three??"
Cue toddler babbling, followed by toddler toddling forward with a giant sword dragging on the ground behind them.
Something similar to this is Rogue Legacy which I really enjoyed! I think roguelikes kinda take this on some level.
I'm so into this.
This is close to a rogue like called Undermine, where there’s a gold mine that digs deep enough that monsters are coming up, and when your character dies, the mine owner sends a new peasant down to clear it out so work can resume.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/656350/UnderMine
You and u/slade should check out Messiah I'm not sure if it's a great game but it has a body jumping mechanic and the PC is a toddler-looking cherub.
I think it should vary by ending because both options have lots of room for drama and comedy.
Make it to the BBEG in the sequel with another toddler. He's even more pissed because he lost to the toddler last time, and now his henchmen are eagerly awaiting round two with popcorn at the ready.
Hmm, maybe something along the lines of "Danjon no Naka no Hito" could make for even funnier game. Like being assigned to help an useless beginner hero or party without them noticing. So like... party dies in the tutorial and you are the unlucky assistant who is taking care of them from then on. First order of business, collecting bodies and equipment, patching all up, turn some traps off, revive & memory wipe. Then they fail again. When they actually suceed on their 3rd attempt, one gets seriously ill from eating uncooked dungeon lichen and you need to sneak into their room and have them drink the antidote in the night... except you don't have it and the only way to get it is to do some seriously dangerous odd jobs for a bully colleague of yours and there is nobody looking after the assistants.
This is similar to what happens in the manga/anime The Legendary Hero Is Dead!. The Hero dies after falling into a spike pit dug up by Local Boy™️ to fend off demons, who then gets necromanced into the hero's body as a coverup.
There's actually an old iOS game, Infinity Blade, that had a hidden story path if you died during the tutorial. Dying there accidentally was almost impossible, you literally had to put your phone down for a couple of minutes, so that your character would take enough damage to die.
Recently a fan-made port of this game came out on PC, I need to finally play it on my steam deck to feel somewhat like playing it on the old iPhone 4. Too bad only the first one is available on PC, otherwise it's literally impossible to play any of the games in the series, they're not supported on newer iOS devices
Infinity Blade was ridiculously cool for the time, and the vibes were immaculate. I played the first one on my iPod Touch - never got to play the sequels, did they hold up?
I remember liking sequels very much, but after that many years it might be nostalgia taking over. I loved John Noble as the main villain in the third game the most. It really felt great to beat Denethor down
Ah I miss infinity blade. I loved how it built in the repeated cycles of death into the story line, and made it feel less repetitive (even though it absolutely was).
Not so! Infinity blade II recently got a PC port. No word on Infinity Blade III, but if the pattern holds, it'll probably get a port sometime next year.
I'll have to figure out how to get steam input overlay working so I can play them with my Steam controller, I'm eager to see that hidden story path!
This is actually explored a bit in Nier: Automata. There are over 20 endings to the game, most of which are trivlal or joke endings. One ending was basically "What happens if your characters just decides to leave in the first scene and not get involved?" You do have to basically start over, which is maybe 2 minutes wasted, but I found it very amusing when I accidentally went the wrong way.
Talos Principle 2 has a similar thing where at the start of the game, you can choose not to go on the big expedition where nearly all of the game takes place. The game then ends with a cutscene showing the rest of the characters going on without you and remarking that it really seemed like the player character would've had fun coming too.
Iconic and under-appreciated 90s PC adventure game The Last Express actually has endings for a variety of fail states, and hitting those is genuinely part of the tutorial.
Because you’re on a train, the game moves in pseudo real-time, rather than being driven by player actions. The train is travelling, after all! At, say, 9:15 PM, the train will stop at a station. Its next station stop might be at 10:45 PM, which might correspond to 10 or so minutes of in-game time.
Likewise, characters go about their lives on the train. One might eat dinner in the dining car at say, 7:00, then go to the smoking car until 8:30, before retiring to their cabin for bed at 9:00.
What this means is that you, as a player, need to persistently be in the right place at the right time. Something significant might be happening in the kitchen, but if you're hanging out in the sleeping cars, then you'll miss the event entirely!
Of course, how can you know whether or not you're in the right place at the right time?
Trial and error!
The game actively intends for you to fail. Because of this, it also builds in a mechanic to help you with this. You can rewind time! Whenever you like. As much as you want. You can conceivably make it to the penultimate moments of the game and rewind all the way back to the beginning if you're feeling dangerous (note: you cannot fast-forward time).
You, naturally, get introduced to this mechanic by failing for the first time.
There are a variety of ways this can happen. Minor beginning-of-game spoilers to follow.
Some background on the start of the game: due to... reasons... your character boards The Orient Express after it has already started on its journey. You jump from a motorcycle and grab onto the platform between cars in the opening cutscene.
Your friend has booked a double cabin, but he's only put down his name in the register, so you're an unticketed passenger and are planning to lie low for the trip.
So, after getting on the train, you should go meet up with your friend in your cabin, right?
Except, you don't have to do this. Maybe you want to explore the train? See the different cars? Eavesdrop on some of the passengers? Go for it. Spend your time however you like, but remember that time is ticking away...
Failstate 1
In not going to your cabin, you’ve made an error. Your game ends when the conductor goes into your cabin to make the bed. He will find your friend's dead body there and have the train make an emergency stop. You will then learn via an ending cutscene that your character, an unticketed passenger, was the likely suspect and was thus arrested for his murder.
When this happens, the game will automatically rewind time back to give you enough time to discover your friend's dead body for yourself, now that you know that it's there.
So you go into the cabin and find your friend dead on the floor. Oh my gosh! What do you do? You evaluate your options and find out that the game lets you hide the body in the bed.
Failstate 2
After hiding your friend’s body, you leave your cabin, presumably to try and find out who on the Orient Express murdered your friend. Except the other passengers are bothered by the fact that your shirt is covered in bloodstains. Emergency stop. Arrest.
Okay, so maybe we need to do something about the shirt. On your next rewind, you decide to take your friend’s jacket which he left hanging on the coat hook in your room. You toss your bloodied shirt out the window.
In taking his jacket, you decide to adopt his persona. You are going to pretend to be him in order to investigate his murder. Most people on the train won’t know you’re not him, but one person very obviously will.
So you venture out into the train to start talking to people.
Failstate 3
Remember before when the conductor went to make the bed? Well, guess what. There’s now a body in that bed. He finds it. Emergency stop. Arrest.
Okay, you either need to get rid of the body or stop the conductor from making the bed. But wait, in all these ending cutscenes you've seen someone pull the emergency stop handle. There's one in every room. Will the game actually let you pull one of them yourself?
Failstate 4
The game lets you. Emergency stop. Arrest.
Okay, so it turns out you've genuinely got a lot of freedom in this game, and many of the train details aren't simply ornamental.
Back to the body. What do we do with it?
I'll stop the story here, because I don't want to go much further past the game's inciting incident. The game will, as mentioned, automatically rewind you if you hit a failstate, but you can also choose to rewind time at any time yourself, manually.
Spend dinner in the dining car to see what's happening, there, then rewind time and go eavesdrop on the people who were talking at the back of the train instead of eating. Wasted an hour trying to find something interesting but came up empty? Rewind and explore a different part of the train for that hour.
What's especially cool about the game is that the endings you get over time change based on the current events of the train. Some of them are short and perfunctory, but others are a bit more fleshed out. There's one "bad" ending that I actually consider a fully satisfying alternate ending to the story in its own right.
Furthermore, the failstates aren't entirely linear.
Remember when I said you could hide the body in the bed? Well, I didn't mention that you can also throw it out the window.
However, if you do this, police will later board the train after having found the body by the side of the tracks, forcing you to find a way around that issue. If you instead hide the body first and dispose of it later, you can toss it overboard when the train is above a river, meaning the police won't find it and thus won't board the train. This gets you out of having to handle the police check.
Now, if anyone reading this goes "wow, that sounds really cool!" then I encourage you to both lean into that feeling but also temper it.
Yes, it is genuinely cool. It's a knowledge-gated game in the vein of Outer Wilds or Blue Prince, only it came out decades before those. Also the game's story is genuinely compelling. It isn't just a good story for a video game, it's genuinely a good story in its own right. Wikipedia says the script was 800 pages!(!!!!!) While the imagery and gameplay are dated, the voice acting remains top-notch.
That said, temper your expectations as well, because the game can be painfully old-school. It's from 1997, after all! There are times where the game will let you get VERY far ahead of your wrong decisions that you, of course, didn't know were wrong at the time. The try-fail-try-fail-try-fail cadence can already be a little grating for modern sensibilities, but losing HUGE chunks of playtime to an error you didn't know you were making can feel downright unfair.
This is made even worse by the fact that, sometimes, the ending the game shows you isn't directly instructive as to why you failed. This means you can lose a whole chunk of time, only to reattempt something different and fail it again. And then again.
I strongly recommend using a guide whenever you feel your progress is halting, simply because it'll save you a lot of frustration.
Anyway, I think it's an interesting example of the question of "failing during the tutorial," because you can genuinely reach the first ending for the game in seconds (if anyone wants to speedrun badend%, simply pull the first emergency stop handle you see right after boarding). Even if you're not trying to speedrun it though, it's very likely you will fail the game within the first five to ten minutes or so, as you're learning not just how the game works, but enough about the situation and characters to be able to make informed choices.
This sounds like a fascinating game! I can't believe I never heard of it. It very sight removes me of Braid, an action puzzle performer that let you rewind time any time you wanted. It had some really soon puzzle mechanics from that.
Well, I now want to play this game. Seems to be a genuine hidden gem. And there's a remake on Steam. Not sure how the experience compares to the original (some of the reviews are decrying it for removing some sound effects and adding tutorials, but there's always a nostalgia filter with these sorts of games that can give people tunnel vision), but the top review just gives me even more appreciation for the original. It mentions they found an actual Orient Express to use as a reference, which shows a huge level of dedication and effort from the developers.
The Gold Edition is fine, and honestly, the hint system it adds is an improvement to the game. It’s optional, but is a great way to get you unstuck or give you direction if you’re not sure what to do or where to go. I get why purists have complaints about this version, but for anyone that’s picking it up for the first time, I’d recommend it.
And yeah! It’s super cool: the game devs were doing research for the game and found someone who gave them access to an old Orient Express rail car. The devs realized that their game was essentially going to be a digital preservation of it, so they tried to get a lot of it accurate to what it actually was.
If you actually do end up playing it and need any hints or pointers, let me know. I haven’t played it in a couple of years (which means it’s due for a replay!) but I know the characters, story beats, and puzzles pretty well. It’s genuinely my favorite game of all time. For anyone that doesn’t want to play it but is interested in it, I recommend checking out a full playthrough of it on YouTube (note: I haven’t watched this one myself, but the comments make it sound like it’s a good one).
Oh, and I also forgot to mention that the game’s score is INCREDIBLE.
Kind of surprised no one's mentioned Kingdom Come: Deliverance! Dying in the tutorial (well, failing the tutorial) is an achievement.
Also in Far Cry 4, you can easily just place your mother's ashes and the game ends, since that is the point of the game.
You said “any game” and left it pretty open-ended.
In a game of Minesweeper, dying in the tutorial just means that you were the overeager but underperforming rookie who got themselves killed during training before even getting to do the real job.
In Sokoban, the closest to “dying” would be to lock yourself in. That means you're just the warehouse intern who is too incompetent to keep the place organized but too proud to call for help before you starve or run out of oxygen.
Either way, the world moves on without you...
Halo: Master Chief is instructed to look at the lights to calibrate his suit, but the suit goes too hard and snaps his neck.
(This can't happen in the game - as far as I know lol)
The Covenant eventually activates the ring, killing all life in the galaxy. Womp womp womp woooomp...
Tav from Baldur’s Gate 3 just doesn’t matter, one of the Irgun characters will end up picking up the slack. Somebody did a video on if the characters stayed in character how would things play out which is pretty cool.
This scenario is actually canon to Zelda. If Link dies in Ocarina of Time, it results in Link to the Past and the NES games happening, while his success leads to Twilight Princess and Wind Waker.
This is definitely a retcon they made because they weren't sure how to include the older games in the timeline, and it's weird they address this situation for Ocarina of Time but not for any other game, but it's what they went with.
It makes some sense metatextually. OoT was a watershed title in the series, as it made the leap to full 3D and became the template for every mainline title that followed (especially those you listed as subsequent to the OoT PC's successful timeline). If OoT hadn't turned out to be such a massive success and instant classic, then the franchise itself would probably have devolved back purely to the 2-ish-D format exemplified in the first and LttP–and probably would have enjoyed a long life on handhelds with niche titles, but never led to the huge tentpole titles of later console generations.
I never saw the need to unify the series into chronological continuity since the premise is mythological. Myths rarely bother overmuch with reconciling discontinuities, which to me is part of the appeal. But if they had to do it, I get why they chose OoT for the fulcrum of the multiple timeline solution they came up with.
I like the series being actually linked (heh) instead of essentially every single game being a reboot. I like the games having lore.
All the lore is still there, even if Nintendo doesn't make a coffee table book full of retcons in an attempt to hammer the series into a prosaic, rigidly logical chronology. The lore just consists of repeated themes, characters and plot elements instead of explicit chronology and causation.
Trying to make the whole thing fit some timeline detracts just a little from my appreciation, because real myths are full of little contradictions, where two opposite things can be true at the same time and chronologies can differ between retellings. The Dreamtime logic of the same story being told in myriad ways really underscores the whole "legend" bit of the series's name for me.
I've never heard this interpretation of the Zelda timeline, but I really like it. Instead of the inconsistencies detracting from the overall story, they're actual part and parcel of it and help establish series' grand mythos!
Brilliant. Thank you for sharing this.
I think it was Wind Waker that really made me start to think of the series this way. The explanation that the various sentient races unique to the game were descended from the familiar Zora, Kokiri and Gorons always struck me as a bit odd and unnecessary. The reframing of the Hero of Time legend as being a culture hero motif so ancient and influential that little boys are dressed in a green tunic as part of their coming of age ceremonies–even though no one really knows why–suggested a sort of fuzzy, mythic dream-logic that I rather liked.
Wouldn't it be better if WW was just a mythic reframing of the ancient myths to fit a culture's milieu? Perhaps this is a version better suited to a maritime culture of Hylians' needs and priorities. You don't really need to explain why the Zora are bird people then, they've just been reinterpreted to fit what the Sea Hylians see around them and think is important. They don't really need to be the literal Zora in the flesh to fill the same role. A similar thing happened in the myths of Polynesia, where the mythic roles that had been inhabited by snakes for generations immemorial came to be associated with eels in the decidedly snakeless milieu of the islands.
This interpretive choice works for other entries of the series as well, to greater and lesser effect. Twilight Princess, with its inclusion of wolf imagery, seems congruent with an agriculturalist or pastoralist mindset in which wolves pose a particular threat and social inclusion a vital priority; it makes sense then for the culture hero to be cursed with that form, and to resolve the culture's collective anxieties about predation and social ostracism by resolving his story's conflicts.
Likewise, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom seem like they could be the products of a semi-nomadic plains people, perhaps descended from an earlier, more sedentary and urban culture. The wide-open spaces with numerous ruins of the setting and the sort of survival-y gameplay mechanics would fit, and wouldn't require rationalization and retconning. "No, see, this is the fourth time Hyrule has descended to waste and chaos. It's different from the seventh and eighteenth time it happened because this is the time the Hero could climb rock walls, had a glider, and his weapons broke all the time." That sort of prosaic rationalization not only seems unnecessary to me, but also a little cheap and pat.
Nintendo have always kind of flirted with this mythopoetic approach, but they can't really embrace it for practical, business-related reasons. They can't really go all in on mythopoesy because they have to insist on their ownership over the IP. Myths by definition 'belong' to cultures, not individuals or their corporate imitations. The diversity and incongruities and sloppy logic of myths arise out of collective ownership and the adaptation of the shared mythic vocabulary to suit the individual storyteller's social milieu and preferences. Nintendo can't really set the myth they created free to embrace all the illogic, fuzziness and affective power of a real myth, because they would likely miss out on some of the profit.
To some extent, I can't entirely blame them for that, since the success of the Zelda franchise has almost certainly bankrolled other beloved franchises over the decades, but I think it's probably hubris to attempt to hold tight to the reins of a truly effective myth. Myths are powerful memes, and it's in the nature of memes to spread and mutate and adapt, and they'll either do that in spite of a body's attempts to control them or they'll die.
With that in mind, I understand the desire on the part of fans to have the discontinuities and logical contradictions reconciled for them, since those are frequent hallmarks of shoddy storytelling. Nintendo probably gets mountains of feverish fan mail about what they got wrong in this particular installment, like they're fuckin' Santa at the end of Miracle on 34th Street. What the continuity police fans are trying to say is, "I care about this world, and I insist you care about it too." There's nothing wrong with that, but such folks are reactive about things, and tend to lose the forest for the trees.
The things that seem most important to me about the mythos are that there's an eternal, cyclical struggle involving the wise Princess, the courageous Culture Hero, and the power-hungry Goblin, each an avatar of one aspect of a tripartite deific force–or "Triforce," if you will. Less vitally, the Hero generally acquires a magical sword McGuffin and a magic whistle/flute, and tends to wear a green tunic. Take those bones and clothe them in the incidental flesh of whatever story details you want and I think you can't help but write a Zelda story, even if none of the other familiar details of the series appear. That's what a myth is and how one works, and I prefer to accept it on those terms, even if Nintendo and the fandom each for their own reasons would prefer it another way.
I played two games last year where I died during the tutorial.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2
Everything went fine until that one enemy with the whip showed up, and it has some attacks you have to dodge and some you can parry, but only if you're at the correct distance, which I was never able to figure out (plus I kept confusing the dodge/parry prompts and the two corresponding keyboard buttons), and I died so. many. times!
Consequences
I guess the consequence would have been that Chaos would have won the battle instead of the Imperium of Man? I'm not deep into 40k lore, so I'm not even sure who is the worst of the two.If you ever play this game on PC, do yourself a huge favour and connect a gamepad. The difference is night and day. The game is almost unplayable with keyboard and mouse. Maybe you'll even survive the tutorial!
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
The tutorial is a faithful recreation of the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, ending with you running from the famous boulder carrying the golden idol. Except I was not able to outrun the boulder...
Consequences
Nothing really. Turns out it was all a dream, and I'm pretty sure it's not even possible to outrun the boulder.Neither of those two are particularly interesting I guess, but they were the only two from the top of my head.
Half-Life: Gordon Freeman isn't around to cause the resonance cascade. Aliens don't invade.
Gordon falls out of the tram car on his way into Black Mesa.1
OSHA investigates and identifies literally thousands of failures to meet basic safety standards across the facility.
1. Be honest: we ALL tried to make this happen when we played it, right?
Not a game per sé, but inspired by them: the anime Re: Zero - Starting Life in Another World deals with that topic a bit. Someone with a bit of "gamer brain" ends up in a fairly dark fantasy world and finds that every time he's brutally murdered, he basically wakes up from a save point, and commences save-scumming his way through a world he doesn't fully understand...which means people really start to wonder why the guy who clearly isn't from around there knows things he shouldn't. (Plus, it's definitely traumatic for him to have that happen repeatedly.)
There's basically a constant loop of "this is iteration X of what happens when the protagonist fails," from characters being violently killed to apocalyptic scenarios. The dying part just comes immediately after, since it triggers the reset.
This would be a good premise for a sequence of Epic NPC Man episodes. I don't recall them doing it so far (although there were so many episodes I may just not be remembering it).