the guy who says “Dark Souls” to every game question logs on
Dark Souls does this. Every character is immortal and resurrects constantly but they go hollow when they lose hope. The implication is that when you (the player) give up on trying to finish Dark Souls, your character has gone hollow. When characters tell you not to lose hope (or to give up) they’re talking directly to the player.
So uh, adjusts glasses, I’m kinda sorta writing an undergrad thesis (in English Lit) around this idea. Not games that specifically incorporate failure into storylines, but the construct of fail-states and repetition in games and how it corresponds to some elements of trauma theory (yay literature). I’m not going to bore y’all with the details but I’d tend to argue that even fail-states that reset you back to a previous save still contribute to a narrative, just not in a way that we’d traditionally view as textual.
But for the question being asked, I’ll (sort of) add my voice to the people crying Dark Souls from the rooftops by saying that Hollow Knight’s very Souls-ian mechanic of finding and killing your Shade after you die has some deep narrative overtones, and is something other characters will even sometimes reference. It also changes over the course of the game, and seems to reflect your character’s level of acceptance and understanding of their past and creation i.e., when it stops fighting back after you acquire the Void Heart.
It’s been really interesting to see sequels like XCOM 2, Metro: Last Light, or the Banner Saga 2 that make it canon that the choices or efforts you made in the first game ultimately led to some sort of failure and a darker world. It’s a bold choice with the potential to demoralize players who finished the first entry, but there’s something powerful about the game telling the player that you just couldn’t save everyone, but that there is a chance at redemption
It’s heavily overlooked because it’s generally seen (unfairly, imo) as the black sheep of the series, but Deus Ex: Invisible War does largely the same thing with the endings of Deus Ex. But to add to that, all of its endings are basically trade-offs between which dangerous and morally-bankrupt faction you want to end up controlling the world, basically pointing out that all these power structures you’ve been playing with are impossible for you to change no matter what you do.
Hall of Meat in the Skate games?
Not much narrative going on considering you would die from most of the challenges but yeah…
Oh snap I just realised your character in Skate is immortal.
From one academic to another, please do bore us with the details! : ) I agree with you that the reset-after-failure contributes to a narrative, especially once the notion of narrative has been opened up from that of a linear reading/viewing. I think the examples given on this thread help show that “failure” is not quite an accurate term for video games’ “fail-states.” Even a “Game Over” does not mean the game is over, since the reset (however “far back” it goes) remains within the game. Failure perhaps is primarily attributable to a difference between player intention and in-game outcome. Of course, the latter considered on its own is not a failure. The examples of narrative incorporating failure seem to me to incorporate this intention gone awry. A game that resets to a game state (like the precisely saved first-person camera in Half-Life) to some extent rejects that difference. It’s as if one were reading it wrong!
As for a game example, I’m fond of the way the Prince’s frame narrative must have gone in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time with every time-reversal mistake (there’s a funny discussion of this in an old Idle Thumbs podcast). “And then I fell off a cliff—oh no, that’s not right, I jumped slightly earlier and missed the hand hold—I mean I grabbed the edge of the next cliff face…” etc.
There’s a neat moment in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number where on the last floor of the level, if you die, the level ends. (You can beat it without dying, and you get a secret level if you do!) But it’s really cool, in a game that normalizes death and retrying to a point of trance, to be suddenly broken out of it as you see your body dragged away off-screen.
Okay, so I’m more or less taking the idea of traumatic repetition (as identified in Freud’s work and then developed through a lot of modern trauma theory, particularly work done by Cathy Caruth and some others) and applying that to the structural repetition present in game narratives in the form of fail-states (specifically ones that involve the concept of a character dying) and continues. Not in that games model traumatic repetition for the player—actually that they do kind of the opposite. I’m using an article on a similar topic from 2015 to establish different modes of empathy between player and character and then bringing in the Freud/Caruth/trauma stuff to establish the idea that, mechanically, games create a trauma for the character at a moment when the player is separated from them, and then employ repetition when the player is again embodying the character, creating a kind of loop that eventually resolves an otherwise-endless cycle of traumatic repetition. I’m then complicating this with a bunch of other things—looking at control schemes, complicity, choice, agency, temporality, etc, each viewed through a reading of a certain game (some notable ones being Hyper Light Drifter, That Dragon Cancer, Shadow of the Colossus, Undertale, Resident Evil 7 VR, Majora’s Mask, and What Remains of Edith Finch).
Hopefully all that doesn’t sound too ridiculous. 
Legacy of Kain did that really well - the first game had a good ending and a bad ending, and then an entire series spun out of the canonical bad ending.
Lots of people keep mentioning Dark Souls and the other Souls games and I understand it to a point. But I’d say those games aren’t considering failure an option because of how they set you back and force you to repeat an area, a boss, etc. to move the story forward. Dark Souls and Diable aren’t that different in this regard. Whereas say with Moon Hunters if you fail to complete a level, then that’s it. You move on with the story.
So with that in mind, what games move the story on without repeating that section? And I recognize that FarCry 2 sits in between these two ideas because you can be revived by a compatriot only to see them die and then die yourself and this be set back.
Of the ones mentioned in this thread, I’d say Pyre, Wing Commander, XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, Reigns and Reigns: Her Majesty, and Darkest Dungeon fit that specific bill - defeat is incorporated into the ongoing narrative, which keeps going despite the loss.
The first thing that comes to mind is Super Rude Bear Resurrection. It’s a Super Meat Boy style splatformer where the twist is every time you die, you leave behind a corpse that can be used to avoid obstacles on future runs. If you die in a field of spikes, the next time around, you use your corpse as a platform to make it past. I don’t believe you’re ever required to die to progress, as long as you are good enough. I only ever played it at PAX, so I don’t know if the mechanic eventually grows stale, but I was intrigued.
That’s awesome! Thanks for sharing. I find the flexibility of psychoanalytic concepts (especially those concerning repetition and error such as trauma and the drives) really fascinating. Your application of the structure of trauma to the player-avatar/character schism sounds great. Good luck with it!
There are some tabletop games that might fit into this as well as into the broader discussion of games that incorporate failure: Pandemic: Legacy and the living card game variant of Arkham Horror. I’ve only just begun to play the latter, but it seems like it may be akin to these squad focused permadeath games. Pandemic Legacy provides a quirk system (not unlike the afflictions and stresses in Darkest Dungeon) in which characters become scarred for having been in a city during an outbreak. And the players do not need to meet the win condition for each game: time, and the world’s developing catastrophe, go on. Thus the game’s mechanics institute a gradation of “failure” (still a word I am not entirely comfortable using here, since part of the fun is this so-called failure).
Yeah, Waypoint actually streamed it when it was released. I vaguely recall from the stream that dying doesn’t necessarily make things easier, if you drop a corpse in the wrong spot. But it also has a mechanic to nuke all your corpses if things get bad enough, which means that failure is literally an option, and not a persistent thing you have to constantly work around.
There’s another platformer called Life Goes On: Done To Death that uses a similar mechanic – but that game seems to require dying to progress, whereas it’s supposedly possible to beat Rude Bear without dying.
I feel like a lot of games have systems that are designed to respond to failure, but few have narratives that respond to failure. and lots of games that do have narratives that adjust to failure do so only as a narrative justification of a system. some roguelikes, like Darkest Dungeon and Into the Breach (only basing the latter off what I’ve heard, so could be wrong), have a narrative explanation for why you start the story over after failing, so that the narrative plausibly proceeds even after you start over. I’m not trying to slight these games by saying they employ a narrative tool that exists only to justify their system, they’re still clever, but I just don’t think they’re what OP is describing. same goes for Dark Souls: not a roguelike, but it still uses a narrative tool to accommodate a system – in this case, the system of respawns and death punishments.
I think something like Until Dawn would maybe work under this description. the narrative makes a lot of adjustments to the player’s actions. while a lot of these are a result of choices like Go With Him or Stay Here, lots are also a result of QTEs and other challenges the game throws at you. If you pass, the narrative goes one way, and if you fail it goes another. Enough of these forks come up and you can have very different narrative experiences.
I’m glad you brought up Until Dawn because it does interesting things with this. I had a character die as a result of indirect choices that I made and didn’t even realize until the game ended and I was reading about it online that it was even possible for that character to survive. Prey actually does some of this too, I think, by having a hidden morality tracker that affects things in the game. I really like the idea of a game tracking those sorts of things without ever telling you and then having that affect your ending, etc as they talked about with Metro on the podcast. Really makes me want to go try that game.
I’m not sure if this is exactly what you’re looking for but Metal Gear Solid 3 explores failure in a few different ways. The first part of the game is a mission which Snake is set up to fail. Without getting too bogged down into insane Metal Gear details, one of the other characters, Snake’s mentor appears to betray him and prevents him from completing the assigned mission. Narratively, the remaining 2/3-3/4 of the game is him going back to clean up his mess. He failed your first try so now it’s up to him to solve the problems he helped create.
There are some other little touches too. There’s a boss Snake can only defeat by dying. There’s an interrogation scene that mirrors similar scenes in earlier games, except in the earlier ones you can resist and “defeat” your captor, but in this game you don’t have that option. And by the end of the game you discover that your earlier failure was not even real. Snake’s mentor’s apparent betrayal is revealed to be staged, part of a complicated plot to avoid a war. They both still care about each other, but Snake is forced to kill her anyway because “that’s what the world needs.” The game very much presents this as Snake losing, falling victim to outside forces he cannot control and cannot oppose. Also, the Snake you are playing as is a person who goes on to be the main antagonist in several games that come later chronologically and several of his team members reveal themselves to be villains in later games.
the hidden morality tracker idea made me think of Dishonored. I never got too far into it (it’s on my list), but I understand that the world changes based on your proclivity for murder. does it change the narrative at all, too? although I guess that wouldn’t really be a failure-responsive narrative, as I don’t imagine it frames murder as a clear “failure” the way that, say, losing a game in Pyre is a clear failure. you could define it as a failure yourself if you were going for peaceful stealth and, say, had to resort to murder when that plan fell through, but it seems like a player-defined failure and not a game-defined failure. don’t know if that’s a significant distinction to make.
I get what you’re saying @Fanshawe about Metal Gear Solid 3 but I don’t think that counts in the same way. Failure isn’t an option all the time. It’s a mechanic used in the occasional encounter/boss fight/story-beat. Where as the other games always account for incomplete or failed missions. I guess Dead Rising does this, especially in the original game when you had the in-game clock to consider and certain missions were only available during particular points.
