Drought Level of Doom

I don't have the ammo to do this all night. I've already used more than I wanted to. That is the one upside to shooting cops: They have bullets on them. You guys are a dead end in the bullet economy. I'm not running a charity here.

— Gordon Freeman on Ravenholm zombies, Freeman's Mind 2

You know that level. A Marathon Death Course that serves to wear down your limited stockpiles of ammo and healing potions in a battle of attrition. It often does this by sending you through a gauntlet stacked with Elite Mooks that require costly magic spells to take them down, or by the much cheaper method of wearing down the player's Hit Points with Damaging Terrain. You'll be nearly dry on supplies before the next checkpoint.

If the player can't go back, it can render the game Unwinnable or nearly so, and can cause massive Unstable Equilibrium depending on how it's implemented.

Contrast Bonus Stage, Monty Haul.

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Examples:

Action Game

• Arkanoid: Round 11 in the original game, as well as similar levels that only have silver bricks that never release powerups. The ball will also speed up during these levels, which try to deplete your set of lives.

Action Adventure

• This is the main reason that the gameplay in the easier difficulties of An Untitled Story is interesting. Slip up, you get hit, no big deal. Can you avoid being hit ten times before the next checkpoint, which is eight screens away? If not, you're going to need to go hunt down some extra hit points before trying again. Much of the game would serve no purpose if health refills weren't mindbogglingly rare (only appearing after defeating a boss), or if save points (which also refill your health) were more common.
• Malek's Bastion in Blood Omen is one of these. The enemies there are, like Malek himself, suits of Animated Armor with the spirits of warriors fused to them, and their blood did not restore Kain's life (like other spirits, they had blue blood, which restores magic instead). The bastion is also situated atop a snowy mountain, and the snow will damage Kain unless you have visited the blood fountain that removes this weakness.
  Kain: My eyes yearned from lack of contrast, my mouth ached for want of blood. In this cold wasteland, food was scarce, and my hunger grew.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link has many caves and areas you must travel through in order to get to various dungeons and temples. The game kills you in such efficient ways that you're likely to run out of both health and magic by the temple and dungeon in question, let alone facing the boss.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker features the Savage Labyrinth, a dungeon with 51 floors where enemies don't drop any items, so you're stuck with whatever was in your inventory at the time. Many an unwary player had to quit the dungeon early not realizing this was the case.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has the similar Cave of Ordeals. You do encounter Chus that drop drinkable Chu Jelly, but it's primarily Purple Chu Jelly that has a random effect (it can heal you or take away hearts). The HD remake also adds the Cave of Shadows, which has the same idea but you are stuck as Wolf Link, which means no healing at all.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has the Trial of the Sword introduced with the Master Trials DLC. It has 45 rooms full of enemies with some resting points in between. You are deprived of all your items except the Sheikah Slate and Paraglider, meaning you have to snatch weapons and food from enemies in order to stand a chance. Completing it puts the Master Sword permanently in its powered-up state.
• Metroid Fusion has two instances of this:
  • First is the Timed Mission to stop the boiler in Sector 3 from exploding. Save points are disabled during this sequence, so you have to get in, fight a minor boss, and get out, all in one sitting.
  • Secondly is when the station's main power reactor goes down, shutting down all save points and Recharge Rooms (apart from Samus' ship) until you turn on the auxillary generator... which requires navigating through a hallway of dangerous enemies and fighting That One Boss. Die at any time during this sequence and you have to do it all again. Worse, there are still a couple of Demonic Spiders between the boss room and the first save point afterwards...

Beat 'em Up

• The Wonderful 101 has the first half of Operation 007-A, wherein there is a near-total dearth of civilians to recruit, forcing you to use a small number of Wonderful Ones. As a result, your Unite Morph capabilities are significantly weakened until you reach the latter half of the stage, where you receive much-needed reinforcements.
• Each game of the Streets of Rage series traditionally has a section - usually during the last level - where the players are trapped in an elevator with a small selection of power ups and are forced to fight waves upon waves of increasingly tougher mooks, sometimes with mini-bosses thrown in. The second game also makes the elevator ride a Boss Rush, featuring tougher analogs of previous stages' bosses.

Eastern RPG

• Black Sigil has a sky-high Random Encounters rate and Mooks that hit very, very hard. The entire game is basically this trope. Triggering a dungeon run without restocking on items can easily render the game Unwinnable. Fortunately, there are multiple save slots.
• The original Dark Cloud for the PS2 had a notoriously bad reputation for this. Whether your item broke, you ran out of repair power, had no antidotes (and thus had to wait in a healing spring until you were brave enough to leave) or water, the game did its best to narrow down your perishable items to slim to none.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Gulg Volcano and its unavoidable damaging floors. Tip: ignore the One True Sequence and tackle this dungeon last.
    • Chaos Temple at the end also serves as this, with lots of floors, mazes, tough enemies, and surprise reappearances of the four fiends. If you can make it to Chaos with any resources left, you're lucky.
    • The remakes do this for the bonus dungeons. Thirty floors? Forty floors? Deal with it! It's even more egregious in the penultimate bonus dungeon as both of the two bosses you can choose to fight at the end are That One Boss.
  • Final Fantasy III. The endgame goes like this: Last inn and item shop, dungeon, last save point, semi-optional dungeon, long difficult dungeon, Point of No Return, short difficult dungeon, Final Boss. And that save point isn't really a help, since it means that you'll have to go through the first dungeon if you need to warp out.
  • Final Fantasy IV:
    • After returning from the Moon, you are forced to go straight into the next dungeon, which is full of very strong enemies, culminating in TWO Boss Battles in a row (Although you do get to save and heal in between by backtracking to the save point), all without being able to re-stock on your items!
    • The DS remake has a merchant Hummingway (or counterpart) at the single Save Point in the Giant of Babil. They compensate for this by making the two boss battles harder - unlike the SNES, PSX, and GBA versions, the Archfiends use all their abilities from the first encounters in the rematch, and the CPU battle is murder.
  • Final Fantasy XII can be like this when trekking between key locations. The long road can wear you down with nary a save crystal or a shop in sight as you waste MP and items on monsters that keep swarming you unless you hold the Flee button so they can't catch up to the running party. The game even suggests to the player to create another save file at various save points at the start of a dungeon because of this.
  • Final Fantasy VII Remake has this as the defining feature for "Hard Mode" unlocked as part of the New Game Plus: enemies are tougher (more HP and more damage dealt), you can't use items at all, and rest points (in the form of benches that restore HP and MP in Normal mode) only restore HP. This makes every chapter of the game something close to the trope because you can't regain MP at all except at predetermined plot points (usually chapter changes or one or two specific side-quests); careful resource management and equipping your party to minimize the need to for MP (like with Chakra and Pray to heal in combat without using MP, or having the right Elemental combo to enhance your attacks/defense against the enemies you'll be facing) becomes a big part of every fight and each level as you have to make sure you can reach the boss fights with enough MP to keep healing (and revive KO'd characters with magic) and to take advantage of whatever element or mechanic is needed for the fight.
• Golden Sun:
  • Downplayed with the Lamakan desert, which is so hot there's a heat gauge that inexorably rises as you walk on sand (with the characters mentioning how hot it is at regular intervals) that deals damage to the whole party when it hits maximum and the only way to reset it is to jump into the hidden oases. Except that the oases are marked by rock circles, which sometimes contain an Antlion Monster or chests or a Djinni instead. Fortunately, there's nothing preventing you from using your own healing spells, as psynergy regenerates as you walk, and there are some non-sandy areas that don't raise the gauge, leaving only Random Encounters to deal with.
  • Happens In-Universe in the Suhalla desert, when the soldiers chasing Sheba's kidnappers need to bring water with them to deal with the tornado lizards, and quickly run out. The party, on the other hand, can summon water at any time (although there is a giant one that chases the party at the very end of the level).
• Some portions of Paper Mario can delve into this because of the importance of certain items and the limited carrying capacity, particularly in longer dungeons. Averted, however, by the game's "Pit of 100 Trials." One of the games looks like it's going to be a chore. No resurfacing to restock on items for 100 levels. Sounds hard... until you start and realize enemy drops practically fall out of trees and you can subsist on what they drop, saving all your items for the boss at the end. In the pit, you can recharge yourself to 100% any time you have a shell enemy whom can be incapacitated by flipping them over. Flip them over, appeal for more star power. Repeat. Save up enough power to use a healing ability. Repeat. Goombella is best for this.
• The majority of the longer routes in Pokémon games are like this, owing to your Mon having a limited amount of Power Points for all four of its moves, and items used to replenish PP can't be bought in stores (though, as of generation 3, PP-restoring Leppa Berries can be grown). The various incarnations of Victory Road are often the worst offenders, due to having lots of tough trainer battles and being really, really long. They also generally require multiple HM moves to progress through them, which further limits your party since you'll most likely need to haul along an HM Slave (who is generally useless in battle at these higher levels) to do the dirty work. Taking on the Elite Four also counts this, as you will most likely blow all of your money buying supplies and heals that will most likely all be gone by the time you get to the Champion. Pokémon Colosseum has one in the shadow lab... it isn't truly long, but unlike many levels, there is no heal machine unless you backtrack to the beginning. Also you can't save anywhere like the handhelds.

Edutainment Game

• The mid-late part of the second and third The Amazon Trail games feature this with Pantanal-style Swamps instead of Rainforests; there are NO fruits or veggies to harvest from these areas. Similarly, fishing around this time gets much more difficult, as the fishing areas get shallow and murky, tending to cause your harpoon to hit bottom over and over again, possibly destroying it, while the fish get much much harder to catch. It's like the game WANTS you to run out of food (and right when you need to TRADE FOOD to various people for the sake of Tokens Of Plot Advancement, too). Same for the desert areas in The Oregon Trail II, where there is little to no water, plants, or hunting opportunities. Venturing here with insufficient water supply will likely result in a Total Party Kill via dehydration.

First-Person Shooter

• BioShock:
  • In BioShock's Fort Frolic, ammo, medkits, and cash are significantly scarcer than previous levels, and the Hacking Minigame difficulty for vending machines is much higher. And this level introduces Plastered Spider Splicers.
  • BioShock Infinite features Comstock House near the end, which is filled with asylum patients that drop nothing upon death and no vending machines. This is to encourage the player to be as stealthy as possible and avoid being spotted, because while you can just ignore the Boys of Silence and blast your way through, your ammo supply will likely be exhausted well before you can replenish it. Luckily, you're more or less in the clear once you reach the warden's offices (which is well-stocked with China Broom shotguns), and thorough searching can turn up a few weapons hidden in the asylum section.
• Level 23 of Descent 2, "Iwihml" (an acronym for "I Wish I Had More Lights") fits its title due to having no energy centers and very few energy pickups. However, experienced players will find enough Vulcan ammo and missiles to get through it without much trouble.
• Doom:
  • Ultimate Doom has two examples:
    • E4M1, "Hell Beneath", not only has extremely limited ammo and health⁺ on Ultra-Violence, you get 11 health bonuses and nothing more! pickups and forces you to fight in very tight quarters, but eventually teleports in a Baron of Hell for you to fight (and triggering one of the secrets unleashes two more), making it the hardest level in the original game.
    • E4M6, "Against Thee Wickedly", features no armor pickups whatsoever. You're forced to trudge into lava constantly, and the level caps off with a fight against a Cyberdemon. The most you get is an invulnerability, which only lasts 30 seconds.
  • In the Jaguar, Playstation, and Saturn ports of the first game, they have a new map called "Hell Keep" to replace the PC's original Hell Keep, and it's infamous for having very little ammo, where on Pistol start you can't kill everything on UV difficulty without using your fists and/or exploiting infighting. The map also has little health with only three Stimpacks and two Medikits, the latter of which don't become available until near the end of the map, and unlike the aformentioned Hell Beneath, it doesn't even have the courtesy to give you any armor. Since Doom 1 is played as a single long episode in those ports instead of the multi-episode structure it originally had, players do not need to Pistol start it and so can bring their ammo and armor from the previous map to alleviate the issue, but those that choose to Pistol start it found surprising difficulty when these ports were known for being usually easier, especially since the original Hell Keep was such an easy map.
  • Doom II: Level 9, "The Pit", is famous for not having quite enough ammo to destroy all the monsters, even on a full playthrough. Those wanting 100% completion usually have to resort to using the fists or chainsaw for good chunks of the level.
  • Final Doom:
    • Map 08 of The Plutonia Experiment, "Realm", has no armor pickups on Ultra-Violence and above.
    • The penultimate map of TNT: Evilution, "River Styx", offers plenty of cell ammo pickups, but no plasma rifle or BFG. On a pistol start, ammunition for usable weapons is scarce and needs to be cautiously rationed.
• Half-Life 2:
  • Ravenholm is a zombie-infested ruin without much ammo. Gordon is, however, provided a wide range of sawblades, explosives and environmental traps to use against the zombies with the aid of the newly-acquired Gravity Gun instead, and indeed the ruined city becomes a playground for this style of gameplay, at least until you have to escort Father Grigori.
  • Both Episodes One and Two started with a Bag of Spilling and a half-dozen drought levels. Ep1 made up for this by handing Gordon the supercharged gravity gun that players didn't get enough of in Half-Life 2's ending. Ep2 included Alyx armed with Bottomless Magazines to escort Gordon.
• Some levels of Halo: Reach follow this trope, especially on Legendary difficulty,. For example, in "Exodus", you start out with only a pistol against Suicide Grunts, Skirmishers and Brutes, and ammo for it and the DMR is extremely sparse. Then the game starts throwing armored Brute Chieftains into the squads, coupled with Hold the Line sequences. Suitable Covenant weapons such as the Needle Rifle are also lacking. The worst is probably the part of "The Pillar of Autumn" where you have to Hold the Line for about 15 minutes against multiple waves of Brute Captains and Chieftains, with almost no ammunition for your good weapons (unless you trigger an Easter Egg or bring better weapons from earlier parts of the level). Luckily, Halo has a long and proud tradition of players taking weapons from their slain enemies.
• Catafalque, the first level of Episode 4 of Heretic, is very stingy with its health, weapon and ammo pickups for most of the level (you don't get any weapons beyond the crossbow for at least 3/4 of it), forces you to fight in tight spaces (except for a large wide-open area in one part) and forces you to contend with boss-level monsters on top of that, including at least one Maulotaur and four Iron Liches.
• Left 4 Dead and its sequel are coded, especially on higher difficulties, to deprive players of ammunition replenishment or medkits - instead, the game will spawn pain pills or adrenaline shots (only the former restores health, but temporarily, and the latter is only good for doing anything faster), and, if you're lucky, a primary weapon to replace your empty one, forcing you to shift playstyles. On normal and below, the game will usually allow the player to restock on health and ammo on the final level of any scenario, but higher levels will keep this restriction all the way through. Have fun!
• Marathon:
  • Acme Station from Infinity. The main reason why its That One Level. Vacuum, hordes of enemies, narrow corridors, scarce ammo, and only two refills for your Oxygen Meter.
  • The original has G4 Sunbathing (Hunters and Troopers, respawning Compilers, and since it's in vacuum, you can only use you Pistols and Fusion Pistol), Neither High Nor Low (only one save point at the beginning, little ammo, lots of traps, enemies are mostly Hunters), and the Pfhor ship levels (no ammo pickups to speak of, and Pfhoraphobia has no save points or recharges either).
• In Medal of Honor: Allied Assault:
  • Medkits are much scarcer on the Hard difficulty setting, which can make certain sections unwinnable if you blunder away your health beforehand. It's made worse by enemy attacks on Hard dealing multiple times the normal damage.
  • The Breakthrough expansion, on top of having scarce medkits, also has the new, additional problem of much harder to come by ammunition, and also applying even on Normal difficulty.
• In Return to Castle Wolfenstein, health and armor are scarcer than in most other FPS games, but the final level (not counting the endboss area) really takes the cake; not only is health and armor very scarce, but the place is packed with Elite Mooks as well as zombies. There aren't any armor pickups at all in the second half of the level as well as in the final boss area, so most likely you'll end up fighting him with no armor whatsoever (fortunately, he's not terrible hard to beat, though you not having armor does make him a bit more challenging).
• Downplayed in the Zombie Apocalypse levels in TimeSplitters Future Perfect, Mansion of Madness and What Lies Below. Normally, the game provides a lot of ammo for weapon pickups (with the pistols and SMGs practically filling up your ammo reserves with a single pickup). While the Shotguns dropped by some of the zombies (yes, they can shoot you too) still provide plenty of ammo apiece, the ammo provisions for the other weapons are scarce and should be used sparingly.
• Pathways into Darkness is this way initially, and it's generally recommended to only use the knife in the first two or three levels until you can build up a reasonable stockpile of ammunition.

Hack and Slash

• Dark Souls verges on this at times.
  • Although you can carry multiple uses of the Estus Flask, multiple healing items and attune a lot of healing spells if you build your character right, long stretches between bonfires filled with hordes of Demonic Spiders can make you burn through them terrifyingly fast. Add in weapon degradation, limited spell castings and the price of ammunition, etc. Replenishing bonfires are thankfully abundant throughout the game worlds with very few "long" stretches between them, but in the event that there are such stretches...
  • The first game has the Undead Parish (especially if you haven't figured out how to avoid the Hellkite Drake and light the bonfire beyond) due to the distance, enemy variety, and Early Game Hell; and the Duke's Archives.
  • In the second game, two areas stand out for having notoriously hard stretches without a bonfire. The first is No-Man's Wharf, accessible early in the game and possessing only one bonfire at the very start; unless the player can somehow make it to the second half of the level and open up the two shortcuts to the boss area, they'll be forced to make a dangerous trek up and around the enemy-infested houses surrounding the pier every single time. The second is the Gutter, a pitch-black, mazelike underground shanty town filled with deceptively lethal hollows, zombie dogs and poison-spitting statue traps, on top of having bottomless pits around every single corner and only two bonfires—one of which is hidden around a corner near the very end of the level and easy to miss.

MMORPG

• Final Fantasy XI has many events like Limbus and Dynamis with armies of Mooks and a time limit, with Assault and Einherjar being the most hectic of the events. Campaign Battles can possibly be like this, depending on the amount and timing of enemy waves.

Platformer

• Adventure Island and Wonder Boy have a variation of the trope. During parts of mountain levels, there are very few bits of food to pick up so player is in a hurry since picking up food before energy runs out is a key for survival. In the later levels, chances to regain your weapon are few and far between, so dying in certain areas can render the game Unwinnable.
• In Impossamole's Slippy-Slidey Ice World, you are bound to take a lot of unavoidable damage from Goddamned Bats and Malevolent Architecture, and healing items and powerups are very scarce here.
• From Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • The final stages of Sonic the Hedgehog and its sequel give you no rings, forcing you to go through one boss in the former and two in the latter with no protection whatsoever. The 8-bit version of the first game also has Sonic trek through the whole last level without any rings, while the 8-bit sequel has no rings for any of the boss levels.
  • Sonic 3 & Knuckles's final zone, Death Egg Zone, does the same thing with the three-form Final Boss in Act 2: a checkpoint activates and there are no rings during this section, so if you die during the fight, you will have to fight all three forms again with no rings.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • World 5-1, the first of two grassland levels in the game that doesn't have a single power-up. It does have a star, however, so it isn't too difficult to beat it.
  • World 8-1 follows a similar formula with a star and no power-ups, but it is the longest level in the game with only 300 on the timer, and has a nasty jump near the end.
• In Super Mario Bros. 3 World 6 and 7, Mushroom Houses are slim in comparison to earlier areas. If you use all your items in these worlds without restocking (via game over and farming), then you'll be in for a rude awakening for World 8, which has some of the hardest stages in the game and no Mushroom Houses at all. You can save a P-Wing to use for those levels. That is, unless you deem them Too Awesome to Use or just run out of the rare things.
• In Level 4 of Valis: Legend of a Fantasm Soldier for the PC Engine CD, there are almost no weapon pickups and thus little to no chance to regain your power if you die or continue, and the boss will give you hell if you aren't powered up.
• Super Contra: The final stage of the arcade version has just two or three gun pickups at most and therefore no chance to recover after getting killed, so if you aren't packing an upgraded weapon from the previous stage, you're more or less screwed.

Puzzle

• This shows up in several casual games of the block-breaking or match-three type. If you don't have lots of power-ups to use, you almost can't get through the level.
  • Zodiac Tower has several near the top;
  • Jewel Quest has a couple in which having the wrong amulets in effect can make it nearly impossible;
  • Monarch, The Butterfly King has several boards that require making matches to generate potions in the right area; and
  • If you don't have the correct two power-ups fully charged at the end of level 63 of 4 Elements, you can't get through level 64 at all.
• "Day Dream" in Lumines Supernova, with a time-line so painfully slow you're lucky if you can clear any blocks.
• The Puzzle & Dragons series has some dungeons that do not spawn any Heart Orbs, meaning that any damage taken cannot be recovered unless you have a monster that can create Heart Orbs or directly recover your HP. However, enemies in such dungeons tend to do less damage as compensation.

Racing Game

• A multiplayer-oriented example: In Mario Kart 8, Bone-Dry Dunes is unusually sparse in Coins compared to other courses. As each Coin provides a slight boost in speed for as long as you have it, fights over Coins in Bone-Dry Dunes can get very rough, especially the ones dropped from the Toads on board the airships near the beginning.
• The first race against Wizpig in Diddy Kong Racing is devoid of any balloons, limiting the player to masterful use of the boosters for a chance at beating him.
• Virtua Racing's Medium course is the only one of the three to lack a pit lane. This is inconsequential on the standard 4- and 5-lap settings, but on the 20-lap Grand Prix setting, where tire wear exists, you'll find your handling deteriorate with no way to patch it back up with a pit stop. The CPU opponents, on the other hand, glide through every lap with invincible tires.

Rhythm Game

• DanceDanceRevolution games beginning with DDRMAX -DanceDanceRevolution 6thMIX- have Extra Stages where your life meter starts out full, but cannot be replenished. Should you meet certain requirements, you can gain access to a One More Extra Stage / Encore Extra Stage where you're reduced to a One-Hit-Point Wonder.

Shoot 'em Up

• Eschatos is usually generous with throwing 1-Up items at you. Stage 3 (Areas 12-15), however, has no 1-ups.
• The recurring "void" levels of Sinistar. The only way to get a weapon that can damage the boss is with Sinibombs, which are mined from asteroids. Roughly 25 percent of levels in the game feature... nothing. Few enemies, and even fewer asteroids, causing the player to rush and seek out the precious few that exist before Sinistar lives.
• In Silpheed: Super Dogfighter, all orbital levels have no power-ups.
• In BLUE REVOLVER, stages 3 and 5 do not have any ground or naval enemies, and thus you're deprived of one major source of special weapon ammo. You'll have to rely on the very occasional "E" capsule ships to refill your special weapon, use Smart Bombs on bullets (there's only one bomb item on this stage, by the way) or use up a life to reset your special energy.

Simulation Game

• Trauma Center:
  • New Blood Episode 5-4, "No Escape". Previously in the story, Markus and Valerie were kidnapped by a crime syndicate. In this mission, they've run out of stabilizer, and their captor orders them to decide whether to operate on a traitor the syndicate had shot a moment ago or to let him die. Being surgeons, they choose the former. You have to perform the operation with no way to restore the patient's vitals... and worse, they're almost out of antibiotic gel, which means you may be forced to suture minor wounds if that runs out, which damages the patient. It is entirely possible to finish the operation without running out of gel and having to resort to medical shortcuts, but you have to be conservative with the gel.
  • A similar scenario occurs in Under the Knife 2, this time with Derek needing to operate on an emergency case, and the limited supplies being attributed to the sudden reduction in manpower at that point in the plot.

Strategy RPG

• In the Fire Emblem series:
  • Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade:
    • The Dread Isle, Imprisoner of Magic, A Glimpse in Time ^note if you're playing Hector's story and figured out the obscure way to unlock it, and Dragon's Gate will punish you if you forgot to stock on the pirate ship. You will find yourself running low on weapons and vulneraries rather quickly.
    • Torches stop appearing after Kinship's Bond ^note and even then, the ones in that chapter are only in a secret shop, even though there's still as many as three fog chapters left (depending on the story and route taken), the last of which is Battle Before Dawn. That secret shop in Kinship's Bond is also the only place in the entire game where you can buy torches at a vendor, making it impossible to stock up on them unless you snagged the member card. Through no fault of their own, an inexperienced player can end up blind as a bat in what's already the most infamously hard chapter in the game.
  • In Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, a literal Drought Level is found in Jehanna, where movement across the sands is extremely limited, especially for mounted units who can normally move halfway across the screen. Getting to the armory in the far corner is... discouraging. Luckily, flying units are unaffected. Unluckily, there are only three available when you can first access the map—two of whom are Fragile Speedsters. Mages are also unhindered by the sands, stating their cloth robes makes it very easy to travel in.
• Phantom Brave does this in later stages by limiting the number of usable objects on the stage. Strategy comes into play as you have to face powerful enemies with a smaller squad at your disposal. If you don't make use of good strategy and didn't grind Marona, you're in trouble.

Survival Horror

• Infinity Mode in Dead Rising serves as a version of this. There's plenty of food at the beginning but it doesn't respawn, so you must balance your inventory carefully, and fight dangerous psychopaths and survivors to get more. Then, on day 7, all psychopaths and survivors disappear and you are left with the quickly dwindling food supplies.
• The final area of Dementium II is a very long series of fights that is also entirely devoid of health or ammo pickups. Additionally, the final boss can only be damaged by ranged attacks and will probably require at least 1 or 2 heals mid-fight, so you'll need to get through the final area while making sure to save at least a few dozen bullets and 1 or 2 healing items for the final fight. Fortunately, the game gives you a chainsaw-like weapon at the end which doesn't use ammo, and you can just run past about 75% of the encounters in the final area.
• The later Armacham levels in First Encounter Assault Recon suffer from this, especially the last one, where most of the enemies are Attack Drones that are armed with highly damaging lasers, are hard to hit, take a load of ammo to kill, and don't give any ammo back.
• Nearly every stage in Resident Evil 4 ran on this, but if you are low on supplies by the Island, lord help you. Doubly so on Professional difficulty. This also goes for other Resident Evil games, as well as Survival Horror in general, especially Code Veronica, where there is simply not enough ammo to kill everything. Fortunately, the knife is actually useful. Resident Evil 0 in Hard mode is noteworthy as well, where it is best to run from a fight if possible.
• The Body of the Many in System Shock 2 may not actually be this to a well-prepared player, but it sure believes that it is, as at one point it taunts you about your dwindling resources.
• The last route to the end boss in Fatal Frame only has one save point before throwing you into a gauntlet of enemies especially when resources in the game were hard enough to come by already.

Third-Person Shooter

• The first half of Gears of War 3 is an example, mainly if playing with 4 players. Especially during the segment where you control Cole's team. Weapons are scarce, half the lambent don't use guns, everyone will be using the same ammo, and most enemies are rather durable. You will find yourself low on ammo a fair amount of the time. Once you start running into more standard enemies from the rest of the series, guns and ammo become much more common.
• In Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion, several tests prevent you from refilling your ink tank by swimming into ink of your color as usual. There may be items you can collect to recharge your ink tank, but either way, if your ink runs out, the test will end in instant failure.

Western RPG

• The Divide from Fallout: New Vegas: Lonesome Road. Enemies include Marked Men, Deathclaws, and Tunnelers, all of which scale their level with the player; ammo, food, and water supplies are few and far between; and the only shop is the Commissary, whose stock is also rather limited. Expect to return to the main Wasteland a few times to restock. The other DLC's are potentially worse, as you are locked in until you complete the main quest. Honest Hearts requires you to decrease your inventory weight to at maximum 100 pounds before entering^note though it's probably the least harsh of the three, as there are a few merchants to buy more stuff from in Zion - including the DLC's new and incredibly useful .45 Auto weapons, Dead Money strips you of all your Wasteland equipment^note you can still get supplies here, too, but it requires hunting down tickets and trading them in for supplies; worse is that the primary enemies are Ghost People who will get back up after a spell if you don't remove a limb, and Old World Blues combines scarce supplies with Respawning Enemies^note and there's no merchants here. Good luck..

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