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It's possible to get out of this situation alive. Good luck figuring it out on the first try.
"A Gygaxian dungeon is like the world's most fucked up game show. Behind door number one: INSTANT DEATH! Behind door number 2: A magic crown! Behind door number 3: ten pounds of sugar being guarded by six giant KILLER BEES!"
"Q: How do I get past the second screen? After the spike walls and all... A: Look around once you get a game over."
A popular variety of Fake Difficulty, Trial And Error Gameplay is what happens when a game developer cannot think of a better method to punish a player's incorrect action than to kill his character off, end the mission in failure, or otherwise penalize him in some way. And, in the most egregious manner possible, this occurs whether or not it was readily apparent that it was a bad move at all. In the end, the only thing the player can do about it is reload the area and/or savepoint, play through that section again, and remember not to do that next time. In essence, Trial And Error Gameplay is whenever it is necessary for the player to fail before realizing what is necessary to succeed.
This is not limited to Nintendo Hard games. It does not necessarily result from Everything Trying To Kill You. Even ordinary games can abuse the non-permanence of death. It can feel much worse in games that have set pieces, voice acting, or (heaven forbid) unskippable cutscenes that do\say\show the exact same thing every time like a skipping record playing a song you can't get out of your head.
Take heart. As annoying as this trope can be, it's far better than the game becoming Unwinnable.
Ron Gilbert of LucasArts fame rants about this trend here . LucasArts, it should be noted, became so opposed toward this trope in their adventure games that they often erred on the side of deathlessness. Others who've decried the trend include this IGN blogger and Shamus Young (of DM Of The Rings fame).
Also known as Curse You Sierra, a lament directed toward the company most prone to putting such puzzles in their games. Save early, save often, and don't overwrite saves.
It is possible to reduce the difficulty by watching and closely studying You Tube videos of it being done right. Or wrong.
Compare Try Everything.
Examples:
3D Action Games
- The Half Quake series of Half Life mods is full of this, along with at least one instance of Unwinnable. This is quite bluntly lampshaded in the first of them with the Hazard Course being replaced with an object lesson in sadism, and justified by the game being intended to punish the player character, torturing and eventually killing them.
- This is a complaint sometimes leveled at Stealth Based Games, such as Metal Gear Solid or Splinter Cell. Getting through an area undetected may require several specific actions performed consecutively, which can often only be discovered through trial-and-error.
- Fortunately, most of these (especially first person stealth games) allow you to go on a cathartic orgy of violent rampage whenever you blow your cover. Unacceptable for special playthroughs (like MGS4's famous Big Boss Run), but if you're just trying to clear the game, this usually works as a backup.
- Defcon 5 invokes this trope due to massive use of Guide Dang It; you're plopped down in the game's setting (a Mars colony ready to be opened) with no idea of what you're supposed to do, a map that only lets you cover your immediate area, and the requirement of picking up data pads scattered around the compound for items and info on your next mission (which are so vague you practically need a strategy guide to make heads or tails of).
- The Tomb Raider series dips in and out of this trope a lot, even between levels; some levels have many dangerous traps but are fair as long as you don't blindly run into everything (or show some haste when you do) and pay a modicum of attention to the surroundings, while others spring fatal (or at least very damaging) traps that are near-unavoidable with very little warning. TR 3 is probably the peak of this, with some levels having a seemingly sadistic desire to throw death-traps at you around every corner (the limited save system if you are on the PlayStation version also doesn't help).
- At the Legendary difficulty level of Halo 2, the Jackal snipers kill you in a single shot and are surprisingly accurate. They can even shoot before directly aiming and bounce their beams off walls. Thus you are usually not aware of them until you have been killed. The best strategy for dealing with them involves memorising the places they appear in the level.
- Similarly, the Goddamned Drones attack in swarms and cherry-tap you to death with plasma fire, and you often don't see them coming until it's too late to avoid death. Big "fuck you".
- The series' randomized jack-in-the-box Respawning Enemies, which also make Legendary a Luck Based Mission at times, ie you may get either a group of flunkies and a regular Elite, or two Ultra Elites spawning at a given point.
- H2's Legendary in general is a big load of trial and error, fake difficulty and luck-based situations. Not fun.
- Mercenaries 2: World in Flames has this annoying type of gameplay in several of the missions. As a particularly frustrating example... Your vehicle: a lightly armoured SUV. Your objective: drive around eight tanks, several static recoilless rifle positions, and multiple rocket grenadiers on your way to the corporate headquarters. Good luck!
Adventure Games
- As mentioned above, almost every Sierra adventure game ever made.
- Quite possibly the most bizarre example of this is in King's Quest 5, where one defeats a yeti by... throwing a pie at it. And there are many more outrageous puzzles of this nature to be found in the game.
- The developers of the Space Quest series have said that they adopted Have A Nice Death messages as a response to this trope. After all, they reasoned, if you're going to die a lot, you might as well get a laugh out of it.
- A seasoned player of Sierra adventure games will be ready to save at every opportunity while playing the first Gabriel Knight game, until realizing that your character won't die no matter how haplessly he stumbles into secret voodoo conspiracies. That is, up until about the fifth day, after they've successfully thrown you off.
- Lucasarts, however, thanks to being unable to die, just has Guide Dang It elements.
- To be fair, numerous Lucasarts adventures, like Monkey Island, have ways to die, but they're so unlikely that they qualify as Easter Eggs. Also, the occasional fake death, that seems like a death but is only a joke, such as Monkey Island's infamous "rubber tree".
- ICOM adventure games such as Shadowgate, Deja Vu and Uninvited are also prone to this. It's somewhat mitigated by restarting the game one screen back.
- The Darkseed games, although those are more susceptible to Unwinnable issues than is normal for this trope.
- Infocom tends to do this a lot as well.
- Their take on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is particularly blatant, whether due to "follow the script" sequences that punish errors, or things as arbitrary as not giving a sandwich to a dog near the beginning of the game.
- To be fair, there's a way to give the dog a sandwich later, by using the Infinite Improbability Drive to replay the opening scene as Ford Prefect, then complete the sandwich section there.
- Played with in Star Trek: Borg, in which the process of dying and "reloading" actually occurs in-game, courtesy of Q. Completing the game requires making one particular "wrong" choice, dying, "reloading", making a different choice (which was previously just as fatal as the "wrong" choice) and having your character use the knowledge he'd acquired in his previous try to solve the next puzzle.
- Waxworks and the Elvira games are notorious for this kind of game play. The players are often given little clue as to how to solve some of the puzzles, with all sorts of deathtraps from nowhere, and too many ways to render the games unwinnable.
- One of Ron Gilbert's complaints in the rant linked above, time limits, is played straight in RAMA. Although your explorations of the titular ship have hitherto been fairly leisurely and forgiving in constraints of time, and death has been a minor setback-a return to a point shortly prior to your death after a few remarks from Arthur C. Clarke that basically boil down to "We put this here, it's pretty apparently dangerous, you screwed with it anyway, try to be more careful in the future". Even after you've crossed the frozen sea and entered the city, things have been undemanding at worst. Through all this your play has been trial-and-error gameplay, but it's justified because you're a scientist studying this ship and you know about as much about it as any other character. Then, the Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal happens and you have six real-time hours to solve the problem...while you're standing still. When you move, the game deducts a couple of minutes from this timer to simulate the time it takes for movement. Same for performing an action. So you have significantly less than six hours to get the fuck off the ship, to do it you have to go to a completely new area of the ship, and you're so severely limited for time that the only way to get out in anything like a reasonable number of tries is with guide in hand. Thanks a lot, you bastards.
- Demonophobia consists of trial and error gameplay in the truest sense of the word. Roughly half of the game consists of trying things out to see if they will kill you — the other half consists of trying not to die now that you know what ends up killing you. Given the incredibly graphic scenes of death and grievous injury to the young female lead character, the developer is quite likely literally sadistic.
- The Immortal is practically a Gygaxian dungeon in 3D video game form.
- Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney can fall under this if you are totally clueless during a cross examination. Some testimonies are so well said or near air tight in what seems to be truth that players who can't spot a contradiction will literally present every evidence on every part of a testimony until they get it right. Many times, the initial testimony is too vague to be useful and requires you to press one or more statements in particular order and even play around with telling the Judge if the new information was relevant/not relevant so that the testimony may be amended and the contradiction spotted. Cue in lots of Save Scumming, Try Everything, and for some players, Guide Mother Funking Dang It.
- Sometimes there are two or more related pieces of evidence that can plausibly contradict a certain statement. However, the game will only accept the "most correct" piece of evidence and will penalise you for showing another, closely related piece, leading to players trying multiple times until the evidence is accepted. This becomes more annoying when, in the process of showing why that particular piece is the one contradicting the evidence, the other related pieces (which you might have chosen to present earlier and was penalised for it) often are also shown!
- While the FMV-heavy Dragon's Lair did not make use of this trope (if you died, it was because you missed the visible signal), at least one computer version does. There were numerous sequences where Dirk had to react to dangers at the right time, and these were not telegraphed. Memorization was necessary in the end.
- Even more oddly, the cartoon invoked this trope. During a commercial break, the viewer was asked to choose Dirk's next move. When the show came back, it was revealed whether or not each choice resulted in his death. (Admittedly, this is a clever way of invoking the beautiful death animations from the game.)
- This is used interestingly in Shadow Of Destiny; the main character always dies at the start of each chapter, and the rest of the chapter consists of trying to avoid that death after going back in time.
- Some MUDs, a form of text-based proto-MMO popular in the '80s and '90s, had "deathtraps" — rooms which killed your character instantly upon entering them and deleted all your equipment. The only reasonable way to avoid this was to use a spell or ability that lets you see what's in neighboring rooms and check every single one before entering. Understandably, some MUDs removed deathtraps to avoid driving players insane.
- Ragnarok (also called Valhalla) is a surprisingly expansive roguelike game, with an insanely high number of ways to die or screw up royally. While there are a minimum of in-game warnings (don't eat speckled mushrooms, the gods can't be killed, etc.), most of the time, it will be down to player experience to determine things like turning into a plant is near-instant death, to survive Niflheim, you need to be cold resistant, sentinel gaze attacks are incredibly dangerous, petrification resistance is a very good idea, randomly mixing potions at low levels (and low HP) is risky...
- In fact, this is incredibly common in almost all roguelikes; for example, in Nethack, by the time you've learned not to eat kobold corpses, not to drink unidentified potions, not to attack floating eyes in melee, not to read unidentified scrolls, not to kick sinks at a low level, not to put on unidentified armor or weapons unless it's not cursed or you can uncurse it, not to drink from fountains indiscriminately, not to attack acid blobs with valuable weapons, not to combine potions, not to go downstairs burdened, not to pray too often, not to eat old corpses, not to eat your own race, and not to eat pets, you might be able to live long enough to learn not to attack a cockatrice in melee, not to pick up a cockatrice corpse barehanded, not to walk over cockatrice corpses while blind and barehanded, not to attack cockatrices while polymorphed, and a lot, lot more.
- There are at least 200 known unique ways of dying in Nethack.
- See here for another list of things not to do in Nethack.
- The Sega CD game Panic! could be considered the epitome of trial-and-error. You play the entire game by pressing buttons to see what happens. Most of the buttons either make a silly gag happen, blow up a real-world monument, or teleport you to another scene. However, there are exactly three Game Over scenes, and a few more than three buttons can take you to them.
- Many older Interactive Fiction games rely on this, where it's generally referred to as 'learning through death'. It's frowned upon in modern IF games, though less so when the plot of the game is built around it, like in Adam Cadre's Lock and Key.
- Fairly well-averted in A Vampyre Story. The game almost always gives you enough information to solve puzzles without a guide, although sometimes you need to be sharp to catch it. As a non-spoilerriffic example, you need to lube up some hinges early on in the game, and in your bedroom you pick up some body oil that'll do the trick-but there's only enough oil for one hinge. No fear-the game will, if you "look" at the body oil, tell you it was made from oils extracted from nuts and dried fruits, which coincidentally you can also collect from your room. In some of the later puzzles it gives you all the pieces (a cop who desperately wants to be recognized as a hero, a little girl's dress, and a bat about the right size to fit into it) and leaves you to figure it out for yourself.
Driving Games
- In the very first race of Midnight Club, there is absolutely no way to tell that you need to use a certain rock as a ramp to reach the finish point. The only way to possibly discover this is to watch one of the computer racers do it, which by definition means placing 2nd or worst. Of course, you need to place 1st in order to proceed in the game, so you must fail the mission at least once just to see how it's done.
- Midnight Club 2 is even worse, stretching this trope throughout the entire game in very annoying ways. Possibly the best example is in the third race of the game where the player spends the majority of it racing along the long, wide open highway, traveling at top speed. Near the end of the race the player must navigate an off-ramp while still going full-throttle, and of course a semi truck will pull right in front of you and block your path when you get close. The only way to get through unscathed is to drive precisely between the gap in the truck's wheels. This troper remembers having to repeat that race over and over because the AI would often mindlessly crash into the truck and knock it over, making it impossible to get past the off-ramp part without taking a header into something. Add to this the need to memorize the precise route needed to win the race. The game gives the player almost no indication of which path to take, with an overhead arrow pointing directly at the next checkpoint, regardless of the actual layout of the streets. Blindly following the arrow will inevitably cause a player to crash into buildings or concrete dividers.
- In the dragster wheelie competition in Need for Speed Pro Street some of the cars cannot pull a wheelie no matter how many upgrades you buy. Some of the cars are much easier to use for drifting too, and the game doesn't give many clues about what to buy. It's not a massive problem since the wheelie competition only comes along when the player will probably have enough credits to buy the 'right' car. But it's irritating to spend ages tinkering with car set-up and driving style in a vain attempt to get the nose of a Supra or RX-7 to lift when the game should mention somewhere that it's a waste of time.
- Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3 's Ghost Battle mode. When you select a ghost to battle, you are only told the starting ramp, and not what route the ghost take, which gets annoying if, say, you select a ghost that starts on one of the faster routes (i.e. Wangan or Yokohane), and thus put all your tuning points into power and leave nothing for handling, but the race ends on the curvier C1 loop and you keep crashing into walls because your car has no handling whatsoever. The only way to know the route for sure is to have already battled the ghost or watch someone else race it.
Horror Games
- In Alone In The Dark 1, there are two "evil books" in the library's secret room(which is a Guide Dang It to find). The first, "Fragments of the Book of Abdul", hurts you, while the second, "De Vermis Mysteriis", instantly kills you if you so much as look at the front page. Unless, that is, you are standing on the pentagram symbol in the room, Guide Dang It.
- If you accidentally bump into a ghost(touching the one by the fireplace is almost certain on the first try), they come to life as a nightmare-fueling swirling cloud of psychedelic death that chases you around the house until it kills you.
- Another unavoidable first time death occurs in the hallway leading to the library, the woodsman painting starts throwing axes at you. Further down the hallway, a painting of an Indian starts shooting arrows that home in on you, at which point death is inevitable. The player learns the hard way to put the Old Indian Cover on the woodsman painting, and to shoot the Indian painting with the bow and arrows.
- Let's not forget just trying to simply open the front door of the house. One of the books you can find contains something that could remotely be considered a clue to this, but it's obscure enough that I don't believe a single player has ever been stopped from trying to open the door in good faith (rather than to see the death) on their first playthrough.
- AITD 2008 is rife with moments like this, such as the part where you have to scale the side of an exploding building. Often due to shoddy game design.
- Fear Effect, a Playstation Survival Horror game, embodies this to a tee. Given the mechanics of the health system (and the really arbitrary way of healing yourself), anything you try, be it solving a puzzle or duking it out with enemies, will usually result in a "special" death scene (which ranges from being shot to death, immolated, asphyxiation, and other bizarre ways to die). Many, many, times. It stops being funny when this happens 10 times in a row.
- See some of the many deaths here — [1]
- Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth has a scene (pretty directly lifted from H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth) where you have to escape from some Innsmouth goons. There is one, and only one, correct escape route, and it is not very obvious. Taking a wrong turn will usually get your (unarmed) character gunned down.
- Gunned down? More like hacked to pieces with an axe. God, I hate that part.
- There's also a sequence (which may be the same one, it's pretty vague) where if you go to sleep without performing a specific action, you don't wake up because you're dead. If you perform the action, you'll wake up, and almost immediately be killed because you didn't perform another action. And so on. Ad nauseum.
- It's an earlier part of the same one, if it's what I think you're talking about. However, to be fair, this is actually pretty obvious. the series of actions is making sure to lock every door leading into your hotel room... after you're earlier shown in hallucinatory premonitions that the hotel owner is a murderous madman.
- Curious - in the PC version this troper played it was impossible to go to sleep before all the doors were locked - the player character would comment on how he didn't feel safe, if you tried to go to sleep before that. The escape sequence itself is far more obvious to the people who have read the book, but there's still trial and error to be had especially in the last sequence right before the first savepoint.
- And don't forget the ending, where exactly the right route must be followed, without even an inch of strafing, and you still can die because the timer doesn't stop even during the final cutscene.
- The House of the Dead series loves doing this by throwing zombies in mid-attack at you, though this doesn't happen in House of the Dead 4. And don't get me started with when civilians, who take off lives if shot, suddenly appear.
- The creepy and utterly brilliant Lovecraft adventure game Shadow of the Comet has a bit where your character visits a labyrinth-like crypt. After you meet a giant slug-like monster, you have to escape from the crypt as it chases you. Unless you had the good sense to draw a map, the beast will tear you to pieces dozens of times as you try to find the right route.
Literature
- Depending on how charitable, fair, or even consistent the writer is feeling, this can be the only possible way to win at a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Fortunately, it's not hard to flip back to the previous page.
- This Troper always made it through unscathed by avoiding any choices that seemed cool or heroic, it never fails. Let's say page 68 has you stand up and fend off an attacker, while page 43 has you wet your pants and run away; go to page 43 immediately if you want to survive.
- This troper found one that was quite the opposite, despite you being totally powerless and accompanied by more powerful people. If you did the brave thing they would save you, if you didn't the danger killed them.
- This Troper would, if she still had it, be happy to give you the one she once had which didn't seem to have a good end - I did give up in despair after being killed in the upteenth weird way and actually flick through to reassure myself there was one. There didn't seem to be.
- This Troper had a Muppet Treasure Island book like that. I think the best ending was you play with a band. Seriously. But worse than all this (and related to this trope), the first choice was something like "Will you eat breakfast, look at your hamster, or read the book?" All 3 led to entirely different scenarios. I'm still not sure which one was right.
- There was a Dungeons And Dragons CGI DVD, something like Eye of the Beholder, with a similar gag. One of the first choices is to scold Lidda, pick a fight with the barbarians, or apologize to the barbarians. A True Hero would scold his party member, and otherwise the beholders eat you all later in the episode. Huh?
- Parodied by the Kingdom Of Loathing Choose Your Own Adventure booklets, which has obviously wrong choices to humorous effect. For example, Section 1 of one booklet has the player getting beaten up, and one of two choices at the end of Section 1 is "If you have no short-term memory, go to Section 1."
Platform Game
- The legendary Cinematic-Platformer-cum- Survival Horror game Another World, AKA Out of this World, combines this sort of level design with Everything Trying To Kill You, and, to add insult to injury, makes your character a One Hit Point Wonder. Fortunately, Eric Chahi, the game's designer, acknowledged making one of the most Nintendo Hard games of his time, and provided unlimited continues, somewhat easing the players' frustration.
- Many of the newer Sonic The Hedgehog 2-D games are like this. Try running full speed ahead (the whole point of the damn series) only to run into an enemy as a result of having mere milliseconds to react to it once it appears.
- The little-known 8-bit NES game Clash at Demonhead took this to another level. Midway through the game, you HAVE to meet with one of the game's Big Bads, you CANNOT beat him at this point, and you HAVE TO DIE and press Continue in order for the story to continue.
- Every single Platform Hell game and Mario hack ever created. Miss that perfect jump between two walls of spikes while dodging numerous Bullet Bills and spin jumping off a conveniantly timed enemy? Instant death to the character. I Wanna Be The Guy, the Unfair Platformer, Sybion Action and Kaizo Mario (and every game based off the latter) are common users of this trope.
- Early 1990s platformer Rick Dangerous suffered from a combination of this, One Hit Point Wonder and Everything Trying To Kill You. Literally every area was filled with dozens of hidden spikes, which would pop out of walls and floors, and you wouldn't even know they were there until you'd been hit (and sent right back to the start of the last scene). The only way to play through the game was to patiently wander into all the hidden traps on any given screen, remember where they all are, and avoid them all the next twenty or thirty times you replay it.
- The old SNES game Prince Of Persia was pretty much built on this from the ground up. The game could (and had to) be completed in a mere two hours; yet people spent days or weeks trying and failing to beat it. This was because perfectly normal looking potions, floor tiles, and platforms would do their darndest to kill you.
Puzzle Game
- Chips Challenge has several of these, mostly involving Frictionless Ice. Level 140, ICEDEATH, relies on guessing which direction to take at every point on the ice of which typically only one of the four directions leads to safe ground, while the other three lead to a watery grave. Of course, you could always map the stage out manually.
- The final level also hides the exit square underneath blocks. You need to push them out of the way to find it. However, most of the blocks on the level have fire underneath, and will kill you instantly if you push them.
- This is the point of The Impossible Quiz. WRONG! -1 LIFE
- As the name implies, the Lemmings Tricky level "Lost something?" appears to have no exit. The exit is hidden inside the rock which floats above the path the lemmings take when they enter the screen.
- A lot of levels in Scribblenauts are like this. Oftentimes, the game gives you almost no indication of what to do, or very vague indication, and you're left to your devices.
Role Playing Games
- Dwarf Fortress. Unless you read an incredibly comprehensive guide before even downloading the fucking thing (which you probably won't understand anyway; until you play enough to learn the interface, it will all sound like gibberish), you literally won't even know how. To play. The game. Until after you've started, been horribly confused by, and lost multiple fortresses. The motto of the game, of course, is "losing is fun."
- A lot of the bosses in WorldOfWarcraft have abilities that will kill everyone if you don't do exactly the right thing. Some of them are obvious. If you get a message saying the boss is looking at you and a circle of fire starts to gather underneath, probably time to move. But some of them no one would ever guess until its too late, eg. when the boss starts casting a certain spell jump into the damage field it previously placed so that when the spell goes off and puts everyone to sleep, the damage you take from the field will wake you up. Or hurt the boss' aids until they're nearly dead so that when she frenzies you can kill one of them instantly, because that will dispel the frenzy for some reason. Consequently a pretty sizable chunk of higher end gameplay consists of looking up what the bosses do in advance, and carefully making absolutely sure that everyone knows what to do when. In other games, this might be considered cheating. In Wow, it's the only way to get anything done.
- At one point in Persona 4, you are given a serious moral choice to make. It's fairly clear to most players what the "good" thing to do is. However, doing so involves getting through several dialogue choices. Picking the wrong one even once gives you a bad ending. Oh, and did I mention this occurs right after some lengthy cutscenes?
- Suikoden Tactics had an interesting twist on this trope: when you Game Over, you keep the Experience Points you earned during the failed battle. As such, you can Level Farm and Trial-And-Error at the same time.
- NetHack You're expected to die a few times before you learn how to play the game. Or use spoilers.
- Final Fantasy IV The After Years has a boss near the end of the game who will wipe out your party before you get a chance to act unless you've brought two specific characters along with you. While one of those characters is pretty good and likely to have been chosen, the other is absolutely useless up to this point and pretty much guaranteed to not be in your party. So, the typical player will play through and get a Game Over at least once, at which point they'll get a hint as to one of the characters they need to bring. Bring that character, but not the other, and you'll get a Game Over, but this time a hint as to the other character you need, at which point you can finally proceed with the game. But if you want to avoid one of these characters being Killed Off For Real, you'll have to bring along two more characters, with no hints being provided by the game that this will help.
Shoot Em Ups
- As if Xenon 2: Megablast wasn't hard enough anyway, two powerups - the side-shot and the rear-shot - are mutually incompatible. At the mid-point and end of each level you are given the opportunity to sell and buy equipment, but without having already played the following section there's no way of knowing which one of the two you should have - and if you get it wrong, you will lose.
- Thunder Force III has a few deathtraps that, without prior knowledge, are nearly guaranteed to kill you. Examples include a pillar of lava on [[That One Level Gorgon that doesn't stop, very sudden enemy attacks, and the moving terrain in Haides.
- At a glance, Ikaruga doesn't require a lot of this. But playing for score, which requires stringing together chains (shooting 3 consecutive same-colored enemies), is like studying for a final exam.
- Subterranean Animism is quite fond of this. Examples include the sine-wave bullets in stage 1, the wave of fairies immediately after the stage 2 midboss battle (which shoot aimed bullets that fly a considerable distance before slowing down to normal speed, effectively automatically killing you if you try to fly up to the top to auto-collect the items that Parsee drops), Parsee's second boss spell card, Yuugi's last spell card, and basically all of stage 5 (see the annotations for this video).
Side-Scrollers
- Battletoads is much, much easier once you've memorized every obstacle instead of needing to react to everything as it comes.
- Up to avoid the the lower barrier, down to avoid the upper barrier, jump the low wall, up, up, down, down, jump, down, up, down, crash into the lower wall for the warp point! This troper hasn't played the game in years, and can still vaguely remember the sequence for that third level horror show.
- This troper would just like to say that that troper is slightly insane.
- That level would be more fun if, each time you attempt the level, the obstacle sequence would randomize.
- Don't worry, level 7 is exactly that.
- The C64 shoot-em-up Delta is pretty much the embodiment of this trope. Enemy waves will quickly scroll across the screen, usually before the player can hope to kill them with their pea-shooter of a gun, and will inevitably destroy the One Hit Point Wonder player ship. This Troper remembers a post on a C64 forum that described it as an "interactive memory test disguised as a game".
- Mega Man X5 had a motor-bike stage which is basically all trial and error. What makes this noteworthy, though, is that this stage and this stage alone requires the player to jump while the "Ready!" stage start animation is still playing. In all other stages, the player can't move while the animation is playing. The only way to realize that this stage is special is by dying once. The rest of the level is also an effort in trial and error, as you're often required to make decisions (upper path or lower path?) with no way of knowing what's ahead.
- Worse, in this troopers opinion, is the first of the final 3 levels. After somewhat of an easy romp, you encounter 1 hit death green lasers. That shoot from the wall and move insanely fast. Truly a painful task in memorization.
- You're meant to freeze them with Dark Hold. However, it's possible to run out of Dark Hold ammo, or enter the level before getting Dark Hold.
- Still, it can be treated as trial and error since it is passable without Dark Hold. The same thing happens in Mega Man 2. Specifically Quick Man's infamous laser section. Sure, you can use the time stopper (if you have it) to stop things from moving, but if you did that you wouldn't be able to use it later in the level.
- The whole of Mega Man X6. Specific portions of levels are simply completely impassable if your character can't double jump or air dash.
- Mega Man 9 also had its "you will die with no warning" moments. On passage in Plug Man's stage looks safe, until a block suddenly materializes in its entrance, sending anyone trying to jump into it to the Spikes Of Doom below. One set of spikes in Splash Woman's stage cannot be seen until you've take the jump, and if you're now aimed for them, the games Jump Physics aren't enough to let you steer away in time.
- R-Type's stages are designed in such a way that the player must find the routes that won't kill them by trial and error. This made it distinct from other shmups that place more emphasis on enemy fire and placement.
- Particularly sadistic fanmade platformers tend to punish the player for jumping or running to the wrong spot, with no clue that it was in fact dangerous beforehand. Popular examples include I Wanna Be The Guy, La Mulana's Hell Temple, Syoban/Shobon Action, and a large number of ROM hacks of Super Mario Bros games. (Hey, you've gotta make them hard for the people who use savestates!) In these platformers, Jump Physics is often the only way to protect yourself from things that prefer to kill you just when you've launched yourself into the air. Even then, you'll probably hit your head on an invisible block or something. (Remember, kiddies: invisible blocks are usually not an ingenious way of invoking Fake Difficulty, it'll only invoke the wrath of anyone playing your romhack.)
- If you've played the SNES game The Lost Vikings, you know this one so well. As awesome as the game is, if you mess up even ONCE, you are DOOMED to repeat the level, almost inevitably. Use the wrong viking? Level is unwinnable. Go down the wrong pit? Level is unwinnable. One of the vikings dies? Level is unwinnable. At least you get an unlimited amount of retries on the level, but this troper, in over 10 years of playing the game, has never managed to beat one of the levels because he always messes up...
Strategy Game
- Pretty much any game ever produced by Paradox - with Victoria being the uber example and many of the others not far behind. Not least because either what you need to know is Not In The Manual or The Manual Is Wrong.
- Later levels of Valkyria Chronicles have elements of this to it, as does character selection as something as simple as not including the right number of different types of troops can severely mess you up.
- A particularly bad example can be found in Command And Conquer Red Alert 3: Uprising. The final Allied mission has you going up against an Empire commander after choosing one of two locations to build your base on, no big deal. The northeast position looks far, far more defensible and has closer ore nodes, so most players will probably pick it on their first playthrough. However... As soon as you kill off the Empire commander, the real Big Bad reveals himself and comes gunning for you. The map expands to accomodate his base and guess what - it's DIRECTLY north of the earlier mentioned starting position. Which before marked the edge of the map, so you probably have no defenses there whatsoever. And he starts out with a ridiculously huge and well-equipped strike force already rushing to attack you. Hell, there is a good chance his longer-ranged units will be shelling you before the cutscene even ends. If you didn't know this was coming you are basically GUARANTEED to die, and even when you're prepared it's a difficult battle.
- Final Fantasy Tactics has shades of this, since you're never given a clue as to what sort of situation you're getting into before a battle. You just have the (very basic) layout of your team's immediate starting area, so if you unwittingly put your team of melee combatants into a map against, say, a whole team of archers and mages on the other side of a valley or river, you're in trouble.
- Especially bad during several sequential battle sequences, where you no longer have the option of Level Grinding if you don't have the right job classes available or if you simply aren't high enough level for the enemies. This can lead to several instances where the game is essentially Unwinnable... Especially during the final game sequence if you made the mistake of passing up your special characters in favor of the generic ones and thus missed the dozens of fights which comprised the "optional" portion of Chapter 4.
Tabletop Games
- As displayed in the page quote, Tabletop Games players have a term for a dungeon with particularly random ways to inflict instant death: Gygaxian, though the term also implies heavy use of Malevolent Architecture. One of the most famous modules of this type is the Tomb of Horrors. People who survived that module largely did so by searching everything for traps, and sending Mooks to open every door in the dungeon. (It should be noted that it takes more effort to roll up a new character than to load a saved game.)
- Favourite Tomb of Horrors moment: There's at one point a statue of a demon that holds an orb. This orb is a teleporter you need to pass through. There's ANOTHER identical demon statue right next to it. That one isn't a portal though — it's a ''Sphere of Annihilation''. Oh, and to get through the teleporter safely, you need to perform a non-obvious sequence of actions.
- Averted in this group's playthrough. No mooks, and VERY few deaths. (Snakes K Oing the cleric, and someone 'playing' with a crown despite being told not to.) Best death was the guy who Fireballed Acererak...
Western Animation
- A Robot Chicken sketch takes this idea and applies to to a game show. Contestants had to avoid a series of death traps based solely on their ability to remember what happened to all the previous ones. (The first contestant never had a chance)
Live Media
- The "Colm and Jim-Jim" show in Ireland ran a quiz whereby you had to guess "where" Jim-Jim's dad was. However the clues were so useless ("I'm in a city"... days later narrowed down to "I'm not in Europe") that it was pure guess-work. The only way to win was to listen to all the incorrect guesses and cross them off your list.
- Late night TV on various channels in Ireland and UK have "Play TV", and all-night viewer-participating quiz channel. You have to phone a premium rate number for the chance to get through (i.e. you are not guaranteed a chance to get through but you have to pay anyway). Quite often they will run a puzzle with prize money in the thousands, with several seemingly possible answers, none of them correct.
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