Unwinnable - Television Tropes & Idioms

Unwinnable is a term describing a gameplay state in which it is impossible for the player to finish the game. The only options are to reload a previous save (if possible) or start the game anew. In computer adventure games, this is usually the intentional doing of the game's developers, much to the frustration of many fans. But to still others, it's an accepted staple of the genre. Unwinnable situations have died down in even adventure games, however.

In other genres, Unwinnable situations are generally the result of either a game-breaking glitch or design oversight. Similarly, games with save-anywhere systems are often susceptible to this, as it's possible for a player to save immediately before imminent death or with too little health to survive their current predicament. This may happen when the player saves after the Point Of No Return without enough strength to complete the final sequence and/or battle. Another common scenario is when a required Scripted Event fails to activate. Many games urge you to keep and continually update multiple save files should you encounter an Unwinnable situation.

Nicer programmers may give you mercy and make Unwinnable situations a Nonstandard Game Over, if what causes the game to become unwinnable is not having the means to complete a mission that is already known. But if they were really nice, they wouldn't have made it unwinnable in the first place.

Zarf's Cruelty Scale of Interactive Fiction, as lifted (and revised) from here

, here

and here

, divides Adventure Game types as follows:

Merciful: You only ever need one save file, and that only if you want to turn the computer off and go to sleep. You never need to restore to an earlier game.
- Say that there is a large button on the wall, with a sign above it that says 'Inorganic Vaporizer Ray'. When you try to push it, the game says something like 'You'd better not. You'd lose that nifty pocket screwdriver'.
Polite: You only need one save game, because if you do something fatally wrong, it's blatantly obvious and you'll *know* better than to save afterwards.
- There is a large button on the wall, with a sign above it that says 'Inorganic Vaporizer Ray'. When you push it, all your stuff gets vaporized, including your clothing, and you catch a draft and die of pneumonia.
Tough : There are things you can do which you'll have to save before doing. But you'll think "Ah, I'd better save before I do this."
- There is a large button on the wall, with a sign above it that says 'Inorganic Vaporizer Ray'. When you push it, all your stuff gets vaporized, and you can't finish the game.
Nasty : There are things you can do which you'll have to save before doing. After you do one, you'll think "Oh, bugger, I should have saved before I did that."
- The same as Tough, only there's no sign.
Cruel: You think "I should have saved back in the third room. Now I'll have to start over."
- The same as Nasty, only you just hear a humming noise when you push the button. Then, fifty turns later, you type 'inventory'... "Hey, where's all my stuff?"

Make this a Guide Dang It, and you're certain to piss a lot of people off.

The spiritual opposite of a Hopeless Boss Fight, where you are supposed to fail to make the game continue. Also (in some cases) the worst-case scenario of Lost Forever. Contrast Kobayashi Mario, for games not supposed to be "won" at all: Games that have a High Scores screen instead of a victory condition.

Examples:

Adventure Games

Sierra games are especially cruel, with so many Unwinnable situations and few players knowing. Just a few examples:
- In Kings Quest I, if you lose any of the three treasures (e.g., have the magic mirror stolen by the dwarf), the game is unwinnable.
- In Kings Quest II, there is a bridge you must cross (several times) over the chasm, and making just one extra trip across makes the game unwinnable - it will break before you can get the three magic doors opened.
  - Also in King's Quest II, if you take the logical puzzle solution of killing the giant snake menacing you rather than the illogical solution of mounting a bridle on it, the game becomes very nearly unwinnable, as you never get the item needed to circumvent a very nasty "walk along the path perfectly or you die" puzzle. Technically not an example, but worth mentioning -- the fan remake removed the fake solution and reworked the original puzzle to be more obvious and logical, just because this was so tremendously unfair.
- In Kings Quest III, the game is run on an internal timer, and if you aren't in the right place when an event happens, you're stuck and the game is unwinnable. Usually there aren't any warnings that there's a time limit for certain things either... a notable example is that after you get the amber stone from the oracle, the pirate ship in the harbor will only be there for twenty minutes. Then it will leave, forever, taking your only chance to get to Daventry with it. Although, if you're desperate, you can always try the random teleporting stone and hope you get lucky and end up there...
- In Kings Quest IV, you're given two love arrows. They're the only ones you can get in the game. One is for the unicorn, and the other for Lolotte. However, if you shoot the unicorn with one arrow too close to the edge of the screen and then accidentally walk off the side, the arrow wears off, meaning that the unicorn will again run away from you if you get back on the screen, therefore rendering it unattainable without wasting the other arrow you need to kill Lolotte. Thanks Sierra. Thanks.
- In Kings Quest V, the player can give a piece of meat to a starving vulture. However, if you give the vulture the pie, you can't win the game. The pie itself was even worse. If you ate it for any reason, you are monsterchow later.
  - This is not even regarding the time you have to save a talking rat from a cat. You get one try to save the rat, and if you don't, the game is unwinnable. You see, saving the rat requires having a boot. Only a boot will do. And the only place to find one is in the vast, trackless desert... somewhere. Which is not in one of the two actual things of interest in the desert to find. Which means that it is very likely that you will have cleaned out the desert of everything but this boot. Oh, and you get only about 2 seconds of time to actually use the boot, with no indication that it's what you should be using. There is also no indication before the cat that the boot is needed, removing any MOTIVATION to search the desert on the first try... And most of the game passes between failing to save that rat and actually coming to grief for it.
- In Kings Quest VI, the player has to venture into the underworld. Upon arrival, he can simply walk through the gates. What he needs to do first is play a bone xylophone in order to get a key that will open a chest containing a letter that he shows to a guard to keep the guard from killing him just before the final scene.
- In King's Quest VII you must remember to scare the jackalope into the hole and get its fur before you leave the desert landscape, or Rosella ends up with the wrong prince. Or So I Heard.
- The original Space Quest gave you the chance to sell a hovercraft for money, which you will need. If you refuse, the would-be buyer will come back and offer to throw in a jetpack as well. If you take his first (jetpack-less) offer, a few hours of play later you will find yourself in a situation where you need a jetpack, have no way to get one (or do much of anything besides float in space), and have no idea where you missed the chance to pick one up, Guide Dang It...
- To be fair, given the genre of the game, and the fact that you actually have to accept the guy's offer the first time makes most people want to experiment a bit, and figure out what happens if you say no (well, the first time, the hovercraft gets stolen because you didn't remove the ignition key, but once you figure out you can do that, getting the jetpack isn't too tough).
- Also, Space Quest II. Late in the game the PC can get kissed by an Alien ripoff without anything happening. However, once you're nearing the end of the game and after having saved over anything before the kissing incident, a baby alien bursts from your character's chest, killing him.
  - To be fair, most people would figure out something was wrong (I mean, it looks like the Alien!) and reload after that. Worse is that several items have to be picked up on the space station you start the game on. Fail to, and you'll be stuck against a monster much later.
  - The monster in question (the Tazmanian Devil Shout Out) is entirely passable without the correct item, assuming proper timing and pathing. Less points, though.
- Space Quest III avoided the Unwinnable scenarios, but they were back with a vengeance in IV. Forget to write down the time code for SQXII at the start of the game? Well, too bad, you're stuck now and the code is randomized so you can't even look it up.
  - Mercifully avoided in the CD remake, where the code is always the same. If you didn't write it down, just play about ten minutes of game time (even skipping a few unnecessary bits), and you have the code again.
- Screw up in making the Dispel Potion in Quest For Glory 1 (with items like the Magic Acorn, which can be Lost Forever), and the game is unwinnable.
- In Leisure Suit Larry 1, if you didn't have enough money for cab fare (under about $10) and weren't at the casino, the game was unwinnable.
- Leisure Suit Larry 2 is linear, from Los Angeles to the cruise ship to the resort island and the like - there's no turning back. Forgeting just one item before you get to the next segment makes the game unwinnable.
- Leisure Suit Larry 3 is equally ridiculous - there is a point where you play Passionate Patti, and forgetting even an insignificant piece of attire makes the game unwinnable. (Women have more clothing than you think.)
- In fact, it was so bad that Sierra game developer Al Lowe averted this trope in Leisure Suit Larry 5: There is never an "unwinnable" point in the game, no matter how much you mess up. (You can't die in this game, either - another interesting inversion!). Still... if you forget to write down the numbers to the various cab companies you must call throughout the game, the single time they're shown in each location, you're pretty much still up Unwinnable creek without a paddle.
- The Dagger of Amon Ra is a potentially Nightmare Fuel murder mystery adventure game that loves nothing more than letting you progress to the next chapter without finding every clue you were supposed to find in the previous one. Congratulations, you found a body. Did you remember to look behind the casket, check all seven pockets on the body, and look at that one hair on the shirt with the magnifying glass, in that order? No? Aww....
- You know what? This trope may as well just be called the Sierra Screw.
The text adventure based on The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy contained some deliberate, devilish cases of obscure things that needed to be done within a certain time frame. For instance, at the end of the game, Marvin will ask you for a specific tool to repair the ship with. The tool required is randomly selected from a pool of eight or ten, and if you don't have one of them, the game will choose that one. So, if you left the toothbrush in your bedroom at the beginning of the game, you'll be forced to start over completely.
- And if you miss your appointment with Marvin by failing to work out how to get into the niche in exactly twelve turns? Also stuck.
- Even more infamous is the notorious "Babel Fish Dispenser" puzzle, wherein the player must use a pile of junk mail picked up at his doorstep back on Earth. At this point, however, the junk mail has already been blown up along with the rest of the planet Earth, forcing players who forgot the junk mail to restart their games for any chance of a satisfactory ending.
  - The number of babel fish in the vending machine is one less than the number of steps necessary to get one safely out of it - in other words, if you're going through fixing the things that go wrong one at a time, by the time you have the full solution the machine will be empty.
- By the way... if you take too long trying to pick things up in your house at the very beginning, you will be flattened by the bulldozer. Best be quick about grabbing all those seemingly-insignificant geegaws!
  - This editor recommends looking up "analgesic" in a dictionary if you don't know what one is. Ahem.
  - Most infamous of all is the cheese sandwich puzzle, in which failing to do something apparently pointless early in the game while you're rushing urgently on a timer will cause the game to be Un Winnable much, much later. You actually got a second chance at that puzzle (you relive that portion of the game as Ford and can have him do it), but there's no clue to do it then either.
- Likewise, the Spellcasting X01 series of games (supposedly made at least in part by the same people) was phenomenally restrictive in terms of what you had to do and when you had to do it; if a day passed by without one tiny little thing being taken care of, the game became unwinnable.
These turned up frequently in other Infocom adventures. In Zork Zero, for example, the player must cast a spell on an item and then has exactly 18 turns to use the item before it changes back. Once it is restored, the item cannot be transformed again.
Subverted in Golden Sun The Lost Age where nearly every puzzle requires a certain power to complete, many of which are given through equitable trinkets. One town has a party member temporarily leave the group to have some time to himself. To progress through the story you need to use a particular ability to tie a rope up to the roof of a building because the owner's door is stuck. If you give the item that teaches this ability to the member that left, the owner will berate you for coming so far in your adventure only to be stuck there and then lower a rope down for you.
Averted in pretty much every Lucasarts adventure game after Zak Mc Kracken And The Alien Mindbenders, which always allow the player to go back and collect items that they need, or refuse to let them continue without the required item. This was often viewed as "dumbing down adventure games for the masses" by hardcore Sierra enthusiasts, whereas Lucasarts themselves believed that players should not be punished for ~~experimenting in their games~~ not buying the strategy guide.
- You can make the Monkey Island unwinnable if you really try, such as by dropping all your money into the (non-functional) grog machine or staying underwater for more than ten minutes (with an insultingly simple puzzle being the only thing preventing you from leaving).
  - Also, one version of the game - due to a bug - allowed you to set one of the ingredients for the navigation soup on fire instead of putting it in the cauldron, and with it destroyed, you're stuck.
  - Failure to buy the "treasure map" (and getting rid of the rest of flammable items) does NOT make the game unwinnable. You can also burn the captain's log/recipe book.
- The Lucasarts Game Development Philosophy is referenced in The Curse of Monkey Island, where Guybrush Threepwood enters a state of faux death and a pair of side characters remark how they thought "you couldn't die in Lucasarts games" and that the developers must be "trying something different".
Rise Of The Dragon can be very Guide Dang It since there are plenty of ways of getting permamently stuck, like locking yourself out of your home, leaving vital items lying around somewhere (thus losing them forever), picking the wrong dialog option and thus permanently pissing off a vital character (specially your girlfriend. Women can be so sensitive...) or letting important events go by completely unnoticed just because you weren't in the right place at the right time. In some cases though, the game will inform you when you've screwed up (or are about to) so you don't hang around wondering what went wrong.
- Heart Of China, by the same designer, also suffers from this. Sierra seems to have a thing for bastard designers.
Mega Man Battle Network 4 had Artifacts Of Doom called "Dark Chips." If Mega Man used them, they gave an incredibly powerful attack, but "darkened" his soul and reduced his maximum HP by 1. Eventually your max HP would be reduced to 1, and Megaman would get addicted to them, closing off various gameplay features (while opening a few others). Some players take it as a personal challenge to beat the game this way; but for most, it would be unwinnable at that point. However, the game does give ample warning of the dangers of excessive Dark Chip use, and it takes so many of them to reduce yourself to 1 HP that you pretty much have to be doing it on purpose. Also, while you could get your base HP down to 1, interchangeable parts that gave Mega Man extra HP were unaffected (because otherwise, taking them off would lead to all sorts of logical problems), so you could still give yourself an unreducable 501 HP or something - though in that case, you'd sacrifice the space for other powerup parts.
During Lute's game on Saga Frontier, It's entirely possible to get to the last dungeon without training at all, but if you save there, there's no turning back.
- The very first Sa Ga game AKA Final Fantasy Legend had several such dungeons, and only one save slot.
The Gigeresque game Darkseed thrives on this. The game has a rather specific solution, complete with many chances to screw up before the end. For example, you only have enough money to buy two items at the store, there are many items available, and you're going to need to buy the right two to win... and you can't even buy them at the same time. For another example, you need to set up an alternate way to enter your house before you ever learn that the main way will be blocked later. Also, you're playing in "real time", and you need to be in the right place at the right time for certain events. Essentially, the game expects you to keep starting over from the beginning until you get it right.
- Or the fact that you need to get put in jail at ONE point in the game, with three specific items you need to put in your cell for later to finish the game. The sequel didn't change anything. If you die, you're told you can't die because of your importance. However, you only get this once, and to finish the game you need to die at a CERTAIN time, so if you die and think you're in the safe before then, tough luck.
The Access game Amazon: Guardians of Eden is unbelievably sadistic about unwinnable puzzles, to the point of being almost unplayable without a walkthrough. Almost every decision in every chapter would make the game unbeatable if you got it wrong (if you didn't just die outright), and it frequently would recall items back as far as three chapters (and of course, once you're in a new chapter you can't go back) for an obtuse, difficult puzzle. Forgot to pick up the gasoline in the airport in Chapter Three? Too bad, you can't make a molotov cocktail in Chapter Seven, and your save is worthless now! Given that each chapter was extremely difficult and somewhat luck-based since a lot of the puzzles also happened to be of the timed variety, interspersed with random, difficult arcade sequences, loading a game and going back through one or two frustrating chapters you just beat because you forgot a lighter is not nearly as easy as it is in other franchises. Have fun.
Infocom's Enchanter text-adventure might have the quickest-to-unwinnable-state of them all. To this troper's knowledge, it is the only game that can be rendered unwinnable on the first command of the game: FROTZ ME, which makes it impossible to find the correct portrait in the picture gallery.
- It's possible this was simply a bug. This troper remembers using EXTINGUISH ME to negate the light from FROTZ. Googling found a walkthrough actually telling you to do this, yet turned up another page stating that the EXTINGUISH command doesn't work on yourself (and describing a different EXTINGUISH bug). Perhaps only some versions have the bug?
  - Being able to EXTINGUISH ME is the bug, actually. FROTZ originally used the same code as the command to LIGHT or EXTINGUISH an normal light source like a lamp or a torch. It wasn't originally intended that you could somehow "turn off" a glowing object (such as yourself) that had had a magical light spell cast on it. When they corrected this "error" in a later version, all of a sudden a very common player trick for making sure you were never deprived of a light source became instant unwinnability. They eventually decided they were better off changing it back, even though the text you get from EXTINGUISH SELF is rather nonsensical.
  - You see this problem crop up in later games. SORCERER, the sequel, makes it a firm rule that FROTZed objects can never be EXTINGUISHed, thus always allowing you to make the game unwinnable on the first move. The final game in the trilogy, SPELLBREAKER, goes 180 degrees on this and explicitly allows you to EXTINGUISH FROTZed objects (with the message "You dismiss the magical glow, and it fades"). Of course, in that game there's never any point in doing so.
Infocom's Suspended can be unwinnable before the first normal command (not counting system commands like save/restore). Setting "Impossible" difficulty does just that - now the player's Sun is due to go nova in a few minutes, so there's not much point trying to find the right-length wire to fix the complex's systems, is there? Infocom was the best.
This troper was interrupted by a phone call while a transition video was playing in Tomb Raider III, and went back to play the (fairly easy) level again in order to see the video. Result: the plot coupon at the end of that level vanished and could not be retrieved, even with a third go. Since the game was rented and would soon need returning, this troper set it aside and never finished.
- In that game, there are five areas, and you can choose what order to do the middle three in. However, one of those three areas will "reset" your inventory, leaving you with absolutely nothing but a health pack! If you choose to do this area last... Well, sucks to be you. The game is still very winnable, but getting this one towards the end is a major slap in the face, as you'll have to build your inventory up from scratch again.
Infocom's only console game, the NES adventure game Tombs & Treasure, succeeded in playing like its PC cousins a bit too well. Besides one intentional example of this (Where the game tells you "This is it, Game Over, hit reset!"...VERY annoying, given the game uses incredibly long passwords as opposed to a battery backup to save your progress.), there are a couple other places where combining items in the wrong order, or forgetting an item, makes the game unwinnable.
Broken Sword 2. A particularly infuriating example. In the jungle, you find your path blocked by a wild boar. You have to shoot it with a dart. Once hit, it runs around wildly, including after you. If you don't click on the innocuous, seemingly-pointless tree branch above your head, it'll run off the screen to the left instead of clearing a new passageway through the jungle bush; making the game unwinnable. They choose not to tell you this.
The horror RPG/adventure game Elvira 2 - Jaws of Cerberus can easily become unwinnable - destroy a vital item (such as by using it up for a spell, or for the wrong spell), fail to get poison from the mad scientist (you only get one try; after talking to him the first time, he'll throw you out of his lab and lock the door), get locked up in a cold storage without means to get out, annoy a vital character ... In addition, entering the wrong room without appropriate protection may result in your death (and you have no idea about the danger until after you die).

Other Examples

The 1984 Namco arcade game Tower of Druaga (adapted to an anime in 2008) features a hero going through a 60 level tower. Each level has a hidden treasure; some treasures are bad, and make the game unwinnable. This fact might not be discovered until many levels later; nor can the item's properties be discerned until obtained. A rare case of Guide Dang It in a arcade game. To make matters worse, some early arcade consoles had a bug simply making the last level unbeatable.
The Atari 7800 game Impossible Mission centered on gathering six pieces of a device to prevent a Mad Scientist from blowing up the world. The catch? There was a bug in the programming that made the mission literally impossible - you could not collect one of the pieces. This is a rare case where the game was unwinnable through no fault of the player.
- This is a port-specific case of Unwinnable; only the Atari 7800 version of this game contains the bug, and specifically the NTSC version. All other versions of the game, including the original Commodore 64 version, and the PAL version of the Atari 7800 port (where the bug was fixed) do not contain the bug, and are therefore winnable.
Similarly, in the N64 game Spacestation: Silicon valley one of the game's trophies was uncollectable, resulting in it being impossible to access the final level without a cheat code.
Though not exactly an Unwinnable situation, a nasty glitch in some initial release versions of Spyro: Enter The Dragon makes it impossible to achieve Hundred Percent Completion: in the first Speedway level, if you leave the level before winning the second egg, a glitch makes that egg unreachable, even if you win the race for it later.
Using the in-game cheats in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City can make Hundred Percent Completion impossible, as the counter often stalls at 98% or 99%. In San Andreas, using too many cheats reportedly can make a certain mission unwinnable towards the end of the game, forcing players to restart. This occurs when you're tasked with catching a jumping, suicidal NPC in the bed of your truck. With the glitch in place, he automatically falls off and dies before it's possible to reach him. It is unknown if these are genuine glitches or measures taken by the developers to intentionally discourage cheating.
The very first Mega Man game has one of these: in Elec Man's stage, there is an item called the Magnet Beam hidden behind some blocks. A level near the end of the game is impossible to complete without this item, and there's no way to go back and get it. Even better, you have to have one of two specific weapons to get the item, so if you go through the stages in the wrong order you have to visit this stage (and fight its boss) twice.
- That is, unless you're able to take advantage of a game-breaking glitch which allows you to zip through walls and other boundaries.
  - Amusingly enough, once you gain the Magnet Beam, such zipping becomes easier to do, even allowing you to skip all the boss rematches.
- The last boss of Mega Man 2 can only be defeated by Bubble Leads. Getting killed battling the last boss causes you to return to the beginning of the stage with the same amount of Bubble Leads as you had when you died and no way to refill your weapon energy. Hope you're a good shot...
  - That doesn't actually make the game unwinnable: dying enough times to require a continue, and the Blue Bomber is fully recharged with weapon energy at the beginning of the level.
In The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind, it is possible to kill NPCs with whom you must interact in order to complete the main quest. However, even if one breaks the plot in this manner, there is a "back path" to complete the game, though it is much less intuitive and requires you to fight and kill a semi-immortal god-king without access to much of the game's best equipment. The game is at least kind enough to tell the player immediately that "The Thread of Prophecy Has Been Broken" rather than making them figure it out the hard way. The sequel, Oblivion, simply does not allow you to kill any NPCs relevant to the main quest prior to completion (it is possible to kill NPCs relevant to some sidequests).
- Besides having to kill the god-king, you also had to survive the horrible backlash of using the supergizmo that lets you wield the game's final weapons. Normally, he teaches you to use it, but without him, you take massive damage the first time you equip it... so much damage that most players aren't likely to survive without excessive preparation.
- It is however possible in Oblivion to obtain a certain quest item before activating the quest, which makes the game unwinnable since the quest will not detect that you have the one of a kind item, meaning the plot won't advance
  - On the other hand, its predecessor Daggerfall shipped with a number of bugs and glitches that made it impossible to complete the main quest. The plot-breaking bugs were eventually corrected with patches, but one potentially game-breaking bug, which could render the character stuck in "the void" after falling through a flight of stairs, was never satisfactorily fixed and even pops up in certain parts of Morrowind.
- Even in Oblivion, the game can be made unwinnable via important NP Cs. One mission requires that you escort Captain Burd, the leader of Bruma's military forces, to an Oblivion citadel so he could close a gate opened near Bruma. This particular citadel features a lava pit - Burd is plot-important, but if he lands in the lava he will be instantly knocked unconcious, and he can't exit the lava pit because every time he recovers, he is instantly knocked out again.
Ultima IX, as released, has a number of killer bugs that make the game Unwinnable. The most notorious one occurred about 2/3rds of the way into the game, in which some bad clipping code on a screen at the extreme edge of the game map caused some people to literally fall off the edge of the world, with no way back into the game, despite the fact that, visually, you were only one step away from being back on track. Worst of all, your saved games became invalid, and you were forced to start over. Thanks to Executive Meddling and the general destruction of Origin by EA, only three patches were released officially, and there were still game-breakers uncorrected at that point.
Many deals of Klondike solitaire (the version that comes with Windows) are unwinnable from the start, no matter how mad your solitare skillz.
- Of the 32,000 possible random draws in Windows Free Cell, exactly one is unwinnable. Also, entering -1 or -2 as a game number will open an unsolvable game.
Like the Impossible Mission example above, the original release of Jet Set Willy could never be completed due to bugs, most notably the "Attic Bug," which would permanently destroy the game as the result of a certain enemy in "The Attic" level traveling past the ZX Spectrum's video memory and overwriting game data. The developer/publisher originally claimed that the bugs were intentional (saying that the affected rooms were filled with poison gas,) but later released some memory-writing hacks to correct them.
Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was notorious for a door that could only be unlocked with an Interchangeable Antimatter Key, across a moat that you were meant to cross after gaining the ability to swim. However, the designers failed to realize that Link could just barely clear the moat by jumping, leaving him without both the swimming ability needed to finish the dungeon and the key needed to get said ability.
- A similar situation can occur in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (with missing keys), only no fancy jumping required: In the first Dark World dungeon, using one of the Interchangeable Antimatter Keys on the wrong door results in the final key ending up behind a locked door. Very frustrating indeed!
- And in Twilight Princess, there's an infamous glitch where saving and quitting at the scene where you find the big cannon before talking to an NPC makes the game unwinnable. Several known workarounds exist to allow players to talk to the invisible NPC and allow them to escape the "unwinnable" situation.
Battletoads (At least the US version on the NES) is impossible when playing with two players simultaneously--there's a bug in Level 11 where Player 2's Clinger Winger never gets up to speed, so the Hypno Orb runs you over every time. You go back to the start of the level and repeat until you run out of lives.
Several of the games in the old Action 52 compilation (for the NES and Genesis/Mega Drive) are not only Unwinnable due to shoddy programming, but a few of them are also unplayable (even in emulators). Not surprising, since the games that actually do work really, really suck.
Even Super Mario Bros 3 isn't safe from this trope thanks to a rare glitch. In World 5, it is possible for the airship to land on the sky castle and be rendered inaccessible, Or So I Heard.
- Almost true. The airship instead comes to rest on the land-based portion of the map, displayed in miniature in the upper left corner of the sky map. Of course, when you chase it down to ground level, it's nowhere to be found...
A live-action example: Though not always consistent, the children's game show Legends of the Hidden Temple had an end game that can become unwinnable depending on certain situations. First, there were the Pendants of Life, needed to get past three Temple Guards that will yank a contestant out of the temple during the end game if they don't have a full one, and which are rewarded in a Golden Snitch-type 1-1-2 three game system; one half pendant for the first two games, a full one for the last. Because of this, it's possible to make it to the end game with only 1 and a half or even a singular Pendant (though in the case of the former, the show gives the contestants the chance to find the other half-Pendant inside the temple), and depending on where the Temple Guards are hiding and which doors in the temple are locked, it's very possible (and has happened several times in the show's run) to be forced to encounter all three Temple Guards with only one pendant, a definite no-win situation.
There's an old strategy in the Yu-Gi-Oh CCG known as the Lockdown, a deck that forces a continuous loop that - once in place - makes it impossible for the opponent to counter.
- You can do this with quite a few card combinations in Magic: The Gathering as well. The rule is that if the game ends up in an unstoppable or loop, it ends in a draw. If it is stoppable, the players simply decide how many times the loop occurs.
Similar to Super Metroid: In Fire Emblem for the Famicom, Medeus, the final boss of the game, has 35 Physical Defense instead of 12 as his status screen suggests, as well as complete immunity to magic spell attacks. Therefore, the only ways to scratch him in battle (and thereby be able to kill him) are by using the Falchion or any useable non-magic weapons with a Sharpness of anywhere above 15 (because everyones strength caps at 20), which is limited to Devil weapons, the Royal weapons, the Fire Dragon Stone, and the Elephant Gun. The Falchion can be missed, the Fire Dragon Stone or its users can be lost, and the other listed weapons disappear from inventory if used too much, so the player can end up having none of these weapons and therefore be unable to clear the last chapter.
- A few of the games in the Fire Emblem series have potential Unwinnable situations if you don't have the necessary weapons to even scratch final bosses along with characters with the necessary ability to use them effectively enough.
  - In particular, FE10's five-part final chapter. If the team you brought can't beat Ashera, then you're going to have to start the entire game over.
- To remedy this in a few of the later games a character like Athos (Seventh Game) might be brought into your party for the last chapter(s). Someone with amazingly high stats and equipment, and generally nearly capped in all stats. While not a surefire way to solve it, it does make the game less Cruel (which most Fire Emblem games are). As from personal experience on my first playthrough of a Fire Emblem game, nobody had the stats to be able to face the Dragon and hurt him. Should also be said that this is part of every Fire Emblem game being amazingly baldness causingly hard.
  - Except for 2/8, but that is one of many reasons no one likes them
- Another reason why you could be stuck in an unwinnable situation in Fire Emblem is if you have done a poor job of leveling your characters. Since you can't go back to previous stages to level (except in some heretical games like FE8, where you can fight monsters whenever you want to level up), your party could be too weak to complete the chapter no matter how good your tactics are and no matter how many people you let die.
The craptacular NES game Heroes of the Lance was especially craptacular for one reason: If the easy-to-die cleric Goldmoon ever dies and you don't retrieve her Blue Crystal Staff, the game ends up unwinnable.
Television/Movie Example: Star Trek. Captains who go through the Academy have to, at least once before their Graduation, take the Unbeatable Scenario, where, no matter what they do, they will be destroyed by an Alien Encounter. James T. Kirk was the only captain to actually beat the UNBEATABLE Scenario... by honestly reprogramming the computer the night before.
- Although other officers have been described as sort-of evading simulated death by changing the mission parameters (Scotty taking advantage of a glitch in the simulation's physics, and others simply refusing to take their ship into the situation where the no-win situation happens).
- Also, by the time of The Next Generation, it's apparent that Starfleet had figured out other ways of testing this sort of thing. Troi's test involved ordering a close friend to certain death in order to save the rest of the ship and crew in a simulation. Wesley had a version of the test (which he didn't realize was one) involving being forced to leave someone behind in a deadly situation in order to save who he could.
- One of William Shatner's own continuation novels had a new character bring up to Kirk about how he was the first to beat the scenario... and then immediately and unwittingly bring him down several pegs by revealing that everyone wins the scenario nowadays. It's become a programming challenge rather than a command one.
Return to Zork tries to make the game unwinnable whenever you kill someone, but it can easily fail. Besides the person's dialogue and options being, you know, killed away, you are also arrested for murder and punished by having your items scattered. But if you put the items down, or simply didn't need them any more, you can still win the game as a horrible, brutal serial murderer!
- Then there's the infamous bonding plant from Return to Zork. The plant appears in the first screen of the game, and since it's possible to snatch it with your hands and take it with you, that's probably what the player will do. Only much later in the game will the player discover that they needed to dig the plant up and keep it alive so it's possible to win the game. This example in particular feels like a deliberate trick on the designers' part. Supposedly there's a way to get another one, but this troper had to restart instead.
In Castle Smurfenstein, a hacked version of the original Apple II Castle Wolfenstein, the game was deliberately modified so that it's impossible to get past first level, among other things.
Phantasy Star III can become unwinnable, if you engage in a little Script Breaking in the beginning by using an Escapipe after being arrested. Apparently, you don't just break the script, you break the whole damn game. Fortunately, there's no way to save afterwards.
In Little Big Adventure you are required to break into the museum, and you are supposed to do this by using the Red Key Card on the back door in order to get to the sewers, evacuate the museum by turning on the alarm there, then come back and get the treasure from the museum. Technically, if you are skilled enough, you can skip all of this and just go through the front door, avoiding the guards, get the items and escape before getting arrested. The problem is, if you do this before getting the Card, you will no longer be able to obtain it, and since it is used to open a few more doors later on, you can't complete the game without it.
Final Fantasy Tactics had a battle with Wiegraf that was easy to make unwinnable if you saved the game before the battle and didn't have a backup save, since you couldn't leave Riovanes Castle to get equipment or gain experience. Many a player has ended up starting the game over because of this...
- Ironically, the main character had a game breaking ability which enhanced his speed and strength a small amount for the duration of the battle. The catch was that it could be stacked indefinitely, to the point where he could run circles around the opponent and kill anything in a single hit. As the skill was part of his mostly useless base class set and the stacking effect not obvious, many players did not realize that this character could single-handedly win the game.
  - Scream (the ability in question) is, however, not available until the fourth chapter, and Focus and the speed increase (whatever it's called), while useful, generally took far too long to stack up to the necessary levels if the main character was left on his own. Far from game-breaking, it was more of a challenge.
"Pharaoh," the first secret level of TNT: Evilution (one of the Expansion Packs that came with Final Doom,) was rendered impossible to finish by the fact that a vital key was erroneously flagged to appear only in multiplayer. id Software did not fix this bug in their distribution (and never has, to this day,) but the creators of the pack, TeamTNT, quickly released a patch allowing the key to appear in any mode. Not that it's stopped people from discovering how to complete the level without it, though.
Net Hack has uncountable ways to kill you, but only one way to become unwinnable: if you offer an animal sacrifice at an enemy god's altar while out of favour with your patron god, you will become a convert to that god's cult. And if you fall from grace before having entered your quest, then the game becomes wedged in way that may not become apparent for thousands of turns. A bug? Nope. If you look in the game's source, you can see the developers included code to handle just that vanishingly unlikely situation.
Many of the physics-based puzzles in Zack and Wiki can be rendered unwinnable by performing steps incorrectly or in the wrong order, for example dropping the platform part of a see-saw into place before the base is ready. Since the game is made up of short levels that can be retried as many times as you want this isn't as evil as many of the other cases.
Sonic The Hedgehog games, by their nature, don't have Unwinnable situations pop up in normal gameplay... normal gameplay. The original release of Sonic Adventure had several glitches that allowed you to get stuck. This editor still remembers the time he glitched himself through the roof of the train station at the beginning of Tails's story, and proceeded to play and finish Casinopolis before the casino area was unlocked... and found himself unable to leave the area and stuck there by the game's auto-saving, permanently ruining the entire save file (which has stories for six characters).
- For that matter, Carnival Night Zone, Act 2 in Sonic 3, is pretty much impossible to escape if you get caught between two red and white swirling things without knowing the trick... and you will. Dear God, you will.
- Let's not forget that nasty section of act two of the cavern in Sonic 2-it was particularily easy to be caught down there as super sonic (and you would likely be waiting for a good while), but if one kept trying to catch their many rings in hopes of finding a way out, they could stay there practically indefinitely.
In Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, ordering new machinery can render the game unplayable if the machinery arrives on the first day right after a chapter change. The only way around this is to simply not order machinery in the last season of a chapter, as the exact date the machinery arrives is random.
- Similarly, though not a true Unwinnable situation, in the North American Harvest Moon: DS two glitches caused both the Witch Princess (the game didn't keep track of the number of dead animals) and the Harvest Goddess (Buckwheat Flour was missing, meaning you couldn't complete your shipping or cooking lists) only unable to be married (though you could still finish the game by just marrying another girl). These were corrected in an updated version (DS 1.1) and Harvest Moon: DS Cute, so these girls could be chosen for the "Best Friends Ceremony." Other glitches rendered the game frozen.
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream was edited in Germany to remove Nimdok and his scenario, because it was set in a concentration camp. This made it impossible to complete the game, because all five characters's scenarios must be finished to reach the last segment.
Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy had a save point that would trap you behind the locked door to a passageway, thus making your save game worthless. If you ever play the game, save yourself the trouble and look up the glitch online. It's nasty.
Wing Commander III: Heart Of The Tiger has a campaign path depending on your performance on previous missions where you fight against an endless wave of Kilrathi until you either quit the game or die. Wing Commander IV has a similar situation, at the point where the plot wants you to defect to the Union of Border Worlds. If you decline the second of two chances, and choose to stay with Confed, infinite waves of Border World bombers spawn up until your carrier is destroyed, ending the game. Even if you cheat and remove all the enemy craft from the mission, your carrier explodes on its own.
This troper recently encountered a glitch in Sonic The Hedgehog 3/Sonic 3 and Knuckles that makes the game unwinnable if it happens; during either act of Marble Garden Zone, while playing Sonic with Tails following, it's possible to glitch Tails off the screen so you go through the rest of the Zone solo, but doing so prevents Tails from returning to aid you in fighting the Zone's main boss, and you're stuck off the screen and out of reach until you reset the game.
The battle system in Crystalis includes a very questionable design choice. While it is true that when you get enough defense, some enemies are no longer able to hurt you, the same applies to the enemies. In the end, this means that if you are underleveled when you reach a boss, none of your attacks will be able to hurt it. You can't flee from a boss battle, either. Time to head back to your last save!
Though there's no specific instance where this happens, due to the rarity of both ammunition and health restoring items in the early games in the Resident Evil series, it was possible to save before a boss with very little of either, making the game unwinnable to most players. Later games give you enough ammunition to invade Spain, so this is less of a problem.
Live Action example: Knightmare had a No Backtracking rule, meaning it was very possible for the teams to miss out on a vital clue or item. In a few cases, this led to an extremely hard Luck Based Mission, but usually it was only a matter of time before their mistake came back to kill them.
The original Mechwarrior for the PC required you to head to a specific planet in order to begin the sequence to beat the game. However, after a certain point in time, going to the planet merely resulted in an unceremonius 'Game Over' screen. So, typically, by the time you're able to build up your forces to a respectable level, it's too late.
In X-COM: Terror From the Deep combines this with a long-term Luck Based Mission: it's possible to progress through the game without fighting any Deep Ones. You need to capture one alive to learn Alien USO Construction, which you need to proceed to the endgame.
- This actually resulted in a Non Standard Game Over, as the inability to proceed to the endgame would eventually result in far more alien sub activity than the player could respond to (alien activity increases linearly as game time increases), which would eventually result in all funding nations pulling funding and the player being SOL. This "bug" is, however, notoriously difficult to recreate, as Deep Ones are numerous throughout the game until a certain point.
In Inindo for the SNES you eventually reach a point where you must complete a Fetch Quest in order to be rewarded with the key to unlock the door to the rest of the game. When you complete the quest and talk to the person with the key you are asked if you have space in your inventory to accept it and given a yes/no option. If the first character in your party does not have any free spaces in their inventory when you say yes then the key just disappears and there is no way to get another one. If you save the game before realizing that, for example because you checked your inventory beforehand and saw that the *second* character had space in their inventory and assumed that was okay, then the game is now stuck in an unwinnable state.
Warhammer - Shadow of the Horned Rat had a stage with so many Orcs it was deemed "impossible" by the makers themselves, and for good reason, there was no stage beyond it. One wily player managed to get through, only to have the game lock up as it tried to load a stage that didn't exist.
Baldurs Gate had a nonstandard game over where if you leveled accusations at the Big Bad without the evidence on your person (or at least the person of one of your party members), you would get called on it and subsequently hit with a flamestrike spell against which there was no save and instantly killed you. Since the invitation's icon looked like any of a dozen scrolls you might have been carrying around at the time, and since non-magical game items would decay after a certain amount of time...
- To be fair to the designer's, they did a lot of things to try to avert this. First, they gave the required item only a few minutes (in real-time) before it was required. Second, when a character is given an item by an NPC, they are forced to drop another item to accept it with the appropriate message to the player. Finally, all the items, including scrolls, had unique names that the player could access. Dropping the very obviously required item and letting it decay would be, quite frankly, difficult to do without an accompanying Idiot Ball.
Links Awakening for the Game Boy. One particular dungeon had you manipulating giant metal balls around to solve a puzzle... except that dropping a ball down a very obvious hole fouled up its respawning, wrecking the game and forcing a restart.
In the PC mystery game Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silver Earring, the action takes place over the course of a series of days. The game is rendered unwinnable on the first day if Holmes neglects to pick up a particular clue. This seems to be a glitch, rather than by design, since failure to pick up any other clues will cause the game to prevent him from moving forward, but it will allow him to go ahead even if he doesn't pick up the autographed picture in the young woman's dressing room. The player will be unaware that there's a problem until the fourth day in-game, when he is supposed to show that clue to someone; his inability to do so brings the game to a screeching halt.
In La Mulana, it is possible to be unable to complete the game by transforming the Shrine of the Mother before getting the Death Seal, one of the four seals required to summon the game's final boss; transforming the shrine dramatically alters its layout, including the room where you can get the seal, making it impossible to solve the puzzle required to obtain it.
In Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3, to face the last opponent and be able to finish the game, you must defeat the other 599 opponents. However, one particular opponent, Whirlwind Fanfare, only appears when you have 100,000,000 CP, and the maximum CP you can carry is 99,999,990. Due to this glitch, it is impossible to beat the game without using a cheat device.
In the flash game "Pandemic 2," the game is unwinnable if Madagascar shuts its ports. Your actual chance at winnable is pretty slim. If someone in Brazil even so much as coughs, they'll pretty much freakout and close their port to avoid infection
Both Baten Kaitos games pull this one. In the first, saving on a certain airship makes it so you can't level up until you clear the airship, and, naturally, said airship has That One Boss at the end. Origins does the same thing, only in a dungeon right after a disc change, so you almost certainly have just saved over your file during the disc-switching prompt. Nice.
Many RP Gs have dungeons you cannot exit until you finish them. Some, such as Final Fantasy XII are nice, and warn you of the fact so you can save in a different file. Others, such as Star Ocean The Second Story are not quite so nice.

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