There's one room near the end where Farah waits by a switch. She will not pull it until you complete a set of puzzles. Once everything is ready, Farah should pull the lever automatically... but sometimes she doesn't. She will stand there silently while you jump around in anger and grope for the 'reset' button.
There are two areas in the game where you can fall off beams, survive the fall, but fall too far to get back to where you were, making the game unwinnable.
Late into the game, there is a puzzle section that is immediately preceded by combat. The puzzle requires you to make a few jumps that deal a small amount of fall damage. Unfortunately, there is no way to heal after the combat, so if your health is low, you cannot continue.
Killing an enemy with the dagger refills one use's worth of sand... and restarts the timer that determines how far back you can rewind time (i.e., you can't rewind to before killing the enemy). At one point, you have to defend Farah from a swarm of enemies. Kill one shortly before another manages to kill her, and you will be forced to watch your sand be depleted automatically in a futile attempt to undo her death.
In the PS2 version there is a save point located near a spike pit. If you so happen to save there, Farah may fall into the spikes and die. It's possible to save again while she's dying, but regardless of that you will need to start from zero.
The "Sand Wraith bug," which occurs early in the game if you save in the wrong place, gets you turned into the sand wraith before you're supposed to. The subsequent Unwinnable situation happens near the end of the game, right before the final boss. You end up having to start the game over after coming all that way.
A different glitch with the same ultimate result: You can glitch right before the final boss if you go back to the previous room to save before going through the portal. When you return, the portal will no longer react — and you can't go further back than the save point.
Another glitch in the final battle is if the boss accidentally sends themselves off the ledge far from it. They will be suspended in the air, with the player unable to do anything to them and vice-versa.
Other unwinnable situations arise from oversights rather than glitches. In some rooms, it is possible to move platforms to locations other than their intended ones and still exit the room if you do it all fast enough. When you return to those rooms as the Sand Wraith, the platforms will be too low or too far apart to make it across.
Late in the game, it's possible to return to various sections to collect upgrades you missed earlier; but, due to a glitch, one of them is a dead end with not one, not two, but three save points in it, making it easy to save yourself into an unwinnable state.
At the end of the Upper Tower, there's a section where you have to run up a wall to a dagger plate, then jump from a shutter to another dagger plate. Be prepared to use several sand tanks, or worse, lives before finding the right moment when you should bounce to the plate, especially when all other shutter jumps in the game are straightforward. Solution hereIt's also possible to skip all dagger plates to directly reach the ledge, but once again, you have to jump at the very right pixel.
It's also possible to skip all dagger plates to directly reach the ledge