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Anti-Frustration Features

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"After getting stuck and swimming across boiling hot lava back to the beginning of the maze several times, it occurs to you that you could shortcut this whole stupid sonofabitch by simply swimming to the goal."

"There is one feature I will happily abase myself before: mid-boss checkpoints. This is a game where a boss can be the size of the moon and have eleven health bars. Chipping the first ten away only to be killed by a casual elbow to the face is frustrating enough without having to take it from the top."

People generally play games to have fun with them. However, sometimes gameplay can hit a snag, and the game then becomes either a chore to play at best, or an intolerable nuisance at worst.

That's where Anti-Frustration Features (sometimes called "Quality of Life" features for obvious reasons) come in; instances in a game designed to alleviate frustration, either in normal gameplay or from previous series iterations.

There are three variants to them. The first is where the established rules of the game are suspended/modified under certain circumstances, or a particular effect that happens when the game deliberately helps you out during a specific situation. Usually an example of an Obvious Rule Patch to prevent unwinnable situations from developing, such as if a given Boss Battle mandates the use of one specific weapon with limited uses (be it Breakable Weapons, Cast from Hit Points, or a simple lack of Bottomless Magazines). It can also occur in other situations, but those are less common.

The second is where they come in the form of very minor changes to the game or interface that provide great conveniences to the player, which alleviates frustrating features found in the prequels or similar games of their genre. For instance, the ability to quickly return to any branching point in a Dialogue Tree within a visual novel, or the addition of little icons on a minimap to allow the player to know where to go to advance the plot.

The third variant, accessibilitynote  is a variant that has been around for many years but hadn't become an established thing until the mid-2010s. This includes features like text size and contrast options, color-blindness filters/design, replacing button-mashes with holds, skipping puzzles with extreme dexterity, and more. Many of these can be convenient for able-bodied players too, such as aim lock-on. Perhaps the oldest example is subtitles, but it's best to not list these as games with this feature are too numerous to count, unless it's a special circumstance like being added in a patch.

While Anti-Frustration Features can be found in practically any video game these days, they're particularly notable in Remakes and Remasters, which often add new features to help make it less frustrating and more intuitive for modern players. For example, a remake of game that used a Password Save will use Autosave instead, or a 3D Platformer's remake adds camera inversion options. And as noted above, sequels will often improve the gameplay with these so that the player can better focus on the core mechanics.

While being a game trope, this isn't exclusive to video games - game shows may contain these as well. Such as acknowledging a challenge is unfair and giving them an out.

Can sometimes lead to some slight backlash, and may also take the form of Suspicious Video-Game Generosity. See Video Game Delegation Penalty for cases where taking advantage of these features leads to a less desirable result.

This is a Super-Trope to:

Related to Player Nudge, when the game helps you out only in times where the solution isn't obvious; Reduced-Downtime Features, which minimize the time spent away from the action in a game; and Anti-Rage Quitting or Anti-Trolling Features, where the developers try to keep players from being frustrated at other players as opposed to the game itself. Sometimes added to the game through Reset Milestones.

Can overlap with Author's Saving Throw if the feature is added to address a common complaint. See also Acceptable Breaks from Reality for when it is the rules of reality that are changed.

Not to be confused with Mercy Mode.


Examples for specific titles:

Other examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Adventure Games 
  • Chicory: A Colorful Tale:
    • Boss fights are the only combat in this game, and the difficulty of said fights can be adjusted freely in the menu, even during the boss fights themselves. It can go all the way from making you a One-Hit-Point Wonder to letting you take an infinite number of hits. And if even that's too much, you can just make yourself untouchable so that bosses can't even hit you.
    • Calling Pizza's parents will give hints to get around. Pizza's mom gives you general hints as to where you should be going, with an option for her to pass the phone to Pizza's dad, who will give exact details about what you need to do to progress. These hints even factor in the phone booth that you called from for Dad's directions. For instance, Mom might say "you should go to the dark tree", with Dad following up with "you need to go two screens to the left, then follow the road".
    • Content warnings for intense moments can be enabled, and they give the option to proceed or skip potentially triggering scenes.
    • While rare, it's possible while swimming through paint to accidentally end up in an area you weren't supposed to get to yet with no way back. To counteract this, you can just teleport right back to Luncheon.
  • A game based on the Connections TV show featured a hint book that told you how to solve certain puzzles. Said hint book also included a few "magic buttons" that, if you clicked on them, would instantly solve a puzzle or put you right at the screen you needed to be at. The game also included a small inventory system, with the objects used for certain puzzles or doors. You could only use these objects on the screen they were designed to be used on, though; attempting to use them at any other time netted you a "not yet!" message, so you didn't spend a lot of time pointlessly trying every object on every pixel of every screen.
  • Cragne Manor: To avoid frustration with using the parser, the bridge room will regularly tell you the correct command to type for things you might want to do, such as throwing the rope into the water.
  • The Dame Was Loaded had a tuxedo needed at one point to get into the Blue Angel nightclub. If you miss it the first time, there’s an alternative route planned to save you from having to reload.
  • On the Armor Games version of Don't Escape 3, the AG quests corresponding to the in-game achievements were only added after the game had been up for a while and, as a result, a lot of players had gotten them already. To prevent players from having to do the same things twice, the quests were coded so that going to the achievements page in-game would trigger the completion of any quest whose corresponding achievement was already completed.
  • In the Farnham Fables games, pressing the X button or the middle mouse button will highlight every interactive item on the screen, eliminating the need for Pixel Hunting.
  • Ghost in the Sheet has two arcade sequences; you can use a command to skip them if they're too difficult for you (the rat one you should probably be able to get on your own; good luck with the fireflies though).
  • Hadean Lands: The game remembers what you've done and what you've seen, and will repeat things you've done before upon request. This includes going to any particular item or location that you've seen, unlocking any doors along the way and creating any resources required to open them.
  • Hiveswap:
    • In Act 2, getting a Game Over will take you back to shortly before it happens rather than your last save. The game also autosaves a lot, allowing you to make use of Save Scumming to get certain achievements that can't be gotten on the same playthrough, so there are only a few where you'll have to replay the entire game.
    • Pressing the hint button enough times during the trial segment in Act 2 will have Tyzias straight up show you when to press and which evidence to present.
  • Modern-day interactive fiction not uncommonly comes with an 'undo' command, allowing the player to simply take back moves if desired. (This is for example the default in games written with Inform 7 unless explicitly disabled by the designer.)
  • The first two King's Quest games have a set of "minor treasures" to allow you to get past certain obstacles, such as bribing the troll in the first game, or buying a lamp with two treasures in the second. You won't get a high score, but at least you won't get stuck TOO much.
    • The NES version of King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! makes it much less frustrating to play compared to its parent game: the trackless desert is made smaller; you get a second chance to save the rat from the cat (failure would make the game unwinnable); and it is impossible to screw up the Chain of Deals to get the provisions to trek the mountain.
    • Messing up most of the puzzles in King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow will not make the game unwinnable — if you do screw up, you can take the "short path" through the game instead. You will not get the Golden Ending, naturally, but at least you can actually get through to the end.
  • AGD Interactive's Fan Remake, Kings Quest III Redux, adds quite a few to alivate some of the frustating or boring parts of the original version, King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human:
    • The original version ran on a timer that couldn't be advanced in any way other than by standing around and waiting. This made waiting around for the wizard to return so you could feed him tedious and the pirate ship (where you had to wait like 15 to 25 minutes for the ship to reach Daventry) horribly boring. This version allows you to sleep on your bed to skip time to the wizard's next appearance and the pirate section is completely event-based rather than time-based.
    • The original had several mountain path screens both on the path to Manannan's house and the Abominable Snowman's Mountain where the path was extremely narrow and curvy and a single step caused you to fall to your death. Here, the paths are straight and generally a lot less narrow so you're less likely to die if you click on the wrong pixel.
    • In the original game, the game became unwinnable if you gave the wizard the normal porridge and if you ran out of food items, you would eventually die because you had nothing to feed him. But here, one of the food items respawns.
    • In the original, the only way to find out the wizard's schedule was to die and take note of the time. Here, the game's timer is color-coded with red font meaning Manannan was about to return. This eliminated the Jump Scare factor somewhat, but the exact time of return was randomized and you never knew exactly when your master would return, so it could create some very tense moments if the timer turned red sooner than you expected and you still had lots of tracks to cover.
    • In the original, using the magic map to warp to the wizard's house teleported you to the foot of the mountain, forcing you to traverse the narrow mountain path every single time. Here, you are teleported to the middle of the mountain path instead, just past the most treacherous part.
  • In Lost Chronicles Of Zerzura, the tip of the cursor turns red if something can be interacted with or used on something else.
  • In Lost Horizon, the cursor resembles a mouse when you hover over things. The right button is highlighted if you can look at something and the left button is highlighted if you can interact with it or use it on something else.
  • Never Gives Up Her Dead:
    • The game allows you to replay conversations you've already had with the REMEMBER command, in case there's any details you forgot or didn't pick up on the first time around.
    • The Locator setting on the multi-purpose tool will alert you to any items that belong in different dimensions, and tell you what they are (using labels you set yourself).
  • Andrew Schultz's Prime Pro Rhyme Row games:
    • Each of the games gives you the Leet Learner, a tool that gives you hints on how many letters you need to change for an item to get the right solution.
    • Another tool is the Lurking Lump. Typing guesses that make sense but aren't exactly what you need will contribute the lump, and when you make enough, you earn a Jerking Jump that can immediately solve a puzzle you're stuck on.
    • Solutions you've figured out that you can't use yet will be stored in the THINK command for later use, signaling when you can use them.
  • An odd one in Quest for Glory II: If you destroy a certain item (the bellows from Issur's shop), the game will instantly give you a Game Over instead of letting you wander around in an unwinnable state. As a bonus, the Game Over screen will give you a hint on what you will use that item on! (The bellows are used to trap the Air Elemental.)
  • The remake of Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter allows you to skip the arcade sequence (dodging rocks with a sandskimmer) without penalty, and get through the Betting Mini-Game (a randomized slot machine) without many saves and restores.

    Card Games 
  • A3 has an auto feature during lessons which stop the player from tapping too many times to proceed, and also saves time.
  • Card City Nights 2: Instead of decking out, there's a fatigue system when your deck is empty. Trying to draw from an empty deck deals damage to you, starting at just 1 but increasing by 1 for each card drawn. This gives players multiple turns to try and win after their deck is empty, while still punishing you for drawing through your deck too quickly.
  • Ensemble Stars! guarantees that if you make it to 5.5 million event points, you will receive a copy of the ranking event card, regardless of what the actual border ends up being. This was devised to deal with the extremely varying borders events could reach up to - at the lower end, some events barely get over 2 million, which for a good team making full use of regenerated LP might take less dia than a gacha pull, but as the game's audience grows the more popular units and characters were starting to achieve extremely high borders above 5 million, which would require hundreds of dia. Even where the border ends up around 5.5 million anyway, the knowledge that a card is guaranteed then is more than enough to soothe a lot of anxiety (especially since the last-minute rush at such high levels tends to be extremely brutal), and since many players are satisfied to simply reach that point and then stop, events which might have spiraled into ludicrously high borders are softened (for example, it was projected that the current record-holder Knights Repayfes would reached 8 million event points if the card were not available; as it is, it still got to over 6 million.)
  • Hearthstone:
    • Instead of decking out, Hearthstone uses a fatigue system when your deck is empty. Trying to draw from an empty deck deals damage to you, starting at just 1 but increasing by 1 for each card drawn. This gives players multiple turns to try and win after their deck is empty, while still punishing you for drawing through your deck too quickly.
    • Minions with conditional effects have a yellow border instead of green when their condition is fulfilled. This can be really important for cards like Reno Jackson which check whether your deck has any duplicate cards or not - which would otherwise require keeping track of every card you've drawn that game.
      • Related to this, a few cards had a requirement that your deck was full of only even-cost cards or odd-cost. When putting them into your deck, the game would give you a prompt and recommend only even/odd cost cards.
    • The Mage Quest card Open the Waygate requires the player to play spells that didn't start in their deck. Cards that you get through generation effects are normally unmarked in your hand, but hovering over the quest will highlight any spells that fill the requirement.
    • If your opponent goes AFK, you'll only have to wait out a full turn from them once. If they run out of time without taking any actions, their future turns will only be 7 seconds long. Enough of these in a row, and they automatically lose. If they really did disconnect or something, they can get their full turn back by taking any action, which gives them a normal turn timer.
    • There is a hard limit of 89 turns. At the start of the 90th, the game ends in a draw. This prevents two players with some way to infinitely restock their decks or cheese fatigue from having to play "concede chicken", giving you an out that results in no lost rank points.
    • Whenever a card is nerfed, you can disenchant it for full dust value for a short period afterwards. This lets you craft something of equal value, or save up for a rarer card more easily. On a similar note, sometimes the Arena game mode will go through a rules change that requires all active decks to be retired. When this happens to you, you're given a free Arena ticket.
    • The Death Knight class uses an exclusive resource called Corpses in order to cast and/or power-up some of their cards. No other class could generate Corpses. This made a large number of Death Knight cards useless in other classes, which is an issue since Rogue and Priest both have effects to copy cards from another class. Originally, the solution was to make cards that require Corpses impossible to randomly generate, but this didn't protect you from effects that copied cards directly (in particular, the Half & Half tavern brawl forces you to play with your opponent's cards, and Death Knights could build a completely dead deck). A few months after Death Knights launched, Blizzard gave every class access to Corpses, but made the counter invisible unless you are a Death Knight or have DK cards.
  • Inscryption: If a match is at a point where you will clearly win but it'll take multiple turns to finish (possibly because the opponent is out of cards but you are many points behind), your opponent will offer to surrender, letting you just finish the game there and move on. You can still choose to take your time and play on, though, as (eventual) success that inflicts overkill damage will earn some in-game currency.
  • Magic: The Gathering:
    • Usually, mechanics that prove too annoying or too complex to explain or track are simply not reprinted or printed on new cards, removing them from most formats.
    • In both Online and Arena there are hotkeys and options to allow you to automatically pass pioriety to reduce the amount of of time used up when you have nothing to play. Online also lets you set up automatic passes on individual abilities that trigger often multiple times. You can also set up skipping whole phases by clicking on the phase buttons.
    • If a card in Arena lets you cast it from a place outside of your hand it'll appear in a separate "hand" beside your normal one. Some cards that keep track of something (such as creature cards in the graveyard) will have a number on them for quick reference and mana costs will be adjusted to reflect any effects that alter casting cost.
    • Because it lacks the ability to trade cards, Arena instead gives players wildcards in packs and as rewards for opening packs that can be traded for cards of the same rarity so that players can make their decks without having to grind though too many packs to do so.
    • Whenever a card is banned in Standard in Arena they will also comp players with Wildcards of that card's rarity equal to the amount they had as an aplogy.
    • +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters nullify each other entirely, so a creature that has had 3 +1/+1 counters and 1 -1/-1 counter placed on it has 2 +1/+1 counters on it rather than 4 counters total. While there are a handful of cards that would care about such things, keeping track of multiple types of counters on a single creature is enough of a hassle that it's not worth doing so for the two most common counter types that simply negate each other's effects, just for such cases.
    • Some old cards care about the order, not simply the contents, of a player's graveyard. Figuring out what order things that should enter can be irritating, and players might like to be able to e.g. put a card with flashback on top to remind themselves they could play it. Consequently players are given the ability to rearrange their graveyards at will in any format these cards aren't legal, since there's no way the order can be relevant (and in casual play the rule is normally ignored anyway, because the cards that make it matter are rare, unpopular, and not even very good).
    • Playing lands and producing mana are both defined as "Special Actions" which operate outside of the normal timing rules, so that they are impossible to interact with. This prevents players from disrupting them and slowing down the game. Additionally, the ability to destroy lands has been slowly but heavily nerfed, to the point where the only formats where land destruction cards are made also include other ways to obtain mana. Land destruction is still a viable strategy with a deck, it's just not as much of a Game-Breaker as it used to be.
    • On a more meta-level, Common and Uncommon cards are designed to be less complex and easier to understand than Rare and Mythic Rare cards. This serves two purposes: it lowers the difficulty of the Draft format, and prevents new players (who tend to mostly own Commons) from becoming overwhelmed and giving up in confusion.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Links has an auto-duel option for standard opponents, which can be turned off mid-fight, and an automatic deck creator, which automatically uses your strongest cards.

    Edutainment Games 
  • In Beecarbonize, the cards that lead to the winning golden card are marked with a star on the lower-right corner, so you won't have to guess which cards will produce it.
  • The Rings of Fire minigame in The ClueFinders 3rd Grade Adventures: The Mystery of Mathra is quite difficult - the game will give you two numbers, and you must find the product, quotient, difference, or sum on a grid, then click in a "Battleship" way to form words. If you play it like Battleship and just fire at adjacent tiles after getting a "hit", even if it's not the "intended" answer the game will consider this valid. The game will even have dialogue acknowledging this. This is especially helpful since the game may sometimes "jump" around to one of the three words you are trying to form.
  • Duolingo:
    • The game is fairly loose when it comes to grammar - as long as the sentence's intent isn't affected, one or two typos or different words are usually accepted. For instance, typing "I am from Spain" when the game wanted you to type "I come from Spain" will be accepted as correct, since the overall meaning was still expressed correctly.
    • Forgoing certain special letters and/or accent markers (such as e/é/è or n/ñ) is often allowed as long as it doesn't alter the meaning of the sentence. You're only gently reminded which character you should have used with a typo correction on the bottom of the page, even though your answer still gets accepted.
    • On browsers, after completing a course for the first time, you can redo the lessons with slightly more difficulty. However, if you ace the first two lessons of the harder courses with no mistakes, the game lets you skip straight to the next level of the course, since you clearly know what you're doing.
    • When translating sentences, words and phrases that the game wants you to translate for the first time will be highlighted in orange, making you notice them easier and letting you mouse over the word to see what it is.
    • The game won't penalize you if your mistake is due to a reasonable typo, such as being only one letter off, unless that typo creates a different word that it recognizes.
    • If you can't listen to audio lessons for whatever reason, you can just click "Can't Listen Now" and all audio lessons will be skipped for an hour. You won't be penalized in the amount of XP you earn if you do this, either. There's also a "Can't Speak Now" button for lessons in which you have to talk into a microphone to give the answer.
  • JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain: In the Observatory level, you must identify the correct constellation to win a mission clue. If you click on enough wrong constellations, Botley will tell you the answer.
  • Super Solvers Series:
    • In Treasure Cove!, you use bubbles to attack things and move around the level. To obtain bubbles, you have to shine your flashlight at the bubble station a few times to pay for them, and bubbles could in turn be used to capture starfish, who reward correct answers to questions with more flashlight energy. Since you could, if you tried very hard, waste all of your bubbles and light, the game would place electric eels on the next screen you swam to to give you a free energy boost, rather than leave you to swim around a now-Unwinnable game.
    • This also applies to all Super Solver games. Treasure Mountain! and Treasure Math Storm! have the same thing, if you swap flashlight for coins, and electric eels with coins laying on the ground.

    Fighting Games 
  • The otherwise insanely-powerful-even-for-an-SNK Boss of Arcana Heart 3 score attack, Parace, starts with less life each time you continue. After losing to her a dozen times or so, she'll start with about a quarter of full health and can be taken out with a single blaze — if you can hit her.
  • In Battle Fantasia's Story Mode, continuing after defeat will start you with a full level on your MP bar. This continues up to Level 3, after which you are given infinite MP.
  • Dragon Ball FighterZ:
    • The Dynamic Entry that accompanies a character being KO'd is done to avoid the Cycle of Hurting that can happen in the Marvel vs. Capcom games, where the next fighter in queue simply jumps into the fray after their partner goes down. Arc System Works felt that this punished a player for losing since a waiting opponent could pounce on them as they came in. In FighterZ, the clash resets both characters to a standing neutral start, so there is no immediate advantage gained by knocking an opponent's character out. This also helps with a bit of Gameplay and Story Integration as these characters will either go in as fast as possible to save their fallen comrade or blindside them to take advantage.
    • The Eternal Dragon mechanic will not activate automatically when a player fills up the meter. Instead, it must be activated intentionally by completing an auto-combo while your super meter is at the maximum 7 bars. This way a player cannot stumble into getting a wish by accident, despite their opponent trying to strategize around securing it.
    • Z-Coins, contrary to initial fears of being a premium currency, are this when it comes to the unlocks. You can't buy Z-Coins with real-world money; instead, you can randomly get a Z-Coin when popping open a capsule, and you also get one if you got something from a capsule that you already have. Trading in ten Z-Coins will always unlock something you didn't already have as a way to mitigate the frustration of getting the same things over and over.
    • Losing a match in Story Mode will still give your fighters a small amount of experience points. And although you're sent back to the beginning of the map, you'll retain all the experience you gained. Also, challenging the Final Boss of Story Mode doesn't make you restart the map if you lose, instead just letting you start the boss battle over.
    • Every cutscene you've triggered will be permanently unlocked in the Story Gallery, even if you didn't save. Equipment is also permanently acquired without needing to save the game. This makes farming items and collecting optional cutscenes much easier, since you can simply return to the story title screen whenever you need without losing any data. Unfortunately, if you lose a match and already arrive at the victory/loss screen, the loss will still count even if you shut down the game without saving.
  • The King of Fighters:
    • Starting with KOF '98, players are given the option to continue with a slight advantage upon losing (such as reducing the enemy's health to 1/3 of its normal length or starting the fight with a full Super Meter)... though that's little help against the final boss.
    • In the remakes of '98 and 2002, failing any combination of the challenge games 100 times unlocks everything in the game automatically.
  • Mortal Kombat:
    • Mortal Kombat 4 introduced a Maximum Damage cap regarding combos. In previous games, some characters (like with Kitana and Scorpion in Mortal Kombat II or with Sub-Zero and Noob Saibot in Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3) were capable of 100% combos, which would effectively guarantee a victory if pulled off, and some of them (especially Noob Saibot's) were rather easy to perform with practice. Mortal Kombat 4 instead forcibly makes both players backflip away from each other if 20% of an opponent's health is drained in a single combo.
    • In Mortal Kombat 9, the A.I. gets progressively easier as the player dies, even with final boss Shao Kahn (to the point where he'll mostly just taunt over and over).
  • Skullgirls has the Infinite Prevention System, a feature that detects when a player is trapped in an infinite combo loop and lets them Burst out of it in an instant. Although, the one doing the infinite can bait out said Burst...
  • The Chronicles of the Sword mode in Soulcalibur III, like the Ratchet & Clank example below, allows you to keep accumulated experience even if you fail a map, so you won't have to restart the campaign from scratch when you realize in the final level that your party is underleveled or that your class composition doesn't allow for enough anti-A.I. moves to beat the SNK Boss.
  • Street Fighter:
    • The series in general has this feature called Negative Edge. Normally, to perform special moves or super moves, you do the motion then press the attack button. Negative Edge allows one to hold the attack button, perform the motion, then, by releasing the depressed button, the special is performed. This allows chaining particularly hard combos and allows easier performance on special moves. This has since been used by other fighting games.
    • Street Fighter III has the A.I. in a particular fight become gradually easier with each loss, until it's practically handing you the win on a silver platter out of pity. This is perhaps easiest to notice in 3rd Strike during the Final Boss: if Gill ever uses his taunt mid-battle, something he'd never do in normal circumstances, that's an indicator the difficulty's been lowered at least a peg or two. (But considering Gill's taunt involves him openly laughing at his opponent, some players might instead interpret the gesture as Easy-Mode Mockery.)
  • Tekken 6: Once completing the tutorial stage of Scenario Campaign, you are allowed to freely unlock one playable character other than Lars and Alisa, who are unlocked from the beginning. This is for the sake of veterans, as they might not be familiar with the two new additions.

    Hack 'n Slash 
  • Hack and Slash Castlevania games:
  • Dante's Inferno gives you health back slowly if failing repeatedly.
  • In the Devil May Cry series:
    • In the third game, dying a few times on Normal Mode unlocks Easy Mode. The fact that the game notifies you that "Easy mode is now selectable" is seen as Easy-Mode Mockery in some circles and, thanks to an infamous Super Best Friends Play moment, has been subject to Memetic Mutation.
    • In the fourth, dying to a boss three times in a row automatically gives it a handicap in future fights. Which can actually feel pretty insulting, especially since it doesn't tell you it's handicapping the boss until after you beat it and doesn't allow you to refuse.
  • Diablo series:
    • The Hellfire expansion for Diablo (1997) added the option to double your walking speed in town—very useful, since you end up coming back to town often, where you need to walk back and forth between the various merchants. Hellfire also added the spells "Search" and "Warp": the former highlights all these hard-to-see items on the ground, while the latter teleports you to the closest stairs, which saves time when you've finished clearing out the level and want to move on. Another nice addition was free healing from Pepin whenever you talk to him. There were also mana staves that restored one's energy, saving you gold on mana potions.
    • In Diablo II, when you die, you respawn in the nearest town with no equipped items or gold. To get your items back, you need to go back to where you were killed and recover your own corpse. This is often unfeasible, especially on higher difficulties, because the enemies that killed you are still hanging around your corpse and now you have no weapons to defeat them or armor to survive them. Thankfully, you can restart your game and your corpse will appear in town with all the items intact and only the gold gone.
    • In Diablo III, some bosses spawn weak monsters whose sole purpose seems to be to drop health orbs when killed. This is so the game is not by definition over should you be unable to use your bottomless potion during the fight. The respawn rule is even more lenient; you just go back to the previous checkpoint, which is almost always right outside the boss room. The higher levels of the Torment difficulty seems to be tuned with endless respawns in mind. The game also picks up gold when you walk over it, and you can now remove gems from their sockets, so they aren't permanently missable as soon as you use them.
    • Diablo II had optional dungeons, which could be multiple levels deep. Once you cleared them out you had a long walk back through empty rooms ahead of you. Diablo III puts a teleporter in the last room, which will take you back to the entrance.
    • In Set Dungeons, losing all of your life doesn't kill you, but just sends you back to the beginning of the dungeon, even if you're playing on Hardcore Mode. Also, a town portal can't be interrupted in a Set Dungeon, in contrast to the usual rules where a player can't move or defend themselves while casting the spell. So if a player wants to leave and come right back in to try again, there's nothing stopping them.
  • Any time you die in Drakengard 2, you're allowed to keep whatever experience points and gold you acquired before dying — the Game Over screen outright tells you "Select 'Yes' to retain your experience points."
  • The God of War series:
    • Traditionally, each game will offer you a chance to drop down in difficulty if you're consistently dying in the same area again and again... which falls apart when the difficulty levels only change combat difficulty, and you're far more likely to die repeatedly on the platforming sections. If you continue from the same checkpoint enough times in a row with low health, it also begins respawning you with slightly more health each time.
    • In God of War (PS4), if you accidentally forget to pick up a unique item after an encounter (like a Frozen Flame upgrade for the Leviathan Axe), the blacksmiths will put the item in the "Lost Items" section of their shops, where you can claim it at no cost.
  • Magicka 2, in contrast to its predecessor, allows the player to skip learning complicated Magicks and assign them to Quickslots, which are effectively macro buttons with a cooldown mechanic. Also, unlike the predecessor again, all checkpoints are automatic and persistent across reboots.
  • Enemies in Red Steel 2 will stop whatever attack they might be winding up whenever the player executes a finisher. In fact, the player is entirely invincible during a finisher animation.
  • Warriors: Legends of Troy gives your health back after three failures, or rather gives health back to the guy you have to protect in a mission when he acts as a suicidal coward.

    Idle Games 
  • In Alchademy, when you put two ingredients in the cauldron, the water will change color to show if you've already tried that combination or not.
  • Kittens Game:
    • You are reminded about stocking up your food supplies if you don't have enough to survive the next winter.
    • You may undo Item Crafting within 20 seconds in case you misclicked.
  • The Incrementali Tree: Incrementali galaxies have their costs locked at 200,000,000 starting from 103 to 134, when they start normally again. It's done to make the rather slow part of the game go by much quicker.
  • The Multitree: Quite a few things are simplified to help with managing multiple trees. For example, you only need 1 magic to cast a spell and you only 1 Phantom Soul for them to be cast automatically.
  • The Tree of Life: Holding the mouse button while the cursor is placed over upgrades purchases them automatically. This really comes in handy when you have to buy them again after a reset.
  • Patch 4.8 of Trimps added a new Heirloom tier which didn't allow to reroll bonuses, making hunting for the perfect ones a weeks' long quest. Sixteen days later, Patch 4.81 brought up the odds somewhat by giving each Heirloom of that tier a bonus empty slot.

    Maze Games 
  • In Bomberman 64, before the big boss fights, Sirius provides you with Remote Control bombs to make the fight easier.
    • That's until you get all 100 Gold Cards from the first five worlds, and Sirius reveals himself as the real villain. From that point on, in the earlier big boss fights you'll have to bomb open a little container to grab the Remote Bombs.
      • In the first three Bomberman Land games if you lose in a minigame too many times the employee will eventually ask you if you want to skip the minigame and get your price instead.
  • In Carrie's Order Up!, to unlock everything, one has to complete four challenges in all 20 rounds of Service Mode. These include never spinning (which lets you dodge customers), never missing a dropped coin, always getting the food to the customers before they even start to lose their patience, and completing the round in a limited time. Thankfully, you don't have to do all four in the same playthrough of a round, and can simply focus on one challenge at a time. Similarly, the Secret Character, Calcia, normally requires completing all 20 rounds on a single playthrough, but can also be unlocked simply by accumulating a high overall score across all playthroughs.
  • In the often maddeningly difficult Atari Lynx/computer game Chip's Challenge, it's actually stated in the Windows version's Help file (not sure if it's stated anywhere else) that Melinda, the one giving Chip the titular challenge, likes persistence and will let him go to the next level if he fails enough times. Given that many of the game's levels require just the right combination of speed, skill, intelligence, and plain dumb luck, it's nice to have something to keep you from pulling out that last clump of hair. However, this feature is smart enough to know when a player is killing himself repeatedly to move to the next level. In order to get the offer to skip, Chip must die 10 times in a row, yet he must have played for at least 30 seconds each time. Persistence indeed.
    • There is also a level where you must build a bridge over a river by using blocks, which you need to navigate all through the level to get them to the water. However if you start with the blocks farthest from the water, you'll discover a pair of swimming fins underneath one of them; alleviating the need to build the bridge!
  • Pac-Man 99: Pressing against a corner will produce a "spark" animation like in Championship Edition. If you touch a ghost while sparking, Pac-Man will survive the hit and play a unique "grazing" effect to indicate that you touched a ghost while sparking a corner.

    Metroidvania 
  • Afterimage:
    • Fetch quests retroactively consider items that you already have in your inventory, allowing them to be completed automatically after accepting them instead of requring you to collect a new amount from scratch.
    • The game remembers if you've opened a treasure chest but have not picked up the item yet, ensuring that nothing inside them is permanently lost. You can just simply return after some time (especially after getting a new movement upgrade), but the item is still there. For what it's worth, one specific map marker that you can manually place as a reminder is a treasure chest icon.
    • Even if you lose your current EXP bar upon dying, your actual Character Level does not decrease no matter how many times you die.
    • You can only sell spares or duplicates of an equipment (weapon, armor, or accessory) ensuring that at least one copy of each unique equipment remains in your inventory. For a good reason, this prevents the "Gate of Babylon" achievement (which requires collecting all weapons and armor) and the "Se's Apprentice" achievement (which requires collecting all accessories) from being permanently unobtainable.
    • The Trial of Soul update introduced new exploration-related quality-of-life features that reduce Guide Dang It! situations, mostly by adding map icons for merchants, conjurors, or NPCs involved in long quest chains. It also added a red mask icon for enemies that are way above Renee's Character Level, which, stat-wise, helps in distinguishing between enemies that can be comfortably fought, from the beef gates.
    • The Trial of Soul mode is a Boss Game separate from the main story mode. Although several quality-of-life features are carried over from the main mode, this one has its own additional QoL to help on its replayability.
      • This mode has its own save file separate from the main story mode, so as not to risk corrupting or overwriting your main story data. However, any progress you make in the Trial of Soul mode is persistent (for example, your equipment loadout is being saved, so you don't have to constantly begin with Renee's Starter Equipment). There's still an option to reset your entire Trial of Soul data, though.
      • Dying in the mode respawns you to the same spot before you challenged the boss or entered the portal, saving time if you want to quickly challenge the boss again in the same gaming session. Exiting the mode respawns you back to the starting point, however.
  • Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
    • Shard abilities that are required to move through the castle (such as Craftwork's hand) consume very little mana on use, so a player won't find themselves stuck. Other abilities, such as inverting or traveling underwater, don't require mana at all.
    • The Aqua Stream ability doesn't use any mana if it's used while underwater. The reason is because it's the only way to traverse past a few obstacles in the watery caverns. The alternative of waiting for mana to recharge just to move across the room would have been insufferable.
    • If a dropped item bag gets stuck in a wall, its contents will automatically be collected after a few seconds.
    • To keep players from getting frustrated by grinding for valuable loot, any item that is crafted is automatically added to the shop right next to where you can craft items. So after forging an item, you can later buy more of it and break it down to get those hard-to-find loot drops.
    • Shards that are in finite supply (such as boss attacks and the Silver Knight familiar) cannot be sold.
    • There are certain rooms on the train that can only be accessed on your first visit with Zangetsu (the opening section and where the Glutton Train is fought), and the time limit will probably prevent you from exploring the entire area. If you get back on the train afterwards, the game will count the entire map as being explored regardless of how much you actually uncovered, allowing you to achieve 100% map completion.
  • Castlevania:
    • Many games in the series will fully restore your HP, MP, and status every time you reach a save point, allowing you to save the often uncommon restorative items for the heat of battle. There is almost always a save room right before a boss, and boss rooms have a unique door to warn you that you're in for a battle and you should probably look for said room to save and recover before going on in.
    • Koji Igarashi explained in an interview how all the games he worked on had a behind the scenes anti-frustration feature in boss design where the creator of a boss had to be able to defeat that boss without taking a hit before the boss would be greenlit for the game. This was done explicitly to ensure that, no matter how brutally hard a boss was (looking at you, Galamoth), there was never a boss that had unavoidable or unfair attacks. You can even watch the designer's fights in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night by paying The Librarian.
  • ENDER LILIES: Quietus of the Knights:
    • Once everything has been found in a room, it will change color on the map from blue to gold. Also, unexplored doors in any room appear as red dots in the general area of the room where they can be found, letting you know that you've still got more paths to explore.
    • At any time, you can pause the game to return to the last Save Point that you visited. Doing this also keeps anything you've found or accomplished since your last save.
  • Hollow Knight:
    • After dying, the player respawns at the last bench they sat on and loses all their geo, the in-game money; in order to retrieve it, they must track down and kill the Shade they leave behind on death. Normally, the Shade spawns precisely where the player died, but if the player dies during certain boss fights the Shade will instead spawn just before the entrance to the boss' arena. This allows players to reclaim their funds without locking themselves in a room with a powerful opponent that killed them at least once already.
    • You'll permanently lose your geo if you fail to kill your shade before you die again, so there's a bank headed by a bug named Millibelle where you can deposit your cash. As an added bonus, her bank is located just two rooms away from the Stag Station and bench in the Queen's Gardens. However, it's a scam. If you deposit more than 2500 geo and leave, she'll have fled to the City of Tears when you next come back. Finding her there will allow you to reclaim your money (with interest), though.
    • Using a Simple Key to open the door at the edge of Dirtmouth allows access to a service that moves your Shade to you in exchange for a rancid egg, which saves you the trouble of going through potentially dangerous or distant territory to recover your geo. These have no other use, and an NPC in the City of Tears' sewers will even sell them to you for 80-100 geo a piece if you use up all of the pre-placed ones. This feature is especially nice if your Shade ends up in an unreachable location or otherwise glitches out so that you can't retrieve it.
    • The Wayward Compass charm still shows the location of the Knight in the overall world map even if no map of the current area has been bought. This is useful if you accidentally visit a new, unfamiliar location and want to backtrack.
    • Two are added in the game's first major update to make navigation easier. First, Cornifer, the NPC who sells you maps of new areas, hums and leaves a trail of scattered papers were added to make him easier to find as long as you can get within a few screens of him. Second, Iselda's shop is stocked with map markers that can be manually placed to help remind yourself which areas to return to later.
    • If you exhaust all of his other situational dialogue, Elderbug will always describe in passing the area of Hallownest you currently need to search in order to move the plot forward.
    • In the Abyss, only a maximum of five siblings can actively chase the Knight. If a sixth is aggroed, one of the previous five will break away from the group and return to being idle.
    • The Grey Mourner's quest gives the impression that you need to take her "one-of-a-kind" flower all the way across Hallownest in one attempt without taking any damage or her reward will be impossible to get. If you fail, she is incredibly distraught but gives you another flower, and will do so endlessly, while insisting each one is just as unique and special as the last. This is done at least in part because she gives you a mask shard, which is required for 100% completion. Furthermore, even after finishing the quest, you can get flowers from the grave where you put it, allowing you to do stuff like give one to Elderbug or get the second Godmaster ending even after finishing it, though respawning it may require a reload.
    • As an unusual display of mercy, if you've finished everything you need to get to that final fight, even if battling the Hollow Knight left you in awful shape, you'll be restored to full health before you clash with the Radiance. You're going to need it.
    • Although every Boss Rush battle at Godhome culminates in a fight against a brand new boss, merely encountering them is enough to make them appear at the Hall of Gods, allowing you to practice against them at your leisure.
    • Dying while in the dream world has far fewer consequences than dying in the normal world. You don't have to collect your shade (and thus don't lose your money), you respawn next to the dream world entrance rather than at a distant bench, and the three Fragile charms don't break, allowing you to use them without fear (which comes especially in handy in Godhome). The only exception is the True Final Boss battle against the Radiance, presumably because, as a Physical God and leader of a tribe who excelled in mucking about with dreams, she knows how to truly kill you in one.
    • The God Tamer doesn't need to be beat to enter the Pantheon it is fought in, ensuring the player does not need to complete the Trial of the Fool in order to complete Godmaster.
    • If you unlock Confessor Jiji's services, you can trade her Rancid Eggs in exchange for retrieving the player's Shade if it ends up in a place they can't get to. In Steel Soul Mode, she is replaced by Steel Soul Jinn, who offers geo in exchange for eggs.
    • If the player banishes the Grimm Troupe while Divine still has a Fragile Charm, she'll leave it behind for the player to take.
  • La-Mulana: The remake has an Anti-Frustration Feature in the Tower of the Goddess. If one falls down the ridiculously tall tower ten times (and one almost certainly will), a door appears at the bottom which will bring Lemeza near the top. Naturally, this doesn't appear if you activate Hard Mode.
  • The Mummy Demastered is a pretty unforgiving game, but not without a few of these:
    • Like Hollow Knight, when you die your current marine becomes a zombie. As a new marine you must find the old one and kill it to recover your weapons and gear. If you die to a boss, the zombie will appear in the empty room before every boss, allowing you to kill it and regroup to replenish gear rather than fighting it and the boss.
    • More powerful weapons have lowered ammunition drop rates, but item drops are guaranteed. Getting less of one kind of ammo from random drops means more of the ammo your other weapon uses, so it's actually difficult to run out of ammunition. Furthermore, taking two powerful weapons in tandem, like the Mercury Harpoon and Plasma Gun, means you'll get a lot more health and grenade drops.
  • Shantae:
    • Starting with Risky's Revenge, the games distinguish between Bottomless Pits and pits that lead somewhere else by giving the bottomless pits skull-and-crossbones marks that float up as a visual cue not to fall.
    • Shantae and the Pirate's Curse:
      • "Run, Run, Rottytops!" makes Shantae and Rottytops, whom Shantae is carrying to safety, both a One-Hit-Point Wonder. To make up for this, failure only sends them back to the beginning of the current screen, each room serving as a checkpoint. Also, dying doesn't subtract any health or use any Auto-Potions.
      • The No-Gear Level where Shantae is mistaken for a princess requires her to sneak past some palace guards, and getting caught sends her all the way back to her room. Eventually, the player can hit a switch that opens the room's front door, significantly reducing the penalty for getting caught.
    • Shantae: Half-Genie Hero:
      • The game features a magic carpet race level where the player flies over the clouds. Falling during the race will not send Shantae back to a checkpoint, instead subtracting a small amount of health and sending her right back up (while holding her butt with a shocked expression on her face).
      • On Hard Core mode, this is removed, and falling off a carpet will result in a traditional bottomless pit fall where you respawn at the start of the area and take some damage.

    MMORPGs 
  • Aura Kingdom
    • Failure to enhance a weapon does not drop the enhancement level at all nor will it break. Instead, you gain potential. Get enough and you'll be guaranteed to successfully enhance the weapon/armor by one level. Enhancement goes up to +20, with +10 being the limit for regular scrolls.
      • Although you can buy advanced scrolls to get past +10, they can be collected through some achievement quests and main quests. They are also shared through your character accounts. Though the success rate, as you might guess, is a bit on the low side...
    • Additionally, if you buy 35 Eidolon packs of a certain eidolon and fail to get a fragment/key, then you will be guaranteed to get a fragment on the 36th pack opened. Still costs a lot of money, but at least there is a guarantee that you can get one.
    • Instead of limiting dungeon runs per day like x-legend's other game Eden Eternal, they are limited to up to one-three times per specific hour (1, 2, 6, 12, 24).
    • You no longer have to buy a cash shop item to reset your character's stats or envoy's path. You can freely reset your character's stats, while resetting envoy's path will cost gold to do so. Still, it is a lot better than paying real money.
  • Billy vs. SNAKEMAN has Megamissions, which becomes available once you reach a certain rank: do a mission at 10x cost, but with 11x rewards. R00t has Megaactions, which work the same (10x/11x, as well as 50x/55x). Also, Pizzawitch deliveries are done in part to find the rare ryo coins you need for upgrading your gear, but there's very low chance of getting one on higher difficulties. However, once you've done 20 deliveries of a certain difficulty, you have the option to "work in the back" on another person's delivery, giving you a one-click option to earn tips and possibly coins (with the added option of bribing them to increase the chance of getting a coin). A few quest also become easier and/or less costly if you've done it a previous season (although a few others become harder instead).
    • Once you've won eleven consecutive Glowslinging duels, you get the "Autosmash" function, which grants an automatic victory (though you forfeit the "perfect"/"nailbiter" bonuses) since you're obviously good enough to win anyway. Also, any turf you've conquered can be "multidueled", where you expend several duels at once and get an equal reward multiplier. You can also play multiple Retail shifts at once, and play multiple Mahjong and Hanafuda games. Saves time when you're grinding.
  • In City of Heroes, the XP Debt that you accrue from dying is temporarily suspended during zone invasion events when an area of the gameworld is overrun by hordes of aliens, zombies, etc. Also deaths that occur inside the Rikti Warzone only give half as much debt as in any other zone.
    • The addition of the Patrol feature, where you gain a double XP bonus based on how long you are logged out, helps even more. Now, when you die are defeated, some of that bonus is taken away instead. If the bonus runs out it's business as usual.
    • There's also the streakbreaker feature, which prevents missing too many attacks in a row (if your tohit is high enough, it will kick in after one miss).
    • The phone feature meant you could call in a quest when it was done, and get the new quest, rather than traveling back to the quest-giver and then back to the quest location for the next step.
  • In the Korean-made MMO driving game Drift City, if you fail a mission, trying it again slightly lowers the requirements. Failing again lowers them even more, and so on. Useful for those who aren't yet able to afford enhancements to their car to pass the time-limited missions.
  • In Dynasty Warriors Online, each time you enter a new scenario, you go back to guard rank which allows you to do the rank up quests again. On the chance you don't have a weapon that's level 2 or below (which you need the higher rank to be able to use), you get a spear the second you start up again, allowing you to use it until you can use the higher level weapons. Also, it will always provide you with a generic partner if you haven't requited one. (Although, some plays may see that as a problem)
  • The Gaia Online minigame Gaia Cards has you playing blackjack against different dealers. Each of them have their own cheat: one dealer can pull out an ace out of nowhere, one can redraw her hand, etc. Fortunately you, as the player, have a frustration meter that, when full, allows you to cheat by looking at the dealer's hand.
  • Granblue Fantasy:
    • If you retreat from a quest that you've never finished, then you're refunded the AP that you've spent. Additionally, if it's a story quest, you get a stat bonus if you retry the quest in the next hour that stacks up to five times.
    • If a character is on their 5★ uncap, then they'll be able to gain Extended Mastery Points even if they aren't at their level cap. Levels past 80 can be very grindy, so it helps that the uncap doesn't have to be delayed just to grind Extended Mastery.
    • Some specific weapon types obtained through a lengthy process of grinding and forging (i.e. Awakened Revenant Weapons, Seraphic Weapons) cannot be sold, reduced, or used as fodder.
    • A weapon cannot be used as an EXP fodder for its duplicate (i.e. Celeste Claws cannot be used as EXP fodders of other Celeste Claws), since the ideal use of a duplicate, especially SSR weapons, is to uncap another copy and not upgrade it.
    • The ability to tag weapons and summons as your "Favorites". Not only it acts as a filter for your inventory, it will (by default) prevent your weapon or summon from being accidentally sold, reduced, or fed to other weapons or summons when using the Auto-Select button of the upgrade menu.
    • For the game's 4th anniversary 10-draw special event, you'd get a roulette once a day where you could get 10 (highest chance), 20 (almost as high of a chance), 30 (decent chance) or 100 (very low chance) draws, completely free of charge. If, on the last day, you hadn't gotten the 100-draw prize over the course of the event, the roulette would just guarantee you 100 draws.
    • The puzzles featured in the "Detective Barawa: The Jewel Resort Incident" can be solved by clicking on the "Show Solution" button, as it gives the direct answer instead of providing clues or hints to the puzzles.
  • In Grand Chase, even if you lose all of your lives and don't continue, you still get to keep your GP, EXP, and quest items (and complete quests).
  • Guild Wars did not feature a durability mechanic, and instead punished you for dying with a "Weakness" debuff that would slowly go away with every enemy you killed - not every enemy group, every enemy. This meant that while you still were punished for dying, the punishment was far less annoying than losing your entire inventory.
  • In Guild Wars 2, the Desperation Attack in the form of downed skills is this, as it gives players a chance to recover after getting their HP depleted and avoid death.
    • All classes also share a common Downed Skill, Bandage, which slowly puts them back on their feet. Very handy if you have run out of enemies to kill for a Rally, have no allies to help revive you, or the fight has moved somewhere else leaving both sides too busy to finish or help you.
      • Additionally, when you are downed underwater, you either go to the surface to slowly recover or can use Bandage - with Bandage now letting you also move around as you are not immobile unlike when you are downed on land. This lets you swim away and recover if swimming to the surface is unavailable.
    • Also one of the personal story missions for those who chose to join the Durmand Priory involves a mandatory jumping puzzle, which can be frustrating for those who don't enjoy that sort of thing, as normally jumping puzzles are entirely optional. Thankfully, your mentor highlights the path you need to jump, and if you take too long, she just opens a portal for you instead. Frustratingly, while the earlier and more challenging puzzle — crossing a chasm via a narrow path with a side wind blowing — can also be skipped, the way to do it is not obvious. (When you fall, you are teleported to the entrance in a downed state. To skip the puzzle, instead of healing yourself from the downed state, you need to let yourself die and choose "Retry from a checkpoint", which will teleport you beyond the chasm.)
      • In the case of many Jumping Puzzles, having a Mesmer (or Scourge) there (or being one yourself) might be considered this due to their portal ability, allowing people to completely skip everything as long as the Mesmer is able to complete it... AND IT STILL COUNTS!
    • Several classes use some summoned allies that can't be fully controlled, and losing them generally means greatly losing impact on battles until they can be summoned again (Rangers and Mesmers are dependent on their pet/illusions to function, Necromancers, Guardians and Engineers need to fill a skill slot with each extra minion/spirit weapon/turret they use which means less skills available). Against bosses with strong AOE attacks that players can dodge but AI-controlled units can't, most of the time these units take greatly reduced damage or are sometimes immune to them (notable in Fractals where only players are subject to agony). Speaking of Fractals, Subject 6 is a special case: it periodically takes a defensive stance that blocks all incoming attacks and after taking 20 hits, every subsequent hit causes an explosion that damages everyone and can cause team wipes. Uncontrollable A.I.s will always attack the boss until their destruction, but their attacks aren't counted when the boss enters its blocking stance.
  • An extension of the Me and My Nemesis Quest in Kingdom of Loathing has a fiendishly difficult volcano puzzle that requires a lot of patience and careful mapping to work out. Fortunately, there's an option to skip it for a loss of 10 adventures if you don't want to go through all that trouble, though you miss out on two of the quest rewards if you do that.
    • The Twin Peak area, released with the revamped level 9 quest, has three (actually four) puzzles that are atrociously hard to solve, and that may be impossible depending on what items and buffs you have available. Once you've spent fifty turns in there, however, an adventure will appear that finishes the entire area, though you miss out on the reward for clearing it the hard way.
    • In the original version the naughty sorceress would be less likely to use her ability blocking talents each time she defeated you. Since she also scaled to your stats this could be the only way to defeat her, short of praying for help from the Random Number God for some players who didn't know how her scaling worked and relied heavily on abilities.
    • The Level 12 quest (Island of Mystery war) involves fighting enemies on the Battlefield while wearing one of two specific outfits. If the player doesn't have either outfit, a noncombat adventure in the Arid, Extra-Dry Desert will provide a full set for one of them.
  • LEGO Legends of Chima Online: When deployed, Proto-Spewers have a timer above them showing how much longer they'll be active so the player isn't caught off-guard when they collapse into a pile of bricks.
  • MapleStory has a few in its new Black Heaven content. If you fail enough times at flying the airplane or escaping from a killer robot, you're given the option of outright skipping the segments.
  • Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds comes with a number of these and more have been added as the game has progressed.
    • You can fast-travel to pretty much any location you've already visited, albeit for a small fee.
    • If you're in a party, you can travel directly to the party leader. This is essential since you only get the benefit for the party if you're in the same area and is highly useful during Field and Chaos Boss battles.
    • You can sell most items in batch, preventing the hassle of having to sell one by one.
    • An update made it so that if you obtain soulstones/specialties, skill books, or clothing, and already have the respective ones maxed out, an emblem depicts that.
    • Have a particular item and want to know where to get more of it? Just tap it and then choose the handy "Source" button and it'll show you anywhere that you can get the item.
    • You can have three different weapons equipped at any one time and switch between them. The game will display a helpful indicator of the one of which element you should be using against your current opponent or opponents.
    • The October 19 global update added even more. You can now use multiple buff items such as food in one go; previously you had to use one, then wait three seconds to use another. When selling items, you can choose to have it default to selling off all of a particular item instead of having to choose that manually each time. You can also request support in the recruit channel for dungeons such as Dimensional Border bosses. Additionally, when claiming things such as Daily rewards or rewards from things such as Field Boss passes, if you have more than one, the game now claims them all at once instead of making you claim them one by one.
    • Previously players could not ride their mounts in Dimensional Border quests, ticketed events in which you travel along a path fighting a series of monsters and then a boss at the end. As of the January 26, 2023 update, they now can.
  • Normally in Perfect World, each character death from Level 10 onwards results in loss of EXP, with the amount of lost EXP going up with character level, unless the slain player has only just leveled up and doesn't have any loose EXP to penalize. Since this can be VERY painful for players of Level 100 and up, especially for anyone not carrying Guardian Scrolls to prevent it, there exist numerous mechanics to soften the blow:
    • The Cleric's resurrection spell and the Mystic's revive-on-death buff both result in lessened EXP penalties for the target on higher skill levels.
    • Players who Reawaken at less than Level 105 on either their first or second "cycle" may store all EXP gained from Level 100 up on a subsequent cycle in their Ancient Tome in order to retroactively gain levels on the previous cycle, resulting in greater gain of attribute points. EXP stored in the Ancient Tome is protected from being lost upon character death.
    • Certain instanced dungeons, particularly those that feature obscenely high numbers of things that can One-Hit Kill players and bosses who love Total Party Kill moves, do not assess EXP penalties against players who are killed. Chief among these are Warsong City, Flowsilver Palace, Uncharted Paradise, Dawnlight Halls, Icebound Underworld, and Ten-Dimensional Domain.
    • Events where players are expected to kill each other, whether they're purely PvP (Arigora Colosseum, Nation Wars, Territory Wars, Theater of Blood) or also feature PVE activity (Territory Resource Wars, Mayhem in Morai) suspend the "random PK" PvP rules that turn player-killers' names red and cause slain players to lose EXP, drop items, or have their gear shattered (or consume Guardian Scrolls in lieu of the above).
  • Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis has several features to improve quality of life, both as improvements over the original game and in-and-of itself:
    • In Classic PSO2, players could only equip one weapon camo at a time. In NGS, different weapon camos can be assigned for each category of weapon.
    • The game world is a massive Wide-Open Sandbox, so players are given the ability to fast-travel to Ryuker Devices located across the world. Any Trainia facilities the player discovers can also be fast-travelled to so they can be undertaken immediately. A later update also allows players to teleport directly to a Region Mag to feed it.
    • Executing PSE Bursts in Classic PSO2 was subject to Guide Dang It!. In NGS, it is simplified to a single meter on-screen in Combat Sectors, which initiates the Burst once it is filled, and which can be filled simply by fighting enemies and completing Trials in the Combat Sector. While the level can lower in a case of bad luck, this only happens within the first five minutes of arrival or after a PSE Burst Climax has resolved.
    • Rewards from completing Trainia facilities apply to all characters on your account. This includes skill points needed to strengthen characters, so any alts a player makes can quickly get their skills and stats up.
    • Item storage can be accessed anywhere in the game world. You no longer have to go back to the hub area to access item storage. Furthermore, if your active inventory overloads (which can happen easily during a PSE Burst Forte), up to 150 excess items are automatically transferred to a Temporary Drop Storage.
    • "Streamer Mode" disables some chat features, including Symbol Chats, allowing players to stream the game without having to worry about other players being disruptive.
  • Especially in the newer quests, RuneScape has a tendency to have quest givers give you small items that you need to complete the quest. This is especially nice when you've trekked out ten minutes to the dungeon and only then realized that you forgot to grab a hammer or a chisel. Also, if they ask you to go to a location some distance away, they'll frequently offer to teleport you there, saving some teleport runes or the need to walk that whole distance.
    • This was later expanded with the tool belt allowing your character to permanently carry most basic tools at all time without using up any inventory space.
    • In the mid-to-high level quest Monkey Madness, the player has to solve an infuriating sliding puzzle early on - however, if sliding puzzles aren't your speed, you can bribe the former gnome glider commander to unlock the hangar remotely and save you the trouble.
    • Following a rework, players can acquire skip tickets from treasure chests which skip different parts of a Treasure Trail. Don't like completing sliding puzzles? Use a Puzzle Skip! Can't get a certain piece of gear for an emote clue? Use a Costume Skip. These tickets are tradeable, which naturally means for merchants these are prime cash builders. Even better, the Treasure Trail shop sells untradeable versions of these tickets for points.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic implemented a whole list of these in patch 1.2, including being able to access vehicles in certain areas, being able to jump right past orbital stations when returning to your ship, and in general cutting down on the Fake Longevity.

    Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas 
  • In Awesomenauts, you play a drop-pod minigame when you respawn. Not only does it kill some time that would be spent twiddling, you can recover most of the money you lost on death if you're skilled enough.
  • Heroes of the Storm:
    • If an ally disconnects from a game, their role will be picked up by the computer so that you still have a full active team instead of having one or more players parked in your base. AI players will even attempt to respond to player pings.
    • Most skills or talents that require you to kill heroes or minions to gain stacks have some leniency. Either you only need to be in the vicinity of the kill to get quest credit, or hitting an enemy with your ability will "mark" them for a very brief period, giving you credit even if your attack wasn't quite the killing blow. This is especially big for Malthael, who gains a stacking cooldown reduction on his Last Rites heroic which mercifully isn't lost to a Kill Steal.
    • Abilities that empowered a character's auto-attacks temporarily, like Kharazim's Deadly Reach and Tychus' Minigun, won't start losing duration until the character has landed at least one auto-attack. This lets you prime the ability before engaging, rather than having to time it perfectly to get the maximum benefit.
    • Braxis Holdout involves two teams fighting over control pads that build up a force of Zerg to attack the enemy's defenses while both are under one team's control. It's possible for one team to get absolutely no charge, and for a long time this would leave them with nothing but six Zerglings against an entire massive wave of enemy forces. This was changed, so now even if your team gets 0%, you still get at least one Ultralisk that can do some damage.
  • League of Legends:
    • The gold an enemy gets for killing you is reduced when you're on a death streak, so he stops getting even stronger and stomping you even harder.
    • Season 4 brought a host of these features for support classes. The support job was to help protect and build up an initially-vulnerable Carry, into a late game powerhouse Unfortunately this was done at the expense of the support, leaving them weak and under performing at end-game without the money to buy any interesting tools. Numerous changes were made to increase the fun level of supports. The biggest changes were the adding of items that significantly increased money income for supports, while being worthless to non-supports, and limiting the number of wards a support could carry, while giving limited use free wards to everyone, to encourage spreading out the responsibility of warding to the entire team rather than making the support do it entirely.
    • If two or more players disconnect from a co-Op vs AI game, some AI players will 'go afk' as well and just sit in their base to even the teams back up a bit.
    • The "/remake" feature was added for when a team has a player go idle for too long. With "/remake", the idle player's team can vote to end the match prematurely, ending in a draw for everyone except the idle player, who gets it counted as a loss.

    Party Games 
  • For Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout:
    • Every platforming game has an invisible timer that will take effect if the qualifying player count isn't reached in time, ensuring that everyone can eventually move on without having to wait forever for delayed/inactive players to finish.
    • Normally, a game of Fall Guys goes for five rounds, gradually eliminating players until the finale. If something happens to wipe out most of the contestants early on (typically through disconnects or Slime Climb, the only Season 1 game with no upper limit for eliminations), the game will pull a final round early so that the remaining players don't have to go through later games with fewer people.
    • The walls in Wall Guys gradually lower over time, which helps if griefers keep pushing the blocks away from the wall.
  • Trivia Murder Party has a simple premise: get a question wrong and you die, and once there's one survivor left everyone gets to fight for one final chance at life. However, it's very possible for multiple people to die per turn and, if everyone dies, the game abruptly ends with no victor. However, if the game goes on long enough and then everyone dies, the announcer will give whoever has the highest money their life back and move on to the final round so all that progress isn't wasted.
    "We came all this way just for everybody to die all at once?! Aw hell no! We're doing the final round! You're doing the best, so you get one more chance! The time... has come!"

    Pinball 
  • A common feature in many computerized pinball games is the "ball saver", where the game will automatically load or launch another ball at no cost if your original one drains soon after launch.
    • F-14 Tomcat was the first pinball game to have this feature, called "Flight Insurance".
  • A related mechanic is the "three-switch rule," which has been around at least since The '60s: If the ball drains before hitting at least three switches, the game will immediately load another ball and pretend the previous one didn't happen. An industry standard, at least when score displays became digital, is that if the score is blinking, the three-switch rule is still active, but if the score is displayed solidly, it's no longer in effect. Because any scoring or progress made during these three switch hits carries over when the game loads another ball, however, the three-switch rule creates some Loophole Abuse on certain machines. For instance, in CSI, you can lock balls for multiball on the second switch, allowing you to start a multiball without any risks (provided you aim perfectly). Due to this abuse, modern games get the occasional software patch that adds exceptions to the three-switch rule if they can be exploited to progress without worrying about draining.
  • In many games with sets of pop bumpers in an enclosed space that can bounce the ball around for an indefinite amount of time, any timed modes going on will either briefly pause the timer, or add an extra second or two, for each bumper hit.
  • After multiball ends in Williams Electronics' Earthshaker!, the player can shoot the ball into the Shelter within 15 seconds to start Aftershock, giving another chance to score the jackpot. This would later become a regular feature on many modern games after a poor multiball.
  • In Elvira and the Party Monsters , if you score poorly on the first two balls, the Extra Ball light will be activated at the start of the third ball.
  • In No Good Gofers, the bumpers on the left side of the table will occasionally direct the ball(s) toward the left outlane. Thankfully, there's a kickback that will propel the ball back to the playing field, even when it's not lit.
  • Space Shuttle has the "Airlock", a gate on the right outlane that opens to redirect balls to the flippers, and the "Heat Shield", a pop-up post between the flippers to prevent drains.
  • The original release of Star Wars (Data East) didn't have a ball saver at all, but one was added in a 2012 software update.
  • In Sega's Star Wars Trilogy, if you start X-Wing Multiball but drain two balls without even one attempt at shooting for the Jackpot, the ramp and the X-Wing saucer will light for 15 seconds; hit either one, and the game will automatically launch a ball to resume multiball.
  • In general, Zen Studios' digital pinball games (Zen Pinball and Pinball FX) tend to have very generous ball save timers, sometimes up to a minute after a ball is launched.
  • Theatre of Magic not only has a ball saver, but hitting the "Hocus Pocus" target enables two magnetic ball savers near the outlanes, which automatically catch any wayward balls.
  • In addition to a ball saver, Gottlieb's Gladiators lets a player stop the pop bumpers by holding down both flipper buttons. This is useful if the ball is in the pop bumpers when a Timed Mission starts and they want to quickly get the ball to the flippers.
    • Related to this, many pinball games freeze or add to mode timers when the ball is hitting bumpers.
  • Airborne Avenger has a ball save gate in the rightmost outlane to return potential drains to the launcher.
  • In 3-D Ultra Pinball, if you launch a ball and fail to score before it drains, the game gives you a "bozo ball" for another go.
  • Silverball Mania has the Disappearing Kicker, a device that is normally recessed between the flippers. Raising it will cause drained balls to get kicked back onto the playfield.
  • In Stern Pinball's Harley Davidson games, the player can press a button on the right side of the cabinet, causing a headlight between the flippers to pop up for a second and block any balls from draining down the middle.
  • Most pinball games have drains on either side of the flippers, which you have no way to escape from and which immediately ends the ball. Some games will actually give you points when this happens, as a sort of apology. For example, Creature from the Black Lagoon calls this the "FOCUS!" bonus.
    • Some of them have a solenoid on the left side (very rarely, on the right) known as a "kickback" or a "laser kick." There will always be an arrow-shaped light pointing downward there, and if that light is on, it means the solenoid will return the ball back in play should it fall down there. Games with kickbacks include Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, and The Hobbit. There's also the lower-budget "virtual kickback," where the drain functions as normal but the game will give you a penalty-free ball and a few points as if a kickback existed, found on machines like Junk Yard (where it's known as the Recycle), Game of Thrones (known as Lord of Light), and Star Trek (Stern) (known as Rescue).
    • A few games, such as The Wizard of Oz, WHO dunnit (1995), and NBA Fastbreak, have a mode that starts when the ball drains down there: The game will load another ball and have you complete a goal in a short amount of time—if you can accomplish the goal during that time, the game will continue as if you haven't drained. (WHO dunnit goes a step further and won't end the ball if you time out.)
  • In Cirqus Voltaire, once the ball is caught on the Ringmaster's hat, the ball will fall off in a random direction. Because these directions can potentially include the drains or a series of ricochets that lead to a drain, a roughly five-second ball saver occurs after each time the hat lets go of the ball.
  • The Time Machine magnet in Austin Powers is pointed directly at the center drain. While it happens less often than it looks, should the ball wind up there immediately after the magnet lets go, the game will provide another ball with no consequences.
  • In KISS (Stern), a spinning disk inside the plastic model of Gene Simmons's head causes the ball to travel out of his mouth in unpredictable directions. In addition, the disk gives the ball a huge spin, curving its trajectory. The machine's initial release generated many complaints about the ball zooming straight down the middle with no chance to salvage it, so Stern later released a patch that provided a short ball saver when the ball leaves his head.
  • Pre-1.00 versions of Stern's Star Wars do not have the Lightsaber Duel mode, even though it's required to reach Jedi Multiball and finish the game. As this would render the game impossible to complete, the machine will simply credit the player with finishing Lightsaber Duel as soon as the player fulfills all of the conditions needed to start it.note 
  • Elvira's House of Horrors has the "Hand of Fate" wheel, which is activated by losing the ball to the left outlane (when it's lit, of course). The roulette has six potential rewards, one of which is a ball saver; thus, by timing it right, the player can instantly send their ball back into play.
  • Deadpool:
    • The Battle and Quest modes (including the mini-Wizard Mode Megakrakolodonus Rex) save the player's progress if they fail, allowing them to retry from where they left off upon lighting the appropriate shot again.
    • Completing the D-E-A-D-P-O-O-L targets enough times will light Regeneration at the left outlane, a virtual ball save.
  • Jurassic Park (Stern): Since it's possible to fail to achieve a fossil and thus lose the opportunity to ever get it again, there are six "wild card" fossils that will award one from the lowest available set.
  • The Munsters:
    • Collecting a SPOT letter causes the family pet to briefly emerge under the left ramp, where it can be hit again to get another letter. Given how small the window of opportunity is, shooting the ramp for a very short period after Spot retreats will still count.
    • Failing to light a Super Jackpot during Raven Multiball leads to a short period where the player can restart it by shooting the left ramp again.
  • Rick and Morty features a pop bumper where the left slingshot would normally go, which has a tendency to hurtle the ball extremely quickly in unexpected directions. The Slam Save mechanic helps mitigate this - by spelling "SLAM", the next time the ball drains as a direct result of the bumper, it's sent back into play and the player gets points.
  • Aerosmith:
    • The mechanics behind Toy Box Multiball (wherein a player can delay the mode in order to add more balls, up to 6) could potentially lead to a second player "stealing" excess balls by choosing to play it with the minimum of 3. The game combats this by refusing to send the excess balls back into play during the ball save period, meaning that the second player will end up with just 3 balls soon enough. By the same token, it will also send as many balls as needed for the first player's multiball, even if they're not physically in the toy box.
    • Medley Multiball provides another opportunity to complete any unfinished song modes in order to access the Wizard Mode.

    Puzzle Games 
  • The 7th Guest has a hint book in the manor's library that can be used for any puzzle. The first time you use it, you're given a cryptic hint on how to beat the puzzle you last encountered. Using the book a second time tells you what you need to do, and using it a third time simply solves the puzzle for you. All three times, the book will also transport you right back to the puzzle. You can even use the hint book without penalty on every puzzle except the last one, despite what the manual tells you. These days, this hint book is the only way to beat the Microscope puzzle, which is based on AI intelligence - not a problem in the Windows 3.1 days, but nigh-impossible now.
  • Antichamber:
    • Stuck on a puzzle? Stuck by a puzzle? Not sure what to do? Whack the Esc key and go back to the main map. One room you might run into near the "beginning" of the game traps you in a tiny, inescapable box, with only the advice "Sometimes, we make choices that don't lead anywhere at all." and a picture of a person's finger pressing the Escape key.
    • In rooms with multiple paths, arrows will materialize on the walls to point you in the directions you haven't taken yet.
    • Rooms on the map with enlarged squares indicate there's still paths from that room you haven't found yet, even if (like with The Butterfly Effect) there aren't any other path indicators leading from it.
  • Bendy and the Ink Machine has a few: when killed, Henry re-spawns at the nearest Bendy statue; and progress-critical items shine to make them more discernible in the sepia-tone environment.
  • In Blackbox, a puzzle that requires the player to travel a certain distance from a starting point that they set had its requirements reduced at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
  • There have been countless versions of Breakout, a game in which you attempt to destroy a brick wall by bouncing a ball off your side-scrolling paddle against said wall, taking out a brick with each hit. One version will let a player try to get the very last brick on each level, but will eventually destroy the thing automatically and move on to the next level.
    • One variant of Breakout is called Baku Baku Block. There are many different versions of it, but the basic idea is, instead of having blocks, it has a picture, which you "destroy" to reveal a different picture behind it. (Naturally, this lends itself to H-Games.) Almost all versions automatically detect when a part of the scene is unchanged and consider those parts to be pre-destroyed, to prevent it from being impossible to see where certain blocks are.
    • Hyperballoid makes a special bonus float repeatedly down if three or less blocks are left in the level; catching it instantly teleports you to the next one, so you don't have to repeatedly try to send the ball exactly right to hit the one remaining brick. There is a small points bonus if you avoid the teleport drops and break all the blocks anyway.
    • Magic Orbz eventually zaps the last few blocks in a level with lightning if the player is unable to hit anything with the ball within one minute.
    • Alpha Bounce has the Javelin, a weapon that is normally accessible via a power-up that destroys an entire column of blocks. When you get down to the last few blocks, however, it becomes freely accessible after a charging period, which gets shorter as you get closer to zero blocks remaining.
  • The Case Of The Golden Idol:
    • The game keeps a notepad below of all the important names, places, verbs, etc. that the player has collected. The player can organize them however they want in that area so, for example, you can put the first and last names of characters next to each other. Different categories (names, places, verbs, etc.) are color-coordinated so players don't spend too long trying sentence combinations that don't make sense.
    • If you have all slots of a scroll filled in and all are correct except for one or two slots, the game will tell you "two or fewer slots are incorrect."
    • During Case 11 and the Epilogue, the game adds a panel that lets you go back to previous cases without having to return to the Scenario Selector, which is helpful since they have so many callbacks to previous cases.
  • Cradle Series: If you're having trouble with a blueprint puzzle, the game lets you skip it after a while, though this results in you not getting a point bonus.
  • Elemental Story:
    • The loading screen converts the normally appearing as JST times for trials, souls collecting stages and battle arena to that of the phone's system time, eliminating the need to manually calculate local time. This does not appear elsewhere, though.
    • The heart costs of battling trial monsters is reduced to 0 when players battling them for the first time.
    • Players whose internet connection drops during a battle arena match are treated as lost the match, which still gives rewards as opposed to quitting which does not give any rewards at all.
    • Players who draw less than 5 effective element pieces in their first turn of battle arena will have the pieces redrawn to level the playing field.
    • Life costs for failed regular stages which are accessed first time will be returned to the player until the player cleared it.
  • In Just More Doors, one of the secret rooms features a Laser Hallway. Each laser you die to several times eventually disappear to allow for easier passage.
  • One Looney Tunes Game Boy Color game had a slider puzzle (the kind where you have to slide a bunch of tiles around to make a picture). After enough tries, you could ask another character to do it for you.
  • Love & Pies:
    • Items on the board that fulfill a customer's orders are automatically highlighted in green and the customer who ordered them moves all the way to the left, letting you know which orders are finished.
    • If there are any leftover roses by the time Yuka's Date Dash Event ends, she collects them and gives you the next reward if there are enough roses for it.
    • To prevent the game from becoming Unintentionally Unwinnable, certain items can't be removed if you don't have any other means to acquire more of them.
    • To help the player avoid accidentally spawning the wrong items, a cursor appears around the selected generator (except for those that automatically spawn items such as the Functional Beehive and its upgrades) since it needs to be double-tapped to spawn them. This also works on item boxes, coins, gems, and energy boosts since they can be merged to spawn better items and give bigger rewards, and the cursor helps the player avoid opening or collecting them by accident.
  • Patrick's Parabox: You only need to complete a certain number of levels in most worlds to unlock the next one. In the majority of cases, this is less than the number of levels in the world overall, so if a puzzle on the "main" path is giving you trouble, you can substitute it with one of the optional stages. It is also possible to unlock all of the levels from the Settings menu.
  • Pony Island:
    • If there is a Hacking portal around the cursor will spit between red and blue and will point towards it.
    • A patch added an Act Select to the main menu to make accessing Ticket hotspots easier.
    • On the final level, your pony's laser will have infinite power, allowing you to fire at will without having to worry about running out.
  • Portal:
    • The game will tweak the position and/or orientation of portals to help align things up.
    • If you fall towards an open floor portal that you'd otherwise slightly miss, the game will nudge you towards it.
    • You can move out of an infinite fall in a way that would not be possible in real life.
    • You can't take fall damage. Chell is wearing leg springs specifically to prevent fall damage.
    • You can't slice yourself in half by placing a new portal when you're halfway through one.
    • The game will bend thermal discouragement beams to account for portals that are just a little bit off, either between the source and the in-portal, or the out-portal and the target.
    • You can't take damage from thermal discouragement beams while you're in mid-air, which makes jumping over them easier.
    • The second game has two specific instances near the end of the game where you only have one shot to place a portal. For these particular instances, if you accidentally fire the wrong colored portal, the other one will silently take its place.
    • Also in Portal 2, the final boss fight resets its Exact Time to Failure countdown each time you complete a phase. Each phase is shorter than the one before it to ramp up difficulty, but you won't be trapped in an Unwinnable situation if you finish a phase with seconds to spare.
    • Portal 2 has moments of scripted velocity. It will force you to make certain jumps correctly.
  • Puyo Puyo
    • The arcade games reduce the Puyo's drop speed whenever the player uses a continue. It will only do so twice per enemy, though, so Puyo will still drop ridiculously fast against late-game opponents. This seemingly does not carry over to the home ports.
    • Games from Tsu onwards introduce Double Rotation: If your current Puyo pair is in a shaft one column wide, you can still rotate it to flip the order of Puyo by pressing either rotation button twice.
    • Nazo Puyo: Arle no Roux lets the player take a (larger-than-normal) health penalty to give up on the current puzzle and receive a new one. Rulue no Roux, on the other hand, cruelly subverts this by making the puzzles that you passed on earlier in the game reappear near the end.
    • All the Puyo Puyo games in the SEGA era have a cheat code which unlocks everything EXCEPT the in-game shop's content note  removing the need to play through the entire game.
  • Superliminal: For objects generated from viewing at a certain perspective the game will gently slide you into the right place if you're close enough.
  • The Talos Principle:
    • If you get to a point where you cannot reasonably complete a puzzle, some text will pop up on screen saying "hold X to reset", which puts the whole puzzle back to how it was.
    • If you take too long on a puzzle, Elohim will tell you to "save this mystery for another day".note 
    • Lastly, you can use the services of a very limited number of messengers (you can get up to three in a game of 120+ puzzles), who provide vague clues on how to get through the puzzle.
    • A post-launch patch added two more: a special autosave that's never overwritten after getting all the sigils needed for the main story, so you can watch all the endings easily, and a button to make the game go at double speed to cut down on travel time.
    • Standing in the path of laser beams for about one second disrupts themnote , but merely passing through them doesn't, which saves a lot of time once the beam puzzles start getting complicated. Also, contrary to the ones in Portal, lasers in this game don't hurt the Player Character.
  • Tetris:
    • Tetris Blast's Contest mode will give you a break if you managed to destroy almost the entire stack of blocks. If only a few blocks remain, the next several pieces you get will be made entirely of bomb blocks, enabling you to quickly make a big bomb and finish the level.
    • Later games tinker with the randomizer so as to prevent issues like the same piece spawning again and again, or a crucial piece not dropping:
      • Tetris: The Grand Master series The first piece of each game will never be an S, Z, or O, because an S or Z on the first piece forces an overhang, as well as an O followed by an S or Z. The games also heavily bias the randomizer against dealing a piece that has occurred in the last four pieces, so droughts of a single piece (such as the ever-crucial I) are rare. The second and third games also initialize the history to ZSZS, so that an S or Z in the first three pieces is also exceedingly rare.
      • Newer Tetris games use a "bag" randomizer, which repeats random permutations of the seven tetrominoes, making it far easier to predict what the next pieces will be. (i.e. after 7 pieces, all seven tetrominos will have been dealt exactly once, after 14 pieces all of them will have been dealt exactly twice, etc.)
    • Some Tetris games feature what are known as "wall kicks". For a simple example, take the wallkicks from Tetris: The Grand Master: If you try to rotate a piece, but that rotation is blocked by a wall or a block, the game will attempt to shift the piece one cell to the right and see if it will fit. If that fails, the game will do the same to the left instead. Only if that check fails will the piece fail to rotate. This feature is very, very handy for rotating pieces in tight spaces. It helps, because TGM in particular is still very, very Nintendo Hard.
    • In Tetris: The Grand Master 3, normally in Master mode the game stops at level 500 out of 999 if you took more than 7 minutes to get there. In a Promotional Exam, in which you need to meet or exceed a target grade to establish it as your qualified grade, this time limit is removed, allowing you to get to level 500 and beyond at your own pace.
  • In Tetris Attack (and Panel de Pon, the game it was adapted from) if the blocks are close enough to the screen for the danger music to play, the stopping effect of combos and chains will last longer than it normally does to give you a bit more time to get the tower back down.
  • The Turing Test: You can reset a puzzle that you managed to get stuck on by selecting it from the menu.
  • Normally in Unpacking, you have to put all the items in the right places in order to move to the next house, but you can toggle it in the Accessibility menu so that you can just place them anywhere to clear the level.
  • The Witness:
    • The player is entirely incapable of falling off of anything. Then again, they can't jump, either.
    • There are two sets of puzzles in the Castle, though only one of them needs to be completed in order to open its beacon.
    • Many puzzles require you to stand at the exact right spot to solve them. On some of them, if you stand close enough to the right spot, the game will pull your character to the right spot when you start the puzzle. In some cases, it's to give you a hint to how to solve the puzzle. In one case, it's to save you from wasting an hour waiting for an object to move to the right spot in case you happen to be off alignment even slightly.
  • In Word Stacks, if you make a mistake which renders the level unwinnable, the letters rearrange themselves so you can still find the remaining words.

    Racing Games 
  • Carmageddon games let you Recover at the push of a button (and a small deduction of credits), which puts you back on your wheels at the last place you were "safe". This allows you to instantly recover from a missed jump, being stuck on your roof, or from falling off a ledge - it even kicks in automatically if you drop off the map. Especially useful in the N64 and PlayStation versions, which have notoriously horrible controls, levels built out of narrow paths and time limits that generally do not let you screw around. The Recover ability is disabled on opponents if you're within a certain range, so they cannot just teleport away as you charge in for the kill. Unless you're talking about the PlayStation port...
  • Crash Team Racing also made a point of giving better power-ups to racers doing poorly. You're not going to see an Aku Aku mask or Lightning Orb anywhere ahead of 3rd place, and don't expect to see an N. Tropy Clock unless you're pushing last. The AI also has some quirks that make it sneakily help the player, such as becoming much less aggressive and using less items during the final lap to allow for a reasonable chance of victory after a much more hectic first couple of laps, and the AI cars in front of the player will use projectiles much more often than the ones behind to effectively take each other out so the player can shoot past.
  • The rewind feature in Forza Motorsport 3 takes this trope and runs with it. Are you getting to the end of a long endurance race, only to take a turn wide and crash into a wall? No problem! Just hit the back button, rewind, and take the turn again instead of restarting from scratch. It returns in later Forza games as an assist that can be turned off (before the race) for a larger credit bonus
  • F-Zero 99: Normally, once your Super Boost meter runs out you will be dropped out of the Skyway. However, if you are in the middle of a sharp turn or a segment where the Skyway does not overlap with the track at the moment, the game will wait until you're over a solid and relatively straight portion of the track so that you don't get dumped to your doom. Though, just to be sure you aren't getting TOO cute, the speed boosters on the Skyway will disappear the moment the bar runs out, so you won't get EVERY advantage the Super Boost provides.
  • In Gran Turismo 2 and 3, if you fail a License Test requirement enough times in a row (and then get a result close to the Bronze time) they'll give you an unlisted prize called "Kiddie Prize" lower than Bronze that would let you technically pass that portion of the test, albeit with a horrendous score.
  • Mario Kart Arcade GP DX automatically accelerates for the player if no pedal input is detected for the first few seconds of the race. This helps to solve two problems: It allows shorter players (such as small children) and those with leg- or foot-related disabilities to enjoy the game, and it serves as a failsafe if the pedals are broken and don't respond to input.
  • Platform Racing: Safety nets are placed around most courses. These allow players who fell off the course to respawn immediately, instead of waiting until they reach the level’s lowest point.
  • Fail a mission enough times in The Simpsons: Road Rage, and you'll be given an option to skip it and go straight to the next stage. While it doesn't count towards overall completion, it does make it easier to unlock The Homer car.
  • Test Drive Overdrive lets the players practice their skills on different races before they're ready for the actual races. This only applies to standard races and not Duel Boss races.
  • Starting in Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 4, if a Story Mode stage is going south and you have retire (which force-quits your current play session, triggered by driving the wrong way for 3 seconds) enabled, retiring before the opponent crosses the finish will not count the stage as a loss (despite the fact it still counts as a Non-Standard Game Over requiring you to reinsert credits to play again). This is very useful, because there are rewards for completing cycles of Story Mode with no losses.
  • Many early racing arcade (or arcade-style) games such as OutRun and Rad Racer have you race to the finish line on a timer, possibly with checkpoints that increase your time limit. Instead of getting an instant game over if you run out of time, the accelerator is disabled and the car slows to a stop and then the game over happens. If the player can coast to a nearby checkpoint, they still get the time extension and are allowed to keep going, and if they coast to the finish line it still counts as a win.

    Rail Shooters 
  • House of the Dead 4 has enemies start to go up in a puff of orange or blue flame and blacken the moment they're killed, so even if a zombie is still standing while going through its death flops, the player knows it's safe to stop firing on it and start targeting the next threat.
  • The fourth Time Crisis game moves away from hard science fiction by including bioengineered monstrosities as opponents. The termite-like things rush at you in a line and are almost impossible to beat without using a machine gun, and the literal Goddamned Bats appear in swarms and can only be handled with a shotgun. Fortunately, your NPC ally will give you his extra ammo if you run out during those fights.
    • Additionally, the game alters its own health system while fighting these things - as opposed to 3 or so quick bites from the bugs taking all your life, you are given a proper life bar that drains when they latch on and attack you, and it is only when that bar is emptied that you take a single point of damage.

    Real-Time Strategy 
  • Against the Storm: Your people take the fastest route they can to get around everything that's been built. If this is impossible, they just cut straight through whatever buildings or environment is in their way. Especially useful for woodcutters.
  • Pikmin: The first two games have their fair share of annoying aspects that later entries took great pains to avoid.
    • The most notable additions made by Pikmin 3 (and Deluxe) are the "go here" function, where you can remotely command a captain and their Pikmin to go somewhere without doing it manually (making multi-tasking far less straining); and having Pikmin doing non-combat tasks like building walls or carrying objects require two whistles to stop (making it harder to accidentally cancel a task when trying to gather nearby units).
    • Pikmin 4, among other things, made it so Pikmin that cannot swim will no longer follow you into water, even if you whistle for them (preventing what used to be a source of Yet Another Stupid Death); the game now displays a message informing you when a task is completed offscreen (making keeping track of objectives easier); and there is a now a "Rewind Time" feature that allows you to reset back to the last major task completed that day (meaning a player no longer has to redo the entire day if they made a mistake).
  • Starcraft II has a few cases of this kicking in. Forgot to evacuate your SCVs on Redstone during a lava surge? Raynor lets 5 new ones airdrop to get things running again. On a more general note, the defeat menu lets you easily restart a mission on a lower difficulty, and the game saves progress automatically quite often.
    • The Heart of the Swarm singleplayer campaign tweaks the Zerg faction significantly to make it much more player-friendly. Injecting larvae is removed, instead letting them spawn much more quickly and numerously by themselves. Numerous passive powerups make base management less fidgety. While this leaves it pretty far disconnected from the multiplayer faction, it's a lot of fun.
    • The Legacy of the Void single player campaign, the player's High Templar cannot damage friendly units with Psionic Storm. Additionally, High Templar (as well as the unit's alternatives, Ascendants and Dark Archons) are given a normal attack, giving them a use even if the player doesn't know how to utilize their spells.
  • In Star Wars: Empire at War in order to conquer planets that do not have a plot mission on them, you have to take the battle to the surface and destroy every enemy building and enemy unit. To keep the player from spending too much time running around trying to find the last elusive enemy units, after you have destroyed all the buildings, the game will helpfully remove the Fog of War so you can see where the remaining enemies are.
  • In Clash of Clans, if you get disconnected during the middle of a battle, the game will simulate the rest of the battle, giving you whatever loot, trophies and war stars that you would have gained from an attack.

    Rhythm Games 
  • In the single American version of beatmania IIDX, if you are playing on Hard Challenge mode and your Life Meter falls below 30%, the penalty for BADs and POORs will decrease.
    • This has been used since 9th Style in the Japanese releases, and applies to Hard, Expert Courses, and Dan'inintei Mode. Of course, Konami seems to have used this as an excuse to make the Dan'inintei courses use harder songs.
  • Before the Echo allows the player to switch the game difficulty freely up until after the third floor. Useful for players that overestimate their abilities or pick the hardest difficulty setting, Spasmodic, on a whim and quickly find themselves overwhelmed.
  • In DanceDanceRevolution, if your health gets too low during a song, the penalty for bad steps decreases, and the life bonus for good steps increases. This lasts until your health is outside of what the game deems a "danger zone." However, the more advanced modes and "Challenge" step charts explicitly don't do this in order to add to their difficulty.
  • In the DJMAX series, beginning with DJMAX Portable Black Square, if you hit the wrong key for a note, you will still get the full percentage for it, but only get 80% of the points. The inclusion of this has proven very controversial among fans, because now you can full-combo or get 100% on a song without even hitting the right buttons at all.
  • Everhood: If you aren't able to defeat the Spirit of Light before the song ends (or face it before you get your arm back, it will warp away but can be found in the movie theater to be faced again.
  • Later Guitar Hero and Rock Band games have a "no fail" feature, so you can finish the song no matter how badly you screw it up.
    • DJ Hero, unlike the other "Hero" games, never featured a meter showing the general quality of your performance, making failing a song impossible.
    • LEGO Rock Band, a game meant to be inclusive to young kids, includes a "Super-Easy" mode where not only can you not fail out of a song, you don't even need to finger the correct buttons on the guitar, match vocal pitch, or hit the right drum pads (you only have to strum at the correct time, sing at the correct time, or use the kick pedal at the correct time).
  • Many arcade Rhythm Games with multiplayer will allow all players in a multiplayer round to be "saved" from a GameOver if they fail as long as at least one player involved clears the song. This applies not only to games where all players share the same machine, but also games where multiple cabinets can be linked together as well as games that allow the player to battle with opponents over the Internet; examples include DanceDanceRevolutionHowever...  (shared machine), jubeat (LAN, online), maimai (LAN), amongst many, many other rhythm games.
  • Similarly, mobile rhythm games with a multiplayer (multilive) feature allow players to continue playing even when their life (or equivalent) reaches 0, unlike in single player.
  • A new feature added in the sequel to Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan was the ability to continue a song once after failing, rather than having to start over from the beginning. However, this can only be done on the easiest difficulty, and not on the final song.
  • In Polyrhythm Mania, if you fail the same level a few times in a row, the game will give you the option to skip it, preventing you from getting permanently stuck.
  • Newer releases of pop'n music and Pump It Up will always give you a second stage even if you fail your first onenote . This allows you to utilize the first stage to practice more difficult songs or songs that you are not confident that you will clear.
    • This is also true for Drummania, Guitar Freaks (as of V6, at least, but probably earlier) and IIDX (at least as of Sirius, and again, probably earlier).
    • In DJMAX Technika, you can run out of Life Meter on the first stage of Pop Mixing and still get a second stage. On the second stage, running out of life won't end the game immediately, but you won't get a third stage. On stage 3, running out of life is an automatic Game Over. The same, however, cannot be said of Technika 2.
    • beatmania IIDX, but only if you play on a Level 6 chart or below on your first stage.
    • SOUND VOLTEX if the song level is 7 or lower.
  • If you fail a minigame in Rhythm Heaven enough times, you can talk to the barista, who will let you skip that stage and go on to the next one. Naturally, you can't do this for the final Remix. Or the one pretending to be it.
    • If you're having trouble during the practice sections in Rhythm Heaven Fever, you'll have the option to see the computer do it themselves.
    • In Rhythm Heaven Megamix, if you're having trouble during the practice sections, the game will eventually display a grid on the bottom screen showing when you need to press the buttons and add a metronome sound to help. During the games proper, a starburst will appear on the bottom screen when you press a button, appearing closer to the center the more on-beat you are.
    • Also in Megamix, you can choose to tap with the stylus instead of using buttons. This removes the need to remember which button does what, and makes most of the DS minigames feel more like their original versions (though you'll have to get used to lifting the stylus up instead of flicking it).
    • The "Lockstep" minigame, which requires you to be constantly tapping on the beat, won't count near-misses as actual mistakes, allowing you to get a Perfect more easily.
  • Thumper:
    • In boss stages, stomping an attack thump removes all active obstacles, including rail turns, giving the player a breather before the next phase.
    • Getting an S rank for a stage saves it, along with the score, which allows the player to get an S rank for the entire Level by retrying the last segment as much as they want, instead of restarting from the beginning. Averted in New Game Plus by not having checkpoints.
  • Tone Sphere:
    • If you play on an iPhone or iPod Touch rather than an iPad, the markers will be made slightly larger relative to the screen.
    • The timing windows for slide notes are a little wider than for tap notes.
  • SOUND VOLTEX III -Gravity Wars- features an alternate version of the Excessive Rate gauge, the Alternative Rate gauge. It starts off as an Excessive Rate gauge but switches to Effective Rate gauge at the level it would be if you had been using it the entire time instead of failing you out if you hit 0%. You can still fail if you can't get up to at least 70%, but at least you'll play the rest of the song. This was originally only available on Generator Standard Start, the most expensive play mode at the time, but Sound Voltex IV -Heavenly Heaven- incorporates it into Standard Start as well, which additionally guarantees a full set of stages per credit.
  • In Tokyo 7th Sisters, players are given a free roll every day as to give a small chance to get silver cards, which is stronger than regular bronze cards.
  • Trombone Champ has a variety of accessibility options, such as making Jump Scares less scary, reducing flashing effects, lowering the amount of Button Mashing required to open chests, and making the score requirements for unlocking hatches easier to attain.
  • In 8 Beat Story, stamina consumed during virtual lives which freezes the game before they can start are returned to the player.
  • The Rhythm Portion of Idolish 7 has slowly been adding in new skills and abilities to make higher difficulties easier to play, especially for newer or lower-leveled players.
    • Exiting out of a live does not deplete your LP (regular lives) or tokens (event lives). Thus, the only thing you waste by retrying a live is your time.
  • Unlike many other mobile idol rhythm games, BanG Dream! Girls Band Party! (and its Vocaloid-themed sister game Project SEKAI) does not actually limit how much you can play. Live Boosts are only used to multiply your rewards; once you run out you can continue to play songs, which is useful for getting the one-time score and combo rewards (which are mercifully not affected by Live Boosts) and simply practicing charts.
  • In March 2020, WACCA had a few Temporary Online Content events extended by about two weeks each due to concerns over the COVID-19 (also known as the Coronavirus) pandemic in real life, as the spread of the virus makes it very difficult to determine if it's safe for people to go out even just for a trip to the local arcade.

    Roguelikes 
  • Abomi Nation:
    • Level is tied to your team rather than individual Abomis, so you don't need to engage in Level Grinding for new recruits. This is lampshaded by one NPC in a Take That! at RPGs with Level Grinding.
    • You can turn off permadeath in the difficulty settings if you want a less stressful experience.
    • An attack's predicted damage is shown before you use it, and this prediction identifies relevant multipliers from types, abilities, and other factors. The damage formula is also relatively simple compared to Pokemon's rather convoluted one, and has no random variance aside from Critical Hits, making it easier to judge whether your Abomi will be killed by an incoming attack.
    • Unlike in Pokémon, you get an Abomi's full Monster Compendium entry through any interaction with a member of a species, rather than needing to get it on your team. Given how limited your recruitment opportunities are, this makes filling out the Abomi Archive much easier than it would be otherwise.
  • The Binding of Isaac:
    • A lot of rewards are given not for winning a run, but for meeting specific criteria like getting so far, defeating a certain kind of boss, or getting the total of the donation box to a specific level. Thus, even if you screw up and die on that run you often still walk away with prizes that will make all subsequent runs easier.
    • If you happen to be standing where the trap door to the next level is supposed to spawn at the end of a boss fight, it won't open until you move off of it, preventing you from falling through to the next level and missing whatever items spawned. Similarly, if the entrance to the boss room is at the top of the room and you leave, when you enter the trap door will be closed until you get some distance away to prevent you from falling in as you enter the room.
    • The game actually avoids one very common anti-frustration feature: Normally when you grab an item and hold it aloft dramatically, enemies briefly stop moving and attacking you. Not so in this game! (Rebirth lets you move while holding an item, though).
    • The effects of pills are random per run, and the game does not tell you which color combination will do what for that run. One pill, Bad Trip, will damage you, and another, Health Down, decreases your heart containers by one. To avoid cheap deaths by unidentified pills, Bad Trip pills will temporarily turn in to Full Health pills if you have less than one heart, and Health Down pills will turn in to Health Up pills so long as you have one or less heart containers. This also means that even if all pills are identified, no pill will kill you just by taking it. Horf! and Explosive Diarrhea still pose a threatnote , but at least those can be avoided by not using pills next to walls/obstacles and having decent dodge skills respectively.
    • DLC for Rebirth included a Bestiary, but it only began tracking enemies you defeated after installing said DLC — any enemies defeated beforehand won't be included and will need to be beaten again. Since Mom's Heart becomes unavailable to battle after It Lives appears, defeating It Lives will also add Mom's Heart to the Bestiary, to avoid making that entry Permanently Missable Content for anyone who happened to unlock It Lives before installing the DLC.
    • Said DLC also adds a number of small quality of life improvements, like the option to add a glow to projectiles to make them more visible and the option to have a small "charge" indicator when using abilities that must be charged up to be used. Explosions now also add a permanent singed effect to the floor, allowing you to keep track of which walls you've already tried to blast open.
    • Since gaining access to the Boss Rush (Get to and defeat Mom within 20 minutes) and ??? (Get to and defeat Mom's Heart / It Lives in 30 minutes) can be a tricky prospect as it amounts to no real exploration and hoping you don't get Curse of the Labyrinth or rooms full of Goddamned Bats, you can just say "screw your time limit" and blast open either entrance with the Mama Mega! item. Granted there's some luck involved in whether or not you can get this item in a run, and of course you need to figure this out on your own.
    • Normally the entrance to Downpour and Dross require a key, the entrance to The Mines and The Ashpit require two bombs, and the entrance to The Mausoleum and Gehenna require two full hearts. If you're playing a challenge that requires you to go through these doors, however, these doors will be free to open.
    • Mama Mega and Golden Bombs have basically the same use, letting you bomb an entire floor. However, Mama Mega is a single use item, so if you find both in a floor, it only makes sense to use the Gold Bombs to slowly and meticulously bomb everything. That was, until Repentance added an interaction between the two, where Mama Mega would turn Gold for a floor if you pick up a Golden Bomb, granting you a free use of Mama Mega, and a much faster way to bomb the entire floor than using Gold Bombs.
  • Bonfire:
    • You are more likely to get food-gathering quests and errands if you're low on food.
    • Losing a hero in Endless mode will decrease the difficulty of the next section to account for the fact the new hero has no motivation levels.
    • While enemy fire attacks still inflict more Maximum HP Reduction than normal, they are much less effective than fire attacks used by the player, which inflict almost as much Maximum HP Reduction as their regular damage. This prevents fire attacks from being quite so devastating to the player, who has more need of healing than enemies.
    • If Anti-Armor effects reduce an enemy's Armor into the negatives, Armor Piercing Attacks will gain the bonus from negative Armor instead of ignoring it, allowing piercing attacks to take advantage of Anti-Armor as much as regular attacks.
  • Brutal Orchestra has two possible final bosses, Heaven and Osman Sinnoks, with different unlocks for each character who is in the player's party upon beating them. If the player completes the quest for Fogs, they will stand outside the gate of the second boss and allow you to pick which of the two final bosses you want to fight for 20 coins. The player can even beat the zone two boss and come back to pay the fee before moving to the final area if they're just short on cash.
  • Death Road to Canada:
    • Rooms you haven't entered yet have a sparkle effect above them so you don't have to waste time entering areas you've already been to.
    • Quitting during a mission deletes your save file. If the game crashes or otherwise shuts down unexpectedly, this won't happen.
    • Random events that automatically deal 1 hit point of damage will never be lethal hits, so you don't have to worry about unexpectedly losing a party member to something stupid like getting attacked by ants.
    • If you get close to a door, you can see zombies if they are on the other side. This is useful for preventing yourself from walking straight into a horde.
    • If a character's morale is very low, they recover some morale when eating a meal.
    • Zombies stop infinitely spawning once a siege finishes, so you don't have to worry about getting jumped on the way out.
    • Before the final sieges of the game, you'll always find someone at a Trader's Camp with one good combat stat. If you need them to fill a slot, they'll be there.
    • The "Kinda Pushy" event as well as the encounter with Clown normally forces the offending character into your party if you have less than four people on your team. If you're trying to aim for a Solo-Character Run or you already have the maximum amount of party members, you have the option to reject them.
  • In Dicey Dungeons, Relaxed Mode reduces all enemies' HP by 25% without affecting your progress or achievements, and it can be toggled anytime.
  • Despite its punishing difficulty, Dungeon Crawl will stop you from executing a staggering amount of foolish actions. The game will stop you from doing certain things that would otherwise outright kill you (walking into deep water, auto-moving while starving), and will ask for confirmation on potentially risky actions (moving adjacent to deep water while confused, stepping into dangerous traps while badly injured). You're still likely to die for a thousand other reasons, but at least the game is rooting for you.
  • In FTL: Faster Than Light, it is possible for your ship's teleporter to get disabled while the entirety of your crew is on board the enemy ship. Should this happen and your boarding team emerge victorious, your boarding team will take a shuttle back to your ship so as to prevent an Unwinnable state.
  • If you find Hades too difficult, you can activate God Mode, which drastically reduces the amount of damage you take and makes the game much easier to beat. There's no penalty for turning God Mode on, and you can do so anytime you wish.
  • In Luck be a Landlord, Each spin of the slot machine costs 1 coin, but if you have exactly 0 coins after a rent payment, your total will magically change to 1 so you can keep playing.
  • In Nethack, one type of food item can be renamed by the player ("slime mold" by default). This item is classified as vegan, even if you name it to something that obviously contains or is meat, such as "cheeseburger" or "fried chicken"; this is to account for players on a vegetarian or vegan conduct who set the name to a diet-appropriate food.
  • In Noita, it is possible to get stuck in the level geometry, such as by being buried in a powder or being surrounded by water as it freezes. Wiggling your character around for a few seconds will cause the game to detect you're stuck and delete the terrain directly in contact with your character.
  • Revita has several options that the player can customize to their liking, including some that make the game much easier like reducing the amount of damage enemies deal and the speed the game runs at, with no penalty. If you so choose, you can even invert this by increasing these values, making the game harder instead (though unlike Lucent Shards, playing the game like that yields no bigger rewards).
  • Risk of Rain 2 doesn't care about what difficulty you play on unless explicitly stated, and it doesn't care what potentially game breaking artifacts you use, when it comes to unlocking achievements. This allows you to, say, use the Artifact of Glass to easily make the Huntress' Laser Glaive kill an enemy with all six hits, or play on Drizzle difficulty to have an easier time reaching stage 20 as the Commando. Of course, you still have to actually do these things, and actually finding codes for the Artifacts to use in the first place is rarely easy.
    • Enemies will never deal more than 90% of your maximum health + whatever your shield is if you have one. This means you can't die in one shot by a single powerful attack you didn't see coming, and you're invincible for a tenth of a second after you get hit. However, this benefit is lost if your maximum health is reduced, usually in exchange for doing heavy damage.
  • The enhanced version of Spelunky has one right at the start of the game: when you enter the dungeon, there is always a pot, skull or rock right next to your adventurer, so you have something expendable to drop down and trigger any arrow trap you might immediately encounter.
  • In Tiny Heist, if you have low health, the game will put a first-aid kit on the next floor for you to pick up.
  • In Streets of Rogue, the Cannibal class cannot use its special ability (eating corpses to regain health) at full health. However, an exception is made for the current target of the Cannibal's Big Quest, which requires them to eat one person of a specific class on each floor, which saves you from having to intentionally damage yourself to complete that quest.
  • Water's Fine is certainly difficult, especially at the start, but there are some concessions that make dives a bit easier.
    • If you're just short of the amount of money needed to purchase something, sometimes the dog shopkeeper will give you the item anyway.
    • To prevent it from being an Unwinnable area without a Safety Bubble, the Boneyard gives you nothing but air bubbles when breaking blocks, since your Oxygen Meter drains so quickly. Also, in the event that the player doesn't have the Magic Bomb, regular throwable bombs are plentiful.
    • If you purchase a VIP Pass, a shop that appears before every boss encounter will become available that lets you purchase Hearts, Bomb Shells, and Air Bubbles.
    • The game gives you a free Safety Bubble before every boss battle.

    Shoot 'em Ups 
  • Bubble Tanks had Level Drain as a mechanic- when you killed enemies, you collected their bubbles as experience points. However, if you took any form of damage, you would lose experience points depending on how strong the attack was. Thankfully, if you get hit one too many times in an area, the next unexplored area will usually contain harmless Pinata Enemies who cannot attack and tend to drop a lot of experience bubbles.
  • In Cho Ren Sha 68k, the Stage 2 boss comes up from the bottom of the screen, but does not have a Collision Damage hitbox until it reaches the top, so that you don't suddenly lose your shield or die with no warning.
  • Radiant Silvergun lets you keep your weapon upgrades when you die or continue. Saturn mode in the Sega Saturn version will even keep your old weapon upgrades when you start a new game.
  • Star Fox:
    • Star Fox 64: The boss of the planet Zoness can only be beaten with Nova Bombs. Ran out of bombs on your flight through the level? No problem — the missiles the boss shoots at you each produce a bomb when shot.
    • Star Fox: Assault: The boss on Fichina can only be destroyed by shooting a bomb into it. The tons of enemies it spits out drop bombs more often than not.
  • Touhou Project:
    • The Scarlet and Netherworld teams in Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night have special abilities that help prevent wasted bombs: Scarlet drops an extra bomb item if you die while still holding one or more, and Netherworld gives you an extra bomb if you finish the stage with fewer than the starting three. Normally, bombs held at death are just lost.
    • Touhou Seirensen ~ Undefined Fantastic Object and Touhou Shinreibyou ~ Ten Desires from the same series do something similar for all characters: if you die with more than the starting two bombs, you keep the extras (including pieces).
  • If you lose your last life in Judgement Silversword while a 1-Up is on the screen, the 1-up turns into your next life.
  • Use up a continue in Ultra X Weapons and the Father of Ultra will suddenly appear and clear the screen of enemies for you. His attack takes away big chunks of health from bosses for good measure.
  • Bullet Hell games by CAVE will intentionally slow down if there are a lot of bullets on the screen, to allow the player to more easily navigate patterns; this carries over to their ports, even on platforms that can take way more punishment than the original arcade hardware, such as the Xbox 360. As a result, it can come off as a shock when a game doesn't feature it; the North American Xbox 360 release of Deathsmiles initially had watered-down slowdown compared to its Japanese-release counterpart until a patch put the original slowdown back in, and the Windows port of DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu has no slowdown at all in its Arrange A mode.
  • Gradius:
    • In games with high-speed stages, if you get killed in one you'll always be taken back to just before your ship accelerates, and there will always be at least two enemies that drop powerups so that you can get the two Speed Ups needed to get through the stage. If there is a checkpoint in the middle of the high-speed zone, you'll always restart slow so that you can pick yourself back up. In Gradius V, which by default respawns the player where they got killed (although checkpoints can be turned on in the options menu), the scrolling will slow down for a few seconds to let you get the necessary Speed Ups.
    • In Gradius Gaiden, having 2 players present (the game uses simultaneous multiplayer, unlike alternating play like in other games) changes the respawning system from checkpoint-based to just dumping you back into the stage with one less life. To alleviate the fact that dying removes all of your powerups, dying causes you to explode into 5 powerup capsules so you can get back on your feet. Do note that those powerups are available to the other player, and nothing stops a particularly rude partner from just swiping those capsules to delay your recovery.

    Simulation Games 
  • APICO:
    • In the Accessibility menu, you can toggle the ability to walk through trees and auto-activate manual mechanisms to make gameplay easier. They don't affect your progress or lock you out of achievements.
    • The Workbench accepts all items from all open menus, so you don't have to carry the needed items around to use it.
    • When you break a tool, another one with the same function takes up its slot so you can start using it right away.
    • If you lose any key items, they'll be automatically placed in the Lost And Found Box so you can retrieve them again.
    • When you respawn, your boat will automatically be stored in your inventory so you won't accidentally strand yourself on an island if you docked your boat somewhere else.
    • Both the Acclimatizer and Degrumpifier allow you to manually add rain and snow adaptation to bees and remove their grumpiness, respectively. That way, you won't have to continually breed these traits down or calm them with the Smoker.
  • In Crimson Skies, if you fail a mission repeatedly, you get the option to skip it.
  • Disney Magic Kingdoms offers daily rewards for playing, including a character and attraction for 30 days. Luckily, missing a day doesn't completely reset the rewards counter, just missing out on the reward for that day (in this case, a day of Magic).
  • Hay Day:
    • You can only have a single one of most types of buildings, but since a smelter takes several hours to produce an item, you can buy up to 5 smelters.
    • Also, regardless of when you buy your smelters, any mastery star benefitsnote  you build up from using the first one are automatically applied to all the smelters you buy after that.
    • In the valley, you spin a wheel with numbers from 6 to 10 to determine how much fuel you get for free every day. Even getting the lowest number ensures that you still have enough fuel to visit a few houses.
    • The notice board is where NPCs can post orders for you to fill. These orders don't have a time limit, and if you can't fill an order for some reason, you can ignore it or delete it with no penalty besides having to wait 20-30 minutes for a replacement order. Similarly, NPCs asking for individual items will not leave until you either give them the item or tell them that you don't have it. So if you don't have the item, you have all the time you need to harvest or produce it.
    • When buying something with diamonds (a premium currency that is difficult to get in-game), the game interface gives you a "tap again to confirm" so you don't accidentally hit a button and waste diamonds when you didn't mean to. If you like buying things with diamonds, you can adjust the settings so that you only have to press a button once to buy something with diamonds.
    • When fruit trees and bushes die, they can be revived once by another player after their owner puts a "!" signpost next to them. But some players have very big farms that make it hard to find signposts, so trees with signposts will also visibly shake and rustle to alert a visiting player that they need to be revived.
    • If an item in your shop isn't bought after a certain amount of time, Greg (an NPC) will automatically buy it. (Items can't be returned to your inventory after you put them up for sale.)
  • theHunter: Call of the Wild:
    • Tracks are highlighted a color of your choosing, which takes a lot of frustration out of the game by making it easier to locate animals, so less time is spent wandering aimlessly and you're less likely to lose a animal that didn't die immediately when it was shot. They also can be turned off for players that prefer a more realistic and difficult experience.
    • At night time, you can turn on a flash light so you can actually see what you're doing and don't have to stumble around blindly in the dark. Animals mercifully don't spook or react to it.
    • Animals don't appear to react to the loud sound effect a bow makes when unloading an arrow when switching to another weapon, avoiding frustration if you happen to change your mind about what to kill it with.
    • Need Zones. Animals visit certain areas each day within certain time ranges. This is useful for when you are trying to hunt specific species, such as for a mission.
    • Many missions are location based. You can select them on the menu and it will highlight the relevant zone on the map. Being that the maps are very gigantic, this is almost necessary.
  • I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling is a parody of lootbox-based microtransaction games. Since it doesn't actually have microtransactions (lest it fall victim to Poe's Law and be exactly what it's making fun of), the "game" part of this lootbox simulator awards an actually substantial amount of the currency you need to buy more boxes.
  • I Was a Teenage Exocolonist:
    • You can toggle Seen Dialog so that dialog choices that you already made in a previous run can be marked and skipped. It also speeds up parts of it so you can skip straight to the choices.
    • Thanks to your Past-Life Memories, you can instantly skip certain subplots once you've learned how to complete them in previous runs, such as finding the cure for Shimmer to save your dad.
    • To compensate being only found on Expeditions and not gaining friendship when given gifts, Sym's heart meter increases by two full hearts (20 points) each time you have a full conversation with him on the overworld.
  • Kitty Powers' Matchmaker explicitly states that it doesn't use timers to force you to wait for a client before you can start playing again; there will always be at least one waiting for you. You can also kick out clients that you find difficult for a fee.
  • My Child Lebensborn:
    • Getting clothing clean. The child's clothing can sometimes get wet from them playing outside, which counts towards the child needing either a bath or a change of clothes. If the clothing is cleaned as a byproduct of giving the child a bath, it will seemingly dry instantly, regardless of season. Clothing that is changed out of, meanwhile, will have apparently been washed off-screen next time the player needs to change the child's clothes.
    • Going to the store doesn't use a time slot, which is a good thing as unforseen events (that can use up a time slot meant for cooking) or free time (turning out to have time to cook after all) can quickly change meal plans.
    • Using the first time unit of a two-unit time period to feed the child with edible food that is already in the house, going to the store, then feeding the child any newly purchased item that doesn't require cooking doesn't use up the second time unit on the second child-feeding session.
    • Helping the child study during the earlier part of the game doesn't actually use up a time unit, despite the fact that not having the time can be used as an excuse to not do it. In cases where the study session can be missed entirely by doing overtime at the factory, the game rewards the player for being present at the house during the evening at all.
  • No Umbrellas Allowed:
    • You can replay any day at any time, and each new run is saved in a separate save file. That way, you don't have to completely start over if you want to try getting another ending.
    • You only have to do the tutorial once. After that, the game will offer to let you skip it when you reach the tutorial scenes again.
    • The fake ID won't appear in your inventory until the day you need it while the Lobster is immediately collected Mr. Gong, so that you won't accidentally sell them away. For the rest of your items, you can lock them to prevent them from being accidentally sold, which is useful for safeguarding stolen items. Locking them also prevents Bokho from erasing signatures with a negative price impact that you don't want to erase (or the "Great Figure in World History" tag, which despite having the same signature overriding effect as the "Unidentifiable/Fake Signature" tag, it multiplies the item's value by 10).
  • Parkasaurus: Normally, when an animal escapes from its exhibit, it'll go on a rampage and will need to be tranquilized. If they can't move on land, however, they'll be instantly put into crates.
  • Planet Zoo:
    • The sandbox mode menu has toggles for various things. One of the things the player can turn off is animal welfare, which keeps the animals from becoming unhappy from anything, like too many rocks, too much or biome inappropriate foliage, unsuitable terrain, wrong elevation, or not enough space. This is so the player is not hindered in making exhibits as they please by having to abide by exhibit requirements.
    • Pressing "L" gives the player a torch, which is useful when trying to build in a dark place, like underground, in a building, or anywhere at night.
    • In sandbox mode, the player can freely adjust time of day, which is useful in some situations like evaluating how the lighting effects exhibits and architecture, or just turning it back to day so you don't have to try and build in the dark.
  • In the browser-based nation sim Politics And War, if you lose a war against another player, the game would puts you in "beige mode". In beige your nation can't be attacked by other nation, but you will receive some income penalty.
  • Potion Permit:
    • A shopkeeper doesn't have to be present in their shop in order for you to buy items from them, as long as they're not sick (for those who build upgrades) and it's still business hours, as indicated by a lit-up cash register.
    • After feeding your dog new food, the food is marked with his emotion so you won't have to guess whether or not he likes it the next time you feed him.
    • If a quest requires your dog to dig for items, the map highlights the exact places where he needs to do so.
  • RC Helicopter lets players replay earlier levels in order to gain enough money to buy upgrades and/or a better helicopter. This way they don't have to keep losing money from failing the current level over and over again.
  • Roots of Pacha
    • The handaxe removes weeds and dead crops only, so you won't accidentally remove a plant that's still growing.
    • The water bucket will only be counted as "used" if it waters a farm plot or the vines in the cave system, so you won't accidentally waste water if use it anywhere else.
    • You can still use your tools while Acre's upgrading them, since she just makes new ones and replaces yours with them after a few days.
    • When cooking meals, ingredients can be taken from the kitchen cabinet besides your belt inventory, so you don't have to carry them around until you can cook them.
  • In Shepherd's Crossing, you can't pick up fences with your bare hands, like you can with every other item. This is to stop you from accidentally setting your animals loose.
  • The Sims:
    • In the original The Sims, advancing up one's career ladder requires your Sim to have a certain number of friends. For example, reaching the level ten job in the politics career track, Mayor of Sim City, requires a whopping seventeen friends. This is made even more difficult by the fact that relationships degrade by a few points every day regardless of what you do, and once the relationship score falls below a certain threshold, the friendship ends and must be restored. It's very difficult for a working Sim to have enough time to form and maintain so many friendships. However, the friends requirement is actually household friends, not personal friends, meaning that the friends of all the people in the working sim's household count toward his friend total. A classic strategy is to have one Sim work and a second to do all the socializing.
    • In The Sims 3, fulfilling your Sim's daily wishes earns you Lifetime Happiness points which can basically be used to buy anti-frustration features. You can make it so that your friendships decrease much more slowly over time, or various other needs of your Sim do not decline or decline much more slowly, among numerous other perks. Essentially, you are rewarded for keeping your Sim happy by making it easier to keep them happy in the future.
    • NRaaS Industries is a mod group for The Sims 3 that specializes in ironing out mechanics and streamlining the game's coding in order for the player to have a more enjoyable experience. Some examples include preventing Sims from re-reading the same book, allowing groups to enter movie theaters (when only individuals can enter at a time in the vanilla game), and preserving wishes so they can never disappear before they're fulfilled/erased.
    • In The Sims 4 expansion pack, Get Famous, it would seem that the developers had some foresight as to how easy to acquire and annoying some fame quirks could be. For example, the Vain Street quirk that famous Sims have a chance of getting whenever they interact with a mirror which causes them to need to look at themselves in a mirror frequently, or else they'll become tense. In the Acting career, practicing in front of a mirror and as such getting this quirk is pretty much inevitable. No need to fret, though. In the Rewards Store, there is a cheap Quirk-B-Gone potion that only costs 250 Satisfaction Points.
  • In Skynet Simulator, If you delete a file required to progress, the game informs you of such, and restarts.
  • Sticky Business:
    • To prevent you from accidentally mixing up your orders, you're locked into one once you start packing the stickers for it.
    • In the Christmas update, if you miss a day in collecting festive sticker parts, they can be bought at the upgrade shop anytime using hearts.
  • Story of Seasons:
    • In Harvest Moon, if you mess up the events where you can get the golden tools for free, the tool shop will sell them so that you can buy them anytime.
    • In Harvest Moon: A New Beginning, the player unlocks the Multiplayer/Wi-Fi feature of the game. This allows the player to trade items and interact with other players' animals while there. This is not only a great (and fast) way to obtain animal produce from animals you have not unlocked yet, but also a way to obtain items that you won't unlock until much later in the game, like the infamously necessary Yam Seeds.
  • Trauma Center:
    • During one mission in the first game that requires you to work on five Kyriaki patients, if you've got at least three of them done and run out of time, the backup team takes over and you move on... so long as the patient who you were working on when time expired survives. If that patient dies, you don't get this relief and the Medical Board will be notified.
    • Also when you to work on a Pempti patient, you're given a special high-powered laser. Gameplay-wise, this means the laser never breaks or needs to cool down and you can fire it for as long as you like. Given how much you need to use the laser on Pempti, this is definitely necessary.
  • In Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, the map that you could pull up to navigate around your home ship also has markers to indicate where a conversation can be had with another character, after players complained that in Wing Commander III some plot conversations were missed because the player had no indication that they even existed, if they didn't have a guide book or website to point them out.
  • Yes, Your Grace:
    • For the first eight weeks, Eryk doesn't need to worry about feeding his army. Considering that it's also impossible to keep the army from being huge for a few weeks, then lose the bulk of it, having to feed it during that time would make the game unnecessarily frustrating.
    • One important questline involves buying at least two items from two different merchants who come to the throne room. If everything needed from each of them is purchased from them on their first visit, neither of them are ever seen again. If Eryk forgets to get something from them, they both visit a second time.

    Space-Management Games 
  • Ixion, despite being a deliberately-challenging survival city-builder, has multiple examples to help make the challenge more fair:
    • In a post-launch update, research items mandatory to the main story path were made to cost no Research points.
    • Advanced buildings which process a resource to create usable materials, like Polymer and Electronics, do not require any of that material to build in case you're completely out at the time.
    • Your science, mining and cargo ships can travel through ice fields with no problems - it's only electrical storms which require careful navigation to avoid.

    Sports Games 
  • 1080° Snowboarding: The player cannot take damage in Trick Attack mode, allowing them to focus on scoring points with the tricks. The actual danger is running out of time.
  • MLB: The Show is supremely friendly towards player customization and accessibility for all skill levels and types, from gameplay to presentation, so that the game can be complex or as simple as a player demands without compromising the whole experience:
    • Having trouble fielding or baserunning, or simply don't want to do it? There's an option for the AI to do that for you.
    • Want a simpler 16-bit style approach to hitting, fielding, and pitching over the modern day meters and mechanics? There are independent options to turn each of those into an old-school aim-and-press-X mechanic.
    • Want a quicker game? You can turn off all the presentation flairs like camera cutaways and even the AI delay between pitches.
    • Players can save mid-game and finish it later if they need to be elsewhere, simulate half-innings (if the player just wants to hit or pitch), full innings (if the player wants to skip to crunch time), and to game completion.
    • Hitting and pitching have separate difficulty levels and sliders, so players can find a sweet spot for both stages of the game independently. The game also offers dynamic difficulties for both, where the game will slowly raise or lower the difficulty level batter by batter depending on how well/poorly the player is doing. Even the scale of how much the game auto-adjusts difficulty can be adjusted.
  • Punch-Out!! for Wii features an interesting rule: if Little Mac loses 100 matches, he is allowed to fight with protective headgear. Unfortunately, this rule applies to all boxers—and after KO'ing the 1-99 Glass Joe for your first fight, he's your first opponent when you're defending your title, and he's got the same headgear.

    Stealth Games 
  • Splinter Cell:
    • Though the light mechanics are largely realistic, if exaggerated to keep the game from being too difficult, with Sam being completely visible in broad daylight and completely invisible in pitch darkness, the game only takes into account the light around you in order to not be too frustrating. Even though you in the shadows would still logically be visible to a foe if there was a source of light behind you to be silhouetted against, that foe won't be able to see you because, as far as the game is concerned, you are in the shadows.
    • As of Chaos Theory, you're no longer subject to the three alerts rule which would cause you to instantly fail a mission if you were spotted three times. Now each time you are spotted cumulatively increases enemy diligence and patrols, and while this can potentially render the level so difficult you'd be better off just restarting, the mission is still possible and you're free to power through. There are still occasional missions where being spotted causes a game over, but there's always a mission-specific reason for it.
    • In the first game, the final step of the final level requires you to snipe the Big Bad with a head shot. Fortunately, there is a magazine of rifle ammunition conveniently placed on the railing of the balcony from where you need to take that sniper shot, and his may be the only body the player doesn't have to worry about hiding.
    • In Conviction Sam has infinite pistol magazines, and picked-up weapons "magically" gain any upgrades that the player's already bought for them.
    • While Sam may only have one Mark and Execute token (granted by performing a melee takedown) at any given time, in several areas with multiple enemies there's often a lone enemy guard in the vicinity or earlier in the level whose position is relatively isolated, allowing for a stealthy takedown before having to deal with those remaining guards. For example, the second level practically frontloads them: a guard in the nearest corner of a low wall surrounding the mansion may be taken down from above without the two guards at the front door noticing, while soon afterward a guard looking out of an open window can be dragged out to his death without the guards in the adjoining rooms overhearing the kill... and quietly opening the door nearest to the middle of the room reveals another lone guard leaning over a railing with his back to the door, who can be taken down quietly without any of the guards downstairs or in the adjoining rooms noticing.
      • The Persistent Elite Challenges do not have a difficulty requirement, so for example there's no in-game penalty for attempting a "no detection" run or a "no firearms use" run on the lowest difficulty setting instead of a higher one, and there are only two co-op challenges but while other challenges are mode-agnostic.
      • At the very end of the single-player story, if you actually want to hear the Big Bad give a Motive Rant, he'll walk into melee range least three times and strongly hint on the third one that he's about to wrap it up and execute Sam if you don't take that last chance.

  • Thief: The Dark Project had a level named "The Lost City" that could be rendered Unwinnable if Garrett jumped a certain gap before retrieving a lever and extending the bridge to be able to cross back. When Thief Gold was released, in addition to some other changes, the lever and bridge were rendered mostly moot by a hallway that had been added to allow the player to return to the previous area with only a small jump.

    Survival Horror 
  • Titles such as Alien: Isolation and The Evil Within offer the ability to decrease the difficulty level mid-campaign. So if you're feeling overconfident and take a harder difficulty on your first playthrough only to get the floor wiped with your mangled corpse over and over, you can drop the difficulty down to normal for the rest of the game (you cannot, however, raise the difficulty midway through.).
  • Speaking of Alien: Isolation...
    • The game gives you three options when you're killed. 'Load Current Save' which takes you back to the last time you saved, 'Load Previous Save' which takes you back to one save before your last save, and 'Load Mission Save' which takes you all the way back to the beginning of that particular mission. This three-tier method of keeping saves makes it almost impossible to end up in an Unintentionally Unwinnable type scenario, since it is for all intents and purposes impossible to not have at least one save you could go back to that would put you back in a winnable state. It also allows you to be a little more liberal with ammo and supplies since if you save after bombing through all your ammo you may be able to go back to a save where you still had some.
    • Furthermore, the game won't allow you to save if the titular creature is too close, and if it's roaming in the area a message will warn you that hostiles are nearby. This is even redundant because the alien will despawn if you reload - and if you manage to save after it noticed you, it will despawn anyway.
    • It also features a hidden "menace gauge" as a part of its AI Director feature. When the Xenomorph is wandering around searching for you the gauge slowly fills, and if you have eyes on the creature the gauge fills up faster than normal. When this gauge fills, the Xenomorph immediately ceases its search for you and retreats into the vents, even if it was inspecting a sound you had made (the only exception is, of course, if it's spotted you and is moving in for the kill). This guarantees that, no matter what, the thing will soon back off for a while and allow you to actually make some progress in the game.
    • Certain noises that you inevitably do when performing mandatory mini-tasks, such as using the torch or removing blocks on door, don't actually alert the xenomorph nor any other hostile.
  • As of the v2020.10.22o update of Among Us, symbols were added to the wires in the Fixing Wires task to make it easier for people who are color-blind. For the same reason, a player's hat was also added to their avatar during a meeting in the same update so it was easier to tell who was who.
  • Clock Tower: The First Fear has the Quick Start option, which skips the intro cutscenes, starting Jennifer in the main foyer after the girls have gone missing and the lights have gone out. Since Multiple Endings is a massive part of the game and you'll need to play through numerous times to see them all, this saves you from having to sit through the introduction events over and over. This feature was inexplicably absent from Clock Tower, forcing players to play the Prolonged Prologue every time they wanted to challenge one of the game's twelve endings much to the chagrin of those familiar with the earlier game.
  • In Cold Fear, saving takes the form of scripted checkpoints that occur right before a Difficulty Spike or That One Level. Chances are that if the player gets a Game Over, it's never too far away from the last save.
    • Tom gets half of his health back before the Final Boss so that the arduous fight is not rendered Unwinnable by arriving with low health.
  • Dead by Daylight had issues with survivors fooling around once the exit gate was opened, dancing around in the exit to taunt the killer or hanging around the hatch. The developers introduced a new mechanic, the Endgame Collapse, to (eventually) put an end to this. Now, when the exit is opened or the killer shuts the hatch, a two-minute timer begins ticking down. If it runs out and any survivors are still alive and on the map, those survivors are automatically killed, counting as successful sacrifices for the killer. This forces the survivors to actually finish the match once the gate is open. Adding to this, the killer can put an end to toxic survivor shenanigans by opening the exit gate themselves, starting the Endgame Collapse and forcing the survivors to leave.
    • This has more Anti-frustration features in itself. If a survivor needs help, whether they're bleeding out on the ground or on a hook, the timer will count down at a slower rate, allowing survivors more time to help their buddies.
  • Dead Space: When your health meter is glowing red, killing the necromorph that's trying to pull your face off will usually cause it to drop a health pickup (although whether or not you survive that long, especially if it brought friends, is another matter).
  • In Eternal Darkness, the Dutch Angle is the only Interface Screw effect that can happen during a boss fight. Every other effect won't trigger until the boss has been defeated, since several of the effects could potentially take control and/or information away from the player.
  • Fatal Frame:
  • Five Nights at Freddy's 2: During most of the Phone Guy's call on the first night, the music box won't wind down at all until after he's explained its significance in order to keep unsuspecting players from getting jumped by the Marionette before they know why.
  • It's impossible to lose on the first night of Five Nights at Freddy's 3, which was done as a way to show players that not every jump scare causes an instant game over anymore.
  • Five Nights at Vault 5:
    • The game autosaves every in-game hour. In addition, the game will wait with autosaving if you are currently in immediate danger.
    • The doors are modified to allow you to close them also by aiming at the empty space, not just the tangible bits (something that can't be done with any other doors in Fallout: New Vegas).
    • Your radiation is always cleared at the start and at the end of the night.
  • One Night at Flumpty's:
    • Across any game where one event could prevent another, these are designed to not happen at the same time to prevent Morton's Fork-type Unwinnable by Design scenarios. In the second game it's impossible to get the Red Man popup if dealing with it would mean another enemy would kill you, and in the third game Grunkfuss will always leave the hallway soon enough that you'll have a bit of time to flash another enemy who is waiting to strike.
    • In the third game, when the interface begins glitching there are brief moments when you'll see the actual values no matter what: when your temperature drops low enough it will stop glitching, and when Eye Flumpty is staring at you the Exposure meter will always show the actual value.
  • Outlast:
    • If you have less than two spare batteries for the camera when you die, you'll respawn with a full battery in the camera and two more in reserve. This way the game never becomes Unintentionally Unwinnable, nor does your camera's Night Vision ever become Too Awesome to Use (since it's a necessity to navigate the darker areas).
    • The only section after the intro where there are no enemies is the one in which Miles also doesn't have his camera and can't see in the dark. When he gets his camera back and realizes he's surrounded by enemies, the game waits a few seconds for the enemies to notice you after the Scare Chord plays so Miles can get a head start.
  • SCP: Secret Laboratory: The Light Containment Zone checkpoint doors will open 30 seconds before the Decontamination Process begins, letting any players there escape to Heavy Containment in the event they were left stranded without a keycard with Checkpoint Access.
  • In Silent Hill, if you run out of bullets at most times, you're in trouble, but if you run out of bullets in the last boss fight (or simply enter with none in the first place) the boss keels over dead straight away.
    • Ditto for Silent Hill 2. Upon entering the boss without any ammo, the game then becomes a timed battle, with the boss dropping dead upon the timer running out.
  • In Silent Hill: Homecoming, if you die and get sent back to an Auto-Save checkpoint, the game will restore you health to 50% if it was below that amount at the checkpoint. This prevents the game from being unbeatable if you end up check-pointing at almost no health with no healing items left.
  • Silent Hill: Shattered Memories addresses the biggest complaint fans had about the lack of combat by letting the player take on puzzles without interruption from Raw Shocks, as they never appear in rooms where a puzzle has to be solved (save for one which involves taking pictures of things in Raw Shock territory).
  • While Siren 1 is notoriously difficult in that it lacks any form of radar or real-time map and often limits your field of vision with darkness or fog, it does offer a few caveats to make it a bit easier:
    • When you are spotted by a Shibito the screen will briefly flash red and give you a split-second glimpse of what the enemy sees, not only warning you that you've been spotted but also giving you a hint to their location and what they are armed with. Also, you can tell a Shibito's status by sight-jacking them: normal color means they're unaware of you, a vague red tinge means they are aware of your presence and are searching for you, and an overly red tint means they know where you are and are actively pursuing or attacking you, akin to Metal Gear Solid's infiltration, caution, and alert phases.
    • When escorting Harumi Yomoda in the school, she can be ordered to hide in closets while the player goes ahead to clear the area before returning to collect her. She is also immune to firearms, as the bullets will not register a hit on Harumi.
    • Enemies will not notice any noise your NPC companion makes, with their voice or footsteps. The only noises they'll be alerted to are those made by the Player Character, so that you aren't spotted through no fault of your own.
    • Not all Secondary Objective Keys are required to complete the game. There are some missions that can still be completed even if you missed an important key item in past levels.
  • Soma in a later patch added a "safe mode" that allows players to explore the dystopian setting with death disabled. Monsters can still attack the main character, but he will be only temporarily knocked unconscious and any danger will move away before awakening. Developers wanted to give an option "without risk of failure", since, using the words of a reviewer, the game's sense of existential dread is driven more by dialogue and story arcs than jump scares or murderous opponents.
  • The HD Renovation of Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion added subtitles to the Foggy Maze's sound effects that say "ding" for a correct path and "donk" for an incorrect one, so people who are hearing-impaired can tell whether or not they're going the right way.
  • Vanish: The game will never spawn more than one moleman at a time in order to prevent getting stuck in one area or cause an unwinnable situation. They also will not follow you into the smaller tunnels, making them safe spots. Finally, they are blind, so they can walk right past you if you stand still and stay close to the walls.

    Tabletop Games 
  • In The Dresden Files official RPG, thaumaturgy can take a long time to set up and involves a lot of rolls, with one bad roll meaning catastrophic, instant failure. The core rulebook advises that you forgo the rolling entirely if it's either (a) a small spell where the failure wouldn't do much; or (b) a hugely plot-important spell that's necessary for the plot to move forward. Its general rule is summed up as, "Don't roll unless failure would be just as interesting as success."
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • Generally speaking, the DM has final say on anything that happens in the campaign; they determine what the players roll, how often they roll, and resolve any disputes between the players and the rules. While it's a meme in D&D circles that one player always insists on following the rules as written only when it benefits him or threatens to weaken his over-powered character build, the DM is the ultimate authority for their world, and what they say goes. There's even notes on the Dungeon Master's Guide for Fifth Edition about how to apply this.
      If the rule or game element isn't functioning as intended or isn't adding much to your game, you can refine it or ditch it. No matter what a rule's source, a rule serves you, not the other way around.
    • Resurrection mechanics mean Death Is a Slap on the Wrist for a Player Character that's been around long enough for the player to get attached to. 3rd Edition made death more survivable by removing the Constitution-based chance for a resurrection to fail and render a PC Deader than Dead. 5th Edition downgraded the Resurrection Sickness side effect from a Level Drain to a temporary penalty on dice rolls. 3rd and 5th Editions also have the Revivify spell, which avoids most Resurrection Sickness penalties as long as it's cast immediately after the character dies.
    • 3rd Edition removed the worst frustrations of the Level Drain mechanic. In earlier editions, monsters with Level Drain applied it with every hit, items and spells that blocked the effect were extremely rare, and drained levels could only be regained the hard way. 3rd Edition replaced this with a "negative level" debuff that disappears after a day and/or can be removed with status-healing magic.
    • Earlier editions' Vancian Magic limited low-level spellcasters to a handful of spells per day, after which a Squishy Wizard became all Squishy and no Wizard. 4th and 5th editions mitigated the low-level weakness of spellcasting classes by putting the most basic of spells into their own "Level 0" tier of spells called cantrips. These cantrip spells can be cast an infinite number of times per day, don't count against prepared spells, and often have effects that scale with character level to prevent them from being Useless Useful Spells.
    • Rust monsters are infamous in the game for their ability to eat player characters' equipment, including hugely valuable magic items. 4th Edition suggests that if that happens, the monster's gut should contain enough residuum to create or buy a replacement. It also suggests that the rust monster should mysteriously lose this digestive power if players keep one as a pet to feed their Monty Haul rejects.
  • Forbidden Island has a hand limit of 5 — if you get more than 5 cards, you must discard the excess. However, if you find yourself discarding a Special Action card, you are allowed to use its action before discarding so that it doesn't go to waste.
  • Mage: The Awakening: Spells with blatantly supernatural effects usually risk a Magic Misfire where the universe notices you're breaking the rules. Most Healing magic is an exception, which one sourcebook lampshades and suggests is a gift from benevolent Ascended mages.
  • Pathfinder introduces several anti-frustration features compared to its predecessor, Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Edition:
    • The cost of several resurrection spells is downgraded from permanent Level Drain or Constitution loss to a "negative level" debuff that lasts indefinitely but can be removed with healing magic, so a resurrected character is no longer stuck lagging behind the rest of the party.
    • Primary Spellcasting classes have at-will use of their lowest-level spells and gain extra abilities specific to their school (if Wizard), domains (if Cleric), or bloodline (if Sorcerer), mitigating the small amount of Vancian Magic available to them at low levels.
    • Experience point costs for certain spellcasting and Item Crafting are replaced with expensive Eye of Newt components so that the spellcaster's level progression isn't delayed and the costs can be shared amongst the party when appropriate.
    • Instead of an Experience Penalty for dipping into multiple Character Classes, characters declare a "favoured class" and gain access to a range of minor bonuses for leveling up within that class. The Pathfinder Unchained supplement continues to reduce the pain of multi-classing by introducing fractional increases to BAB and saves so that multi-class characters don't fall behind in those progressions, so long as you don't mind some additional math when levelling-up.
    • The Cleric class's role as The Medic is supported by a "Channel Energy" class feature, which simply heals everyone within a certain radius (and can be fine-tuned to avoid healing enemies) and isn't drawn from the Cleric's limited pool of spell slots.

    Third-Person Shooters 
  • Gears of War:
    • Found in the first game, where any time you absolutely need a Hammer of Dawn to progress, one will be found somewhere nearby. This is made even more obvious by the fact that two will be found side by side. This is even more required to avoid headaches than the obstacles in the sequel. The Lancer actually has some motivation for you to keep it, but the Hammer of Dawn is a worthless piece of trash when you're out a boss fight that needed it, since the satellites always seemed to be out of alignment shortly after completion (or you had to go indoors).
    • On the other hand, when you do get the chance to use the Hammer on ordinary Mooks (for example, when a Seeder is protected by a Mook Rush) it is awesome.
    • The game makes the final bullet in each magazine do extra damage. This helps reduce the chance that you will be caught reloading while trying to kill an enemy, as well as increase the number of One Bullet Left moments a player will experience.
  • In Gears of War 2, there are parts where you have to use your Lancer's chainsaw bayonet to cut through obstacles blocking your path. No worries if you drop your Lancer to pick up another gun, though, as there is always a Lancer on the ground somewhere near the obstacle; though these Lancers are always nearly depleted of ammo so as to not provide players that DID keep the Lancer with an unfair ammo advantage, and to help players realise that you don't shoot the obstacle.
  • Max Payne:
    • In the first game, the final scene is unwinnable without a Grenade Launcher (or any other explosive) and a sniper rifle. And just in case you run out of ammo, the final group of Mooks has two guys who wield just those two weapons. You'd wonder what use are they in that situation...
    • In the third game, in some cases your health will reset to full if you die and need to go back to a checkpoint, even if you were on the verge of death when you trigger it. Keep dying and you'll get additional painkillers and ammo, just in case shortages are the problem. Also, for most of the Achievements/Trophies where you have to kill a certain number of people during a scripted Bullet Time sequence, there will be a checkpoint immediately beforehand, allowing you to retry immediately rather than slog through part of the level first. The sequences will also give you Bottomless Magazines with no need to reload, but rate of fire remains the same so you're out of luck if you only have a slow-firing handgun.
    • During the third game, Last Man Standing ignores body armor or ammo straps. You can shoot at an enemy anywhere to get back up, as opposed to needing a headshot as Max is falling.
  • The Ratchet & Clank series lets you retain all the experience for your weapons and maximum HP if you die. Plus, you've got an infinite number of lives, so dogged persistence will eventually get you through any part of the game.
    • Two skill points in Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando require playing levels under strict conditions. "Old Skool" requires defeating the enemies in the Testing Facility using only weapons from the first gamenote  while "Wrench Ninja II" requires completing the trek to the Megacorp Games on Joba using only the wrench. Luckily the challenges are much easier than you'd think - by finishing the levels normally then returning to the planet at a later time the number of enemies in these locations are heavily reduced.
    • A Crack In Time features puzzles that make you use several recordings of Clank to stand on multiple switches to open the door to the next section. If you fail enough times, the game will give you the option to skip the puzzle, but you won't get any bolts.
    • In Into the Nexus and Ratchet & Clank (2016), if you have a low jetpack fuel level (blinking red, beeping), staying on the ground for a few seconds will cause you to generate a little bit of fuel so you can get to a refueling station and get a full tank.
  • Whenever a situation arises in Sniper Elite V2 that requires a lot of bullets to solve, you will always have nearby a box with a full refill for your sniper rifle, just in case you've managed to run out to get to that point.
  • In Warframe, if you fall into a Bottomless Pit, you will be automatically brought back up with no penalty aside from losing any buffs or abilities you had active on your frame when you fell, such as Rhino's Iron Skin.
  • In Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, when your game autosaves it doesn't save your health. If you die with a sliver of health left after the autosave, you revive with full health.
  • The final boss in The Warriors can only be defeated by throwing a knife at him after you get his health down a certain amount. If you managed to fudge it up, the boss will send mooks after you with knives.
  • Uncharted makes liberal use of checkpoints, especially in platforming sequences and gunfights. Typically if you do a "milestone" of sorts, the game will mark it as a checkpoint. Unfortunately, gunfights are likely to kill you more often than the platforming sequences. Also, during the segments where you have to shoot while hanging from something, if you run out of ammo, the game will give you enough for another clip. This way, you're never helpless.
    • In Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy, your companion characters will not be spotted by enemies even if they are right in front of them, as long as the player is still in stealth and has not yet alerted the enemies themselves. This makes it very unrealistic, but the alternative would leave a player pulling their hair out.
  • Risk of Rain 2:
    • Teleporters now have glowing "dust" that hovers in the air around the them, making them easier to spot from a distance. Before, it could be hard to find, doubly so if it had a darker background to sit on.
    • Artifacts don't disable challenges when activated, allowing players to use them to make otherwise Luck-Based Missions (collect x number of items, for example) easier.
    • Void Cradles and Shrines of Blood, both of which deal damage in order to open, cannot be opened if you don't have enough health to spare, to stop you from doing something, uh... ill-advised.
    • Starting with the Survivors of the Void update, the pop-ups used for item pickups now show the conversions for many items that can change while in your inventory, such as for corrupted variants that replace their original items or items that are consumed on use.
  • Splatoon:
    • Splatoon has a subtle version of this in matchmaking. According to Word of God, the servers try to match players who like to paint more together, and players who like to kill more together, allowing players who are focused more on painting up the level some degree of relief from those who are just out for a good K/D ratio.
    • In the first game, losing a ranked match will cause your ranking to drop, even if one of your teammates got disconnected early on (which is a big disadvantage as you're now outnumbered). From Splatoon 2 onwards, your rank will no longer drop if your team loses in such a scenario; and in Splatoon 3, if the disconnect happens early enough in the match, it'll instantly end in a no contest.
    • In Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion, if you have less than 100 CQ Points (needed to enter levels and purchase continues), one of the characters will give you a loan of 3000 CQ. You can finish the campaign while in debt, and the only restriction the game places on the player for not paying it back is the inability to use the train station vending machine.
      • There's also the phase skip feature in the escape phase portion of the Octo Expansion. If you die five times during a phase, Agent 8 will gain Fireball Eyeballs and the game will give you the option to skip the phase altogether. Understandable, as these are the most difficult portions in the entire game.
    • Splatoon 3 added the ability to swap between watching the animations for Splatcast newcast or to a fairly small box with text and chibi pictures only in the upper left corner of the screen by pressing the L-stick, with the game bringing up the box format automatically while playing, as the forced watching of when first loading the game and every two hours was one of the biggest complaints from the community. You are still forced to watch Splatcast during major announcements, such as Splatfests and patch updates.
      • Weapon dealer Sheldon would only allow you to buy certain weapons once your level was high enough in Splatoon and Splatoon 2, requiring money in exchange for them. This often led to players who were good at a specific weapon needing to stick to one they didn't enjoy using or were bad with until Sheldon deemed you worthy of the one you were looking for. In Splatoon 3, he now deals in Sheldon Licenses, of which you get one for free every level-up. You can buy weapons that your level is high enough for for one Sheldon License, or you can pay three of them for a weapon your level is too low for. The License system also lets you save your hard-earned money for either clothes (which provide stat boosts in the game) or for the customisation of your locker.

    Turn-Based Strategy 
  • A good piece of gear is relatively easy to obtain in Artery Gear: Fusion:
    • Gear substats are shown the instant you receive your gear from target eliminations. This makes it easier to decide which gear is worth keeping and prevents waste of upgrade materials.
    • Fusion can be used to transfer substats between any piece of gear dropped from the same boss. This massively streamlines the grinding for gear that you'll need.
    • Casting a piece of gear will always upgrade the lowest tier of substats first.
    • Reforging allows you to reroll the substats of a 6* piece of gear. In the case that your rolls are unfavorable, you get to keep the substats you had before.
    • The game also allows you to constantly repeat stages offline by using 'substitute operations', saving you the time, battery and hassle needed to grind stages on autoplay.
  • Nintendo Wars:
    • Dual Strike attempted to Nerf Infantry/Mech Spam tactics by increasing the point value of footsoldiers, so that destroying them fills up your CO meter much faster than before. This is a double edged sword, however, as the player who's losing units still gains twice as much meter from it as the one destroying them. If the spammer can afford the losses, it may end up helping them more - which is exactly the case with all of the most overpowered COs, who can pump out insane quantities of units. Days of Ruin took a more polished approach to the issue with its veteran system, where units level up every time they get a kill. You're rewarded for keeping units alive, and sacrificing fodder to wear down the enemy can end up making them stronger instead.
    • Older games had an issue with scouting in fog of war - since you could cancel movement, this would've let you check for enemies within a unit's entire movement range and defeat the purpose of concealment. Advance Wars through Dual Strike solved this by making it so even if movement is canceled, the fuel drain is not. This can be a constant annoyance if you're a little too careless with your moves, and it also means that checking a unit's attack power against multiple enemies is always wasteful. Then Days of Ruin came along, and simply changed the order in which actions are decided - movement comes after everything else. You can't cancel movement anymore, but there's no longer any reason to, and it otherwise plays exactly the same. Such a simple, common sense solution makes all the fuel nonsense seem laughable in hindsight.
    • Advance Wars onward made it so fuel and ammo no longer cost money to refill. Prior to this, it was a question between losing money every time you put a unit on an allied city, or turning off the auto-supply and doing every single refill manually. The newer games also let supply units refill air and naval units, which previously relied entirely on airports and harbors that could be extremely far apart.
  • The seishin search menu, first added in Super Robot Wars Gaiden, lets you select multiple pilots with the same seishin and activate them all at once in Shin Super Robot Wars. This is a big improvement over past SRW games where you could only activate one seishin at a time.
  • DEADLOCK requires the player to carefully balance income and morale; most actions that'll bring in money will affect morale negatively, and a demoralised population will refuse to work, decreasing your income, not fixing damaged buildings and generally making the situation miserable until you stop doing whatever it is that made them angry - usually at the cost of income. Newbie players who can't get the hang of morale management have an anti-frustration option at their disposal: choosing the Cyth race, which has morale permanently stuck at 90%. While this means you permanently give up 10% of your workforce, it also means you can tax the remaining 90% to within an inch of their life and they'll just pony up the cash without complaint - or contact the resident black-market traffickers for a boost in resources and/or research without suffering the massive morale hit you usually get when your dealings are inevitably discovered.
  • Disgaea D2 adds a lot of features that make the grind much more streamlined:
    • There's a Cheat Shop that lets you adjust EXP, HL, Mana, and Weapon Mastery gain by shifting one of the rates to another, and you can increase your gain by clearing special maps. You can also make enemies stronger or weaker freely from there. No more having to pass a bill every time you want to adjust enemy levels once.
    • Speaking of bills, you also don't have to pass a bill to add higher level gear to the shops. That's now done by progressing through the game. Also, their stock is no longer randomized, so no need to reload to buy basic items in bulk, but there's still a way to buy randomized gear.
    • And speaking of items, item rarity values are standardized to three tiers instead of being abstract numbers and you can upgrade an item's rarity if you put some time into it. Also, there's no more "Item Bag" and you now have access to all your items anywhere.
    • Passing spells between characters is much easier. Apprenticeship is no longer locked to the character you used to create them. Now you can assign any character to be an apprentice then learn their spell off of them freely.
    • There's now the option to Promote a generic unit to a higher tier after they've leveled up, instead of being forced to reincarnate to change their class.
    • You can now Throw things diagonally however you please. Previously, you had to use a jank method of pressing the button to throw in between changing the direction, which was imprecise to say the least.
  • Into the Breach:
    • If all your mechs are disabled in battle, the mission immediately ends with all objectives failed, but without any additional power loss, giving you a chance to recover.
    • The grid pylons in the final area of the game are uninhabited and do not count against a perfect run if destroyed. This is a good thing since it's also the toughest level in the game.
    • While both Spiders' and Alpha Spiders' eggs web all units around the point of landing, the Spider Leader's eggs do not. A good thing too, as it spawns 2-3 eggs per turn.
    • The insta-kill tentacles in the final mission will not spawn on a tile the Renfield Bomb is sitting on.
    • The challenge run objectives only require surviving three islands, meaning players don't have to go the 4th island, whose Vek are almost always their Alpha versions.
    • In a mission with a Time Pod landing, the player is warned that they should save it as soon as possible before the Vek get to it, but despite that, the Vek will never intentionally target it or move into the pod's space. It can only be destroyed by a Vek multi-tile attack inadvertently hitting it, the player knocking an enemy into the tile or getting it hit by a weapon.

    Virtual Reality 
  • In Job Simulator, if you accidentally throw or drop a task-critical item outside of the play area, it will teleport itself back into the play area automatically, preventing you from having to restart.

    Visual Novels 
  • In the Ace Attorney series, specifically those that include the Psych-Lock mechanic (most notably featured in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations), the penalties that the player gathered from the previous court day or Pysch-Lock unlock are carried over. However, unlocking all locks normally refills the bar partially, but normally to full, as to not leave the player completely screwed if they only had one penalty left after a unlock and had to immediately head into a court day.
  • In Coffee Talk, if the Skip Dialogue option is set to "Read", the Fast Forward button is disabled for new dialogue so you won't accidentally skip them in your subsequent playthroughs. Alternatively, you can set Skip Dialogue to "All" so you can speed through all conversations.
  • Danganronpa:
    • Both the original game and the sequel, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, let the player continue from wherever they left off in the trial upon running out of influence, to prevent them from having to go through all the other deductions that they've already solved. Danganronpa Parody hangs a lampshade on this.
      Makoto: Kind of takes the edge off it though when you realize that no matter how many times you lose, Monokuma will just let you carry on.
    • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: Obtaining all of the Free Time Events for all of the characters in the original release was tedious; a single playthrough allows for a maximum of 19 events out of 65. Since the events unlocked new abilities, the best way to see all of them and get the rewards was to restart the first chapter over and over again, getting everyone's Free Time Events completed (except Genocide Jack, who joins the school in Chapter 2). The sequel introduced Island Mode, a time management post-game minigame that would allow you to quickly access all of the Free Time events and obtain an "Island Mode Ending" for each character (essentially a bonus Free Time Event). This minigame was retrofitted into the Updated Re-release of the original game under the name "School Mode".
    • In Chapter 4 of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, the player has to solve several puzzles in a locked room. If the player's unable to solve the puzzles, they have two options: talk to Monomi for the solution, or skip the room entirely and go to the next major scene. The only penalty is losing out on some bonus Monocoins.
    • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony adds the option to start a chapter from the first Free Time period, making it easier to get the Friendship Fragments, especially for Kaede's events, which cannot be gotten in Love Across the Universe, the game's equivalent of Island/School Mode.
  • In Doki Doki Literature Club!, you can normally only skip dialogue you've already seen from loading a save from a previous day. However, the player can skip through part of Yuri's event in Act 2 even if they haven't seen it before. After Yuri kills herself with a butcher knife, the player can freely skip the hundreds of paragraphs of Corrupted Data that don't say anything important. However, this is averted in the Plus re-release as the player is expected to not skip a single line in this segment in order to unlock an image in the Gallery.
  • A Little Lily Princess: The game tells the player outright which routes are still available and whether it's their last chance to pursue a route. The characteristics that make Becky's route easier to follow than the others also makes it so there is a route that can be followed in Act 2 regardless of how unlucky the player may have been in collecting resources in Act 1.
  • In Murder by Numbers (2020), Easy Mode lets you complete most puzzles easily and without penalty, though you can't unlock all of SCOUT's memories that way.
  • NU: carnival:
    • The game automatically converts duplicate cards into shards, which can be spent to ascend your initial card.
    • Either escaping a level manually or being defeated gives you back all the energy you spent for it.
    • Even though several of the consumables for AP expire, the icon on the inventory displays a timer on the top left that refers to the item(s) closest to their expiration date, as a form of a quick notification and to save the players from the hassle of checking every consumable one-by-one.
    • Any fighting stages that have been 3-starred can be repeated automatically without having to play through them again.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies adds a whole bunch of features:
    • Your partner give advice if you keep screwing up a cross examination by flat out telling you which part of the testimony is false, but you still have to use your own brain to figure out what piece of evidence contradicts the testimony.note  If you happen to lose a trial, you can opt to try again on the part you screwed up with a fully restored life bar, which helps curb on Save Scumming.
    • A stenograph-like record of the last few dozen lines that were spoken, so if you zone out and miss a bunch of dialogue, or are forced to save and quit and come back at a later time, you can look over the past several lines to re-initiate yourself with the context.
    • A to do list for investigations, which flat out states when you need to present evidence to characters.
    • An option to fastforward text despite not having seen it yet.
    • A chapter select to get right to the fun parts when replaying.
    • Moving between investigation locations no longer requires going to all the locations on the way, preventing a lot of maze like wandering.
    • Hotspots in investigation locations now have a checkmark like the discussion topics to avoid repeating dialog.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice retains most of the above features, but tones down the significance of the hint mechanic. It is only accessible under circumstances where you've already been heavily penalized, and the feature can even be disabled entirely.
  • Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Hint coins are extended to the trial segments. They will lock out a majority of the wrong answers and flat out reveal the correct spot for spot the image problem questions.
  • After obtaining an ending in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, the player needs to play through the game all over again. While dialogue can be skipped, puzzles can't, which results in something of a drag. The sequel, Virtue's Last Reward, presents the player with a flow chart of events so they can revert to any point in the story after getting an ending. The flow chart function was also added to the Updated Re-release of 999, fixing the problem from that game as well.
  • In When the Night Comes, important choices are clearly labeled, and potentially triggering content is warned for. A large number of available save slots, as well as the ability to rewind the game, make it easy to make a different choice if you want to.
  • Several events in Zero Time Dilemma take the form of a Luck-Based Mission. The player is encouraged to savescum their way to the desired outcome, but to prevent excessive time wasted rerolling, the game will rig one of themnote  in the player's favor after a few attempts.

    Wide-Open Sandboxes 
  • Astroneer:
    • The gateway at the center of each planet happens to refill your oxygen, which is good, because bringing a vehicle or a line of oxygen tethers down to that place would be a nightmare.
    • Every planet has the resources necessary to build a base, a basic shuttle and a thruster for it, so even if you lose your regular shuttle or run out of fuel, you aren't stranded. It may be quite hard to pull off on some planets with tougher terrain types, but it's still entirely possible.
    • The verbosely-named "Mission, Power, and Compass Update" added an improved version of the compass that will show the direction to your base or any beacons, from anywhere on the planet. Previously, the only way to find your base after exploring was to look for the 'flag' over the horizon.
    • If a rover ends up wrong-end-up after a tumble, such as down the side of a mountain, after 2-3 seconds the "Exit Vehicle" key will switch to "Flip Vehicle".
  • Dead Rising 2: Off The Record has a slew of features that address grievances with the original Dead Rising 2 and the first game, such as:
    • Since Frank himself needs Zombrex, instead of someone else, he can inject it himself whenever he needs a dose, instead of having to run back to the Safe Room.
    • Frank uses a Bluetooth earpiece instead of a walkie-talkie, allowing him to answer calls while keeping his hands free to protect himself.
    • Money is easier to obtain, particularly in Sandbox Mode. Considering one of the Case Files requires you to pay a million-dollar ransom, Sandbox Mode is almost necessary.
  • Elite Dangerous is a space game that does not hold your hands and has a steep learning curve, but it has certain features to make it more fair:
    • If your ship is destroyed, you can rebuy the same model and all of your modules for 5% of their original price.
    • In the case you don't have enough credits for the aforementioned ship insurance, you can make a loan to pay for it. Your loan limit is based on your current rank and 10% of all your earnings is deduced until you finish paying up the loan, but you still have some coverage against permanently losing your ship and upgrades in case of lack of money.
    • You can activate a flight assist, which helps the ship to move in the desired direction at the desired speed, by countering your thrusters so speed and direction are maintained. Without it, thanks to the mostly accurate Newtonian physics that the game uses, if you accelerated, you would keep accelerating until you made a thrust in the opposite direction, or, if you turned, you would keep spinning until you applied a thrust to the other side.
  • Endless Sky:
    • Making port or jumping to hyperspace both advance game time by a day, but this only applies to your ship. Your escorts can do this as much as they want in real time, which saves a lot of trouble when waiting for escorts in other systems to catch up with your fleet.
    • Unlike the game's spiritual predecessor, Escape Velocity, you can read and compare the marginal difference in commodity prices between the system you're in and your next destination, making it easier to spot optimal trades without having to rely on arbitrary "high" or "low" price descriptions as with EV.
  • In Fallout 4, the inhabitants of your settlements can be set to various tasks while in Workshop Mode, but early on, unless the settler was standing right next to their job, it was nigh impossible to figure out what it was, or whether or not the settler even had a jobnote . A few months after release, Bethesda released a patch that places an icon on the screen, telling you their job. This cut down on the really annoying tendency to assign settlers tasks when they already had one to do.
  • Grand Theft Auto:
    • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City has the mission "Death Row", which is unique, as it is the only mission in the game that gives no monetary reward for completion. As compensation, however, the enemies drop significantly larger sums of cash than normal when killed, ensuring that you will at least get something out of the mission.
    • In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the final story mission, "End of the Line", has CJ blast his way through a giant crack fortress, take out Big Smoke, escape said crack fortress, and chase Tenpenny, who is in a fire truck. If the player fails during the driving sequence, the mission starts there for future retries.
    • Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned added mid-mission checkpoints for the first time in the series. This meant that players no longer had to replay entire missions, which often began with a long driving sequence.
      • Whenever Johnny invites one of his friends to an activity, the other two will automatically tag along, thus enabling you to maintain your relationship with all of them at once. This new feature is also present in Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony.
    • In Grand Theft Auto V, if you fail to complete a multiple-ending mission with the ending you wanted (e.g. "Unknowing the Truth"), you can go back and do it properly. This is particularly useful because said mission deliberately tricks you into not doing it properly. It also allows you to skip a mission segment if you fail it three times in a row like in L.A. Noire, with the only penalty being not getting a gold score at the mission's end.
  • In Just Cause 3, there are 2 trophies/achievements that require the player to liberate a base in a particular way ("...Without Bullets!" requires you to destroy all of the Chaos Objects without using weapons, grenades, or bombs; just your Grappling Hook, while "This was Supposed to be a Western" requires you to break all the Chaos Objects without getting out of your vehicle). So, are you screwed if you've liberated all of the bases? Nope, because upon beating the game, you gain access to the Re-Oppression feature, which allows you to reset almost any location in the game to the default state, meaning that all of the enemies, Chaos Objects, and other such things come back, allowing you to try again as much as necessary.
  • L.A. Noire has an option to let you skip an action sequence if you fail it three times in a row, along with letting your partner drive to a destination you set to avoid bad driver penalties, or as a form of fast travel.
  • Necesse:
    • Smart Mining can be toggled on, which automatically moves the cursor to a different block of stone once you're done mining one block.
    • If the world settings are set to drop all items on death, they will automatically be re-equipped and set to the same slots on the hotbar when you retrieve them.
    • If you beat a boss before getting the quest to slay it, it will still be counted, so once you do get the quest, you'kll be able to claim the reward immediately.
  • Palworld:
    • While being mildly over-encumbered will remove your ability to climb, it does not prevent you from climbing out of water, preventing unavoidable drowning.
    • You can still use your grappling gun to launch yourself short distances while over-encumbered. While this is extremely inefficient for actual traversal, it makes transferring heavy items between storages/bases much more feasible. Additionally, a later patch allowed players to continue moving at a snail's pace no matter how severely encumbered they are.
    • Wanted status usually follows your character throughout the entire game, until death. However, if you begin a tower boss battle with a wanted status, and connect with at least one attack, they will despawn and your wanted status will disappear.
    • If you die during a tower boss battle, your dropped items sack will be neatly placed in front of the tower entrance, instead of inside the tower instance where you died.
    • At most initial spawn points during the beginning of the game, there is a "friendly" NPC nearby who, a couple of times, will give you a few welfare items to jumpstart your first base creation (assuming you talk to them, and assuming you avoid hostile actions toward them).
    • Pal Spheres will spawn in small quantities as gatherable items in the wild, meaning the player will almost always be able to go catch Pals at a slow pace, regardless of current coin and resource fortunes.
    • Extreme temperatures in the initial spawn areas are designed to encourage the player to craft mitigating gear, but are not tuned to be unbearable before they are able to do so. Getting caught in a cold or heat wave is usually not a death sentence at this stage of the game.
    • While Pals caged by the Free Pal Alliance and Rayne Syndicate can take damage, they cannot be killed even if you reduce their HP to 0. This means reckless use of explosives and trigger-happy Pals with area-of-effect attacks won't screw you out of rescuing the caged Pal.
    • Version 0.1.5.0 made it so that your weapons will no longer damage your buildings, so you won't reduce your entire base to rubble if you had your rocket launcher out instead of your Grappling-Hook Pistol.
  • Red Dead Redemption:
    • The game is quite open-handed with its autosaving, automatically securing any sidequest you may have completed. Finish a Stranger mission and then get mauled by a cougar on the way back to town? When you respawn, you'll see that the mission is still complete. As a bonus, if you don't like what happened (for example, if you unwittingly made a really bad moral choice), the autosave is on a different file in the HD than your manual save.
    • The bandana also counts in some situations. For example, one of the Sharpshooter challenges requires you to shoot the hats off two people. It's very easy to shoot them in the head and kill them by accident, netting yourself negative honor and a bounty on your head. But if you're wearing the bandana, these consequences are negated.
  • Saints Row:
    • The series in general is good about teleporting the player when they find themselves trapped. Notably, it has a "Warp to Shore" feature when in the water, to prevent the player from having to look for a way out of the water.
    • In the "Veteran Child" mission in Saints Row 2, you have to use flashbangs to separate the eponymous boss from his human shield Shaundi. Don't have enough? Well, VC was kind enough to leave some lying around.
      • When Saints Row IV has you relive that fight in Shaundi's simulation, they let you just shoot them with a taser to separate them.
    • In Saints Row: The Third, in the one mission Oleg (who can't ride in most cars) joins you that involves vehicular travel, the game is very generous in spawning utility trucks. Even then, it will waive the normal failure condition of abandoning followers, having him catch up and rejoin you at the next objective without penalty.
    • Saints Row IV has the Warden fights. These end in a minigame where you have to repeatedly hammer one of the buttons to move up the progress bar while the system tries to push it back down. While the pushback speeds up as the game goes on, if you lose and get spat out, it will slow right down for your second attempt.
  • In The Simpsons Hit & Run and The Simpsons: Road Rage, if you fail a mission five times, it lets you skip it. However, Hit and Run doesn't allow it for the final missions, preventing many from finishing the game. Unfortunately, doing so also skips the cutscenes you see after completing the mission, resulting in some confusion (for instance, skipping the last mission of the first stage of Hit and Run will make you have no clue why everyone stopped suspecting Mr. Burns or the black vans).
  • In Sleeping Dogs (2012), when Wei Shen is at less than half of his original health (or a quarter of his maximum possible health) and not taking damage, he will regenerate health until it reaches half of his original health/a quarter of his maximum possible health. Filling the Face Meter in combat and/or consuming foods can regenerate his health past that point, while entering one of Wei's apartments will immediately break off combat and sleeping will immediately restore Wei to full health.
  • Stacklands:
    • The game has an option a longer Moon length, which increases the time limit per turn to gather food before you have to feed your villagers. There's also Peaceful Mode, which removes Random Encounters.
    • If you play a mysterious artifact on the Temple or Cathedral, a confirmation box asks you if you're ready to start the ritual. This is because doing so summons the Demon and the Demon Lord, respectively, who are the Final Boss and True Final Boss of the game.

    Other 
  • The Blind Swordsman: The player character is a blind swordsman, and it is reflected in gameplay through being unable to see, and thus having to hear which direction enemies are coming from. Thankfully, they all attack one at a time.
  • In the Arkanoid game Break Quest, if you take too long without breaking any bricks, the game will spawn a random weapon for you so that you can (hopefully) take out that last lousy brick.
  • The Doll Shop: After playing through the whole game, subsequent playthroughs cut down on retreading the same scenes by allowing the player to skip to the days where they can branch out the story.
  • Game & Watch: In Mario Bros., if you fill the truck or drop a case the game pauses for a quick animation (of the brothers on break until the truck returns, or the foreman reprimanding the brother that dropped the case, respectively). When the game resumes, any cases that were close to falling off the conveyor belt mysteriously disappear, giving you slightly more time to get back into your rhythm.
  • M2's Sega AGES series of ports on Nintendo Switch normally just require you to tap A to navigate the menus, but for more significant actions like exiting the game, resetting the game, or reverting settings to default, the game will require you to hold A for a second so that you don't perform such actions by mistake.
  • A community for a given video game's Speedrun has the ability to pick and choose rules for its runs via majority vote. These will sometimes include opting to exclude introductory sequences of the game that otherwise have minimal impact on run time save for extremely minute optimizations and can be safely removed from runs by simply removing a fixed time from existing runs retroactively, giving players an easier time getting runs started by getting them straight into the game sooner.
  • Many mobile games that feature a gachapon typically also have a secondary mechanic commonly referred to as "sparking" (after the Granblue Fantasy mechanic of the same name that popularized it), where pulling repeatedly on a certain banner racks up a secondary currency that can be used to buy high-rarity cards/units of your choice when enough of it is gained. This means that a player with abysmal luck will eventually be able to get a desired pick given enough premium currency and/or real money is dumped in.
  • Arcade Archives is a series of arcade game ports by Hamster Corporation. Most of these aim to replicate the original arcade experience, but some of these releases have extra quality-of-life features tailored to each game:
    • If you turn on the autofire feature for a specific button, it will be disabled during continue and name entry prompts so you don't accidentally rapid-fire your way into a Game Over or inputting the wrong initials (e.g. meaning to enter "TRO" but you put in "TTT" due to the autofire).
    • Gradius III is one of a very few releases to have a stage select, which is great for practice or exploring the game, because it's one of the hardest shmups in existence.
    • Gun Frontier: Most ACA releases with autofire functions only allow you to choose between 15 Hz and 30 Hz autofire. This release also features 6.6 Hz and 7.7 Hz autofire. Why these specific frequences? Because this game has a Dynamic Difficulty feature that, among other things, raises the difficulty if you fire your weapons too frequently. 6.6 Hz is the fastest you can fire without causing a difficulty raise, while 7.7 is the fastest you can fire while only minimally ticking up the difficulty.
    • Gunnail has a toggle to disable the alarm that plays when you have no shield left. As this game features a multiplier system where your multiplier increases the more empty shield slots you have, this can help make score-based runs feel less unnecessarily urgent.

    Non-Gaming Examples 
  • Some "mud run" obstacle courses have a few challenges that can be skipped for the sake of attendees that aren't physically capable of doing them.
    • In the Spartan Race obstacle course, if you fail to complete an obstacle or choose not to attempt it, the race requires you to do thirty burpees (a push-up followed by a jump) before you're allowed to move on. However, you have the option to skip certain obstacles without penalty if failing the obstacle could be potentially dangerous, such as a rope climb or a net ladder, where your strength giving out partway up would mean a very long fall.note 
    • The Tough Mudder race has an obstacle called the Warrior's Carry, where you have to walk a certain distance with someone else on your shoulders in a fireman's carry position. Should you be unable to carry someone or be carried for whatever reason, you can just run through Warrior's Carry's designated path with no one on your shoulders, and it will still count.
  • Many browser improvements over the years have been designed to avert frustration.
    • Gone are the days when accidentally closing your browser or tab meant that you lost a huge post you were writing in an input field, and Chrome's practice of separating each browser component and tab into its own individual process means that one misbehaving component probably won't crash your entire browser. Combined with new in-browser features like about:performance in Firefox, this can also help you isolate which tabs are causing issues, perhaps due to a badly-coded plugin or website.
    • The Google Chrome browser will mark tabs playing sound with a speaker icon, so you can quickly pinpoint and silence tabs that are suddenly playing music. Firefox also does this as of November 2015, and further allows users to mute the tab directly by clicking the speaker icon there.
    • Web browsers eventually filtered out the feature that makes a user go back a page when pressing the Backspace key. The "Go Back" command was changed to Alt + Left Arrow, which is much harder to do by mistake and prevents accidental data loss when typing a long post.
    • The "Restore Previous Session" in Mozilla Firefox allows you to re-open the tabs in your previous sessions with most unsaved changes kept, in case you want to read them again, accidentally exit the browser, or in the rare instance that it really does manage to lock up/crash completely. Chrome has a watered-down version; so long as you haven't shut the computer off beforehand, you can use the History submenu to recover your last session.
  • YouTube:
    • If you tell a video to open in a new tab, or quickly swap to another tab before the video starts, the video won't play until you click on the video's tab.
    • When autoplay is on, you're given about five seconds at the end of each video to either cancel starting the next video, or start it immediately. If you replay the video, the website will just end the video as if autoplay was off once you reach the end. Handy, if you're replaying a short video over and over.
    • In your Subscriptions page, active livestreams of YouTube channels which you're subscribed to are always placed at the top. This happens regardless of when the stream started, so streams that never end or started months ago (such as music/radio streams) can still be found easily. In addition, if you turn on alerts by clicking a bell icon for a channel, it will send you a pop-up link to any of that channel's scheduled streams a few minutes before the stream is set to start.
  • In the book Heir Apparent, there's a hidden 'cheat' in the titular virtual reality arcade game that makes the game easier to play, causing the NPC characters to act out of character to help the player's avatar if the player starts to cry. As the game is designed in-universe for a young audience, the player crying would mean that they are likely stuck and getting extremely frustrated, hence the game drops some of the difficulty to help them out.
  • Some Friending Networks like Facebook and Twitter will prevent you from making the same post twice in a short amount of time, so as to prevent accidental double-posting.
  • In baseball, runners are allowed to run past first base and still be considered safe, as long as they come back to the base fairly quickly. This means batters can run at full speed and try to beat the throw, without worrying about being called out or slowing down to stop exactly on the base. However, since this only applies to first base — more specifically, to tagging first base without "rounding" it (i.e. turning to run towards second base, as opposed to continuing to run straight ahead) — runners have to be careful when trying to go to second or third.
  • In many email clients (such as Hotmail and Gmail), if you type "attached is/are..." in the body of the email without attaching a file and then hit "Send", the client will point this out and ask if you want to attach anything before the message is sent. The client may also point out if you left the subject line of an email blank, since many spam filters block emails without a subject.
  • Microsoft Windows:
    • Windows 9x will force a restart if you press CTRL+ALT+DEL twice. Windows NT-based versionsnote  instead bring up a menu of choices and no longer force-restart your PC if you mash CTRL+ALT+DEL, in the event that your machine is stuck.
    • Every Windows machine ever created will open Task Manager if you press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC. This is hard-coded in at the most base level possible; even if literally nothing else is running, you can still open Task Manager and have access to the Run command or see what's causing problems.
  • Some SMS apps on Android, such as Evolve SMS, allow you to include a delay when sending a message so that you can cancel sending the message if you catch a typo in your message.
  • With some portable music players and music player apps on tablets and smartphones, if your headphones are unplugged (or whenever you get a phone call), whatever song is playing will automatically pause, so you don't suddenly get music blaring out of the speakers and annoying everyone around you.
  • Games Done Quick: Runners are allowed to use savestates for tricks that could result in the game crashing, softlocking, or otherwise cause a massive loss in time that could kill the run. They're also allowed to have emergency back-up save files on games with save functions to fall back on if they attempt a trick that can irrevocably ruin a run.
  • Golf features the "Unplayable Lie" rule, to deal with situations that can arise where playing the ball as it lies is practically impossible to do in a way that would make any progress at all. Once a player has located his ball, he can unilaterally determine it to be unplayable, which offers him three options. First, he can take a drop within two club lengths of where the ball lies, no closer to the hole. Second, he can take a line that connects the flag stick with his ball, and take a drop as far back along that line as he wishes. Finally, he can go back to where the previous shot was played and drop the ball there (or place it on a tee if the previous shot was the tee shot for that hole). To prevent obvious abuse, all of these options cost a one stroke penalty, but can still be the best option if attempting to actually play the ball as it lies would result in MORE strokes due to whiffs or having no clue where a stroke could potentially send the ball.
    • Players can mark the position of their ball on the putting green with a coin or the like, in order to get their ball out of the way of players farther from the hole, who usually play first, who might also have a closer ball in the way of where they intend for their ball to roll. Before this one would have to putt around another player's ball, or chip over it (which could damage the greens), and suffer stroke penalties if a shot played from the putting surface hit another ball on the putting surface (this penalty remains, but being able to mark your ball makes it largely irrelevant).
  • In Minigolf, it's possible for the ball to end up right against the wall or an obstacle. If this happens, you're allowed to shove it a few inches away so you can swing the putter.
    • In the ABC game show Holey Moley, when this happened a staff member moved it.
  • Educational institutions (primary schooling, college, etc.) have a few, because instructors that aren't Sadist Teachers want their students to learn but also want them to pass, as "fails a lot of their students" is generally considered a mark of a poor instructor.
    • Instructors may ignore the grade that's based on your assignment and test scores in favor of giving you a higher grade, often if they believe that you've made enough of an improvement in understanding the course material over the academic quarter/semester/year. For example, if you needed a 70% to pass the course, but you got a 69.9% and your last two tests were 95% each, they may just give you the pass as if you got a 70.0% anyways. Or even bump you up to a B instead of a C.
    • This is why grading curves exist. Instructors may see how their students are doing on their coursework and adjust the requirements for each letter grade accordingly if the instructor feels they were initially too harsh on their students.
    • Some instructors will opt to drop the lowest-graded assignment you have from your course grade calculation. This is usually seen with instructors who grade entirely based on tests with "no making up missed tests for any reason" policies.
    • At many colleges/universities, you are not required by law to attend your classes (whereas skipping school in primary schooling without a valid excuse is always met with consequences). While instructors often frown upon skipping, and may include penalties per class if you do miss one, there's nothing legally saying you have to attend. Many students with learning disabilities (including those who are great at learning new information on their own but not in a classroom or lecture hall environment) see this as a boon.
  • As of October 2018, Fox began to feature an ad-break timer to let the viewers know how long the breaks will last until these programs like The Simpsons and Family Guy return.
  • Once in a while, when you check into a hotel, you may be offered a complimentary upgrade to a better room type. This is usually because the room type you reserved ended up with an overbooking (which can happen if the hotel's reservation systems receives reservations in rapid succession, as the various interlinked systems can take time to communicate with one another and say "hey, we're out of rooms, don't allow reservations of this type to our hotel anymore") and the hotel would rather take the loss than make you pay extra because of something that's entirely not your fault.
  • Many Pee Wee and Youth sport leagues feature a rule where a team's score stops being increased if they get too much of a lead over their opponents and keep scoring. For example, if the limit was five and the Red Team was leading 6 to 1 and kept scoring, their score would remain locked at 6 until the Blue Team scored a goal and closed the gap, then Red could score again and go up to 7. This is to prevent the trailing team from getting so frustrated by getting their butts handed to them that they rage quit and/or lose all motivation.
  • The Los Angeles Metro Rail allows for free transfers up to two hours of using a one-way pass. This is a lot more fair to passengers that need to make more transfers while commuting, and also more economically feasible to those commuting longer distances.
    • This is a fairly common feature in many urban transit systems. London's rail network doesn't feature a transfer time limit, but transferring between stations close enough to each other (typically within a 10-minute walk) will count as a single journey for the purpose of fare calculation. Also in London, the "Hopper" fare valid on buses and trams claim that it allows free transfers up to 60 minutes after your first journey, but in actuality it is up to 70 minutes to give customers a small grace period.
  • The Nuzlocke Challenge in Pokémon has two core tenets: if a Pokémon is knocked out, it can no longer be used, and you can only catch the first mon you encounter in each area. The second one has developed a few universally accepted caveats:
    1. If the Pokémon you encounter is one that you already have, you may elect not to catch it and try again. This is to stop the party being glutted with early-game Com Mons with no variation.
    2. If the Pokémon flees, it doesn't count as the one encounter you're allowed in an area, since wild Pokémon running away is rare and beyond your control.
    3. If you encounter a Shiny Pokémon, you can attempt to catch it regardless of where and when you found it. The chances of encountering a Shiny Pokémon are so small (about 1 in 8000 for most games) that it would be a shame to not try and catch it.
  • Whenever Chopped requires the contestants to make an ice cream component, a second or third ice cream machine is provided. This is because ice cream makers must be cleaned between each use, which will take more time than contestants realistically have. This avoids making the round Unintentionally Unwinnable.
    • Rice and Polenta are notoriously difficult ingredients to incorporate - however if they appear as a basket ingredient, they must be incorporated. Under these circumstances, the ingredient will have been prepared ahead of time so they instead will transform it rather than forcing every contestant to waste time preparing it.
    • On several occasions, either the theme or a basket ingredient required more time to prepare - as a result, the contestants were given more than the usual time. In contrast, a few episodes had a "Quick" theme and thus contestants were given less time - and thus they were given basket ingredients that were either pre-prepared or didn't take much time to prepare.
    • One part Loophole Abuse one part Anti-Frustration Feature - the rules state that you have to transform an ingredient. Sometimes, a basket ingredient may be something that is technically "Complete" such as a cake, parfait, or a quesadilla. You can simply take a part of it (ie the filling) and it counts as "transforming" it.
    • The judges are always much much more lenient and constructive when they are dealing with people who either aren't chefs (and thus never went to culinary arts school or had no formal training), or are children.
    • Similarly, stepstools are provided for children - or shorter contestants.
    • In one episode, the contestants were given a really disgusting basket of lime Jello, cheeseballs, imitation crab meat, and durian because the viewers chose them. The judges admitted that there was no possible way that they could make anything appetizing while using all four of those ingredients.
  • In an episode of Guy's Grocery Games, a contestant spoke Thai as her first language. The Bonus Round (requiring not just physical speed but thinking speed) required her to answer questions and then quickly rush to find the ingredient. A translator was provided so that she would have a much fairer chance.
    • In said Bonus Round, you will be directed to find a specific ingredient, however you don't need to be overly specific, you can actually get something containing the ingredient and it counts. For example, one ingredient was Quinoa and a contestant simply slipped a box of microwavable Quinoa in his basket and it was of course considered valid.
  • A common arrangement in informal (backyard, beach, street, etc.) Cricket is that players under a certain age can't be out on the first ball they face.
  • Chat program Discord alerts you with a ping every time someone posts in a server that you're in. While you have the option to turn this off, the message pings are on by default when you join a new server. However, if a server has a sufficiently high number of people when you join, the pings are silently turned off by default so that you're not suddenly overwhelmed.
  • The iPhone series from iPhone X onwards features Face ID, which allows you to unlock your phone just by raising it to your face and having it recognize your facial features (except for the iPhone SE line, which continues to use fingerprint-based Touch ID instead). However, this backfired in 2020 when the COVID-19 Pandemic hit, as it caused many jurisdictions and businesses to mandate wearing face masks to mitigate the spread of COVID-19; unfortunately, many users tend to remove their masks in public to unlock their phones. To mitigate this, Apple introduced two features:
    • Starting in iOS 13.5, if your iPhone detects a face covering, it will immediately bring up the passcode prompt so you can just input your passcode to unlock your phone, instead of waiting for several failed attempts before asking you to use your passcode instead.
    • Starting in iOS 14.5, if you have an iPhone and an Apple Watch, you can configure your phone to automatically unlock as long as your watch is also unlocked. This has an Anti-Frustration Feature of its own: your watch will notify you that you've unlocked your phone, so if you did it by accident or someone else grabbed your phone, you can press a "Lock iPhone" button on your watch screen.
  • I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What? has several of these built into the dungeon system.
    • Every room in a dungeon must be accessible on foot from the dungeon's entry hall. If a dungeon puts a pit trap in a hallway, there must be a ledge wide enough to cross on one side, and if a dungeon puts a room above or below another room the system automatically provides stairs.
    • Similarly, while a dungeon can create doors that require keys or puzzle-solving to unlock, those doors must be unlockable using only items or information found within the dungeon.
    • Higher-level monsters and hazards apparently can't be summoned on the dungeon's early levels (Taylor has yet to grow enough levels to see exactly how this is enforced, but it's a well-known rule of dungeons).
    • And in addition to all the built-in stuff, the ritual system lets adventurers force changes on the dungeon if they really want to, such as creating artificial shortcuts or secondary entrances to bypass especially nasty floors.
  • Gmail normally uses your language setting from your Google account to decide which language to use for spellcheck. However, it is fully capable of recognizing when you are typing in a different language in an email and will, silently and without any prompt, just change to that language to spellcheck the entire thing. Very handy for people who frequently use multiple languages, like people in Central Canada where it is common to be bilingual in English and French, as it saves the annoyance of having to constantly open up your settings and change languages back and forth.
  • The film Jumanji is about a cursed board game that subjects players to Darkest Africa-themed environmental hazards. The game board floats in water, so it won't be irretrievable if the players come across a large body of water in the midst of the other chaos. Overlaps with Required Secondary Powers, as the game board is able to summon a monsoon. The same can be said for how the pieces stick to the board via magic, and how the board can be folded up for later play; if not for these features then losing game pieces (and thus your progress or even your chance of ever finishing the game at all) would be a very real concern.
  • Password will accept word variants as correct guesses. Such as "Vibration" (For "Vibrate") or "Cosmopolitan" for "Cosmo".
  • Sparklecare (2018) has an option to reduce the comic's saturation, since it's drawn with glaringly bright colors.
  • Supermarket Stakeout: In the first round it is being able to buy from any number of shoppers. In the second round it is getting to look into the bags before purchasing. In the third round it is being allowed in the last 10 minutes to purchase one item of your choice.
  • LEGO:
    • Since it's very easy to lose the manuals for sets over time, LEGO has posted the instructions for thousands of the sets online to read free of charge. You can see them here.
    • LEGO pieces can be difficult to take apart sometimes, especially with small tiles or plates in the middle of larger plates or stacked on each other. To this end, LEGO solved its own problem by manufacturing brick separator tools that grip onto pieces and provide leverage to wrench them off, and can even be built into a model if you really want. Later, LEGO did one better than just selling the tool themselves, first-party: they designed a slimmer, more attractive version, and tossed one in every large set to ensure that buyers would have one for free. A devoted collector will never have to look far for a brick separator again. This second brick separator piece is also nearly always released in LEGO's orange color, making it very easy to spot in almost any context to make sure the piece doesn't get lost in other bricks.note 
    • The (sadly long discontinued) LEGO Brick Vac, a hand-operated gadget that let you roll up LEGO pieces quickly into one bin to save you the trouble of picking them all up while saving your feet from a world of pain as a welcome bonus.
    • In lieu of the Brick Vac, LEGO has released official LEGO Slippers to help protect users feet from the bricks.
    • If you break a brick or a certain part of a set or simply misplace part of it (very common with small parts like Studs) you can buy replacement pieces (over 11,000 to choose from) from the LEGO website. In general, the fact that LEGO sets largely consist of common parts, almost all of which are modular to begin with, makes it fairly easy to replace certain bricks with ones taken from other LEGO sets.
    • Bags containing the smallest pieces, discounting mini-fig pieces, always contain redundant spare copies of those parts to prevent one rolling on the carpet or under a table and getting lost from holding up progress on the model. This practice has migrated to the Minifigures line, with their smallest parts getting a spare in the packet.
    • Later sets started breaking model pieces into chunks packaged in separate bags to make processing the build and hunting for the necessary parts easier, with the instructions taking a "one bag at a time" approach.
    • Nowadays, the creators deliberately avoid putting hard-to-distinguish bricks in the same set to save you from frustrating "damn, I was supposed to use the non-painted tiny bricks 50 steps ago, time to disassemble the whole thing" moments. This explains oddities like printed bricks used in spots where the print won't be visible anyway.note 

 
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Alternative Title(s): Anti Frustration Feature

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Cradle of Empires does not penalize you for [[SaveScumming restarting a level before you have made any moves]]. (However, it will not refund any resources that you paid to enter the level if you choose to exit outright. Also, [[GuideDangIt the game does not outright tell you about any of this]].)

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