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Unintentionally Unwinnable
aka: Unwinnable By Mistake

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As computer programs and video games have increased in size and complexity over the years, it's only natural that the number of bugs, glitches, and design errors has likewise increased. Bugs can take a variety of forms: some as mundane as causing slowdown, others as catastrophic as a system crash, and others simply being pretty hilarious.

One specific class of video-game glitches and/or design errors, however, is despised more than most: the ones that render the game impossible to win, thus forcing the player to start over from their last save, the beginning of the level, or even the beginning of the game. It's still possible to play the game inasmuch as you can still control your character, but meaningful forward progress is no longer possible for whatever reason.

While unwinnable situations were once somewhat common (and intentional) in video games — particularly in older Adventure Game titles — today they're generally eschewed by all but the most mean-spirited games. Still, unwinnable situations do crop up in modern games, though generally not because the creators intended for them to be there. They may happen because of some random glitch the developers never caught, or they may be unintended consequences of a design decision. When cases like these occur, the game has become Unintentionally Unwinnable.

Please note that the "unintentional" aspect of this trope pertains to the developers, not the players. While many of these examples can be stumbled upon accidentally, others require such complicated or counterintuitive actions to trigger that it's highly unlikely most players would stumble upon them during normal gameplay. Even if the player has to work to create an unwinnable state, the important criteria are that the state wasn't meant to be there and it renders winning impossible.

Subtrope of Unwinnable. Contrast with Unwinnable by Design, in which the unwinnable state is intended by the developer. May be caused by a Game-Breaking Bug. See also Cycle of Hurting, another state which is continuing yet hopeless, albeit with much lesser consequences. In some examples, Who Would Be Stupid Enough? and/or Earn Your Bad Ending may also apply.

Due to the sheer number of examples, they have been sorted by video game genre. If a game falls into more than one genre, be sure to check out all the pertinent folders to see if your example is there.

Examples:

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    4X 
  • Civilization VI has a strange example, in that it happens in the game setup. Under the advanced settings when creating a new game, you can disable any of the game's multiple win conditions - you can even disable all of them, leaving only Score Victory (whoever has the most points when the turn limit runs out). You can also disable the turn limit. This means the game literally has no win conditions anymore and becomes a giant sandbox.
  • Due to a bug in Crusader Kings II's Conclave Downloadable Content, Player Characters ruling nomadic realms sometimes end up in a Catch-22 Dilemma where the members of their realm council dislike them because they want more land, then disagree with granting vassal khans (usually including themselves) more land, because they dislike the PC due to wanting more land. The only solution is to fire the council altogether.
  • In Sword of the Stars some scenarios require you to colonise certain systems. Unfortunately, if those systems are already owned by enemies, your bombardment of the inhabitable planet may lead to it being out of your Terraformable range when the dust clears. To the load screen!
  • Victoria 2 has the tutorial become unwinnable after expansion packs are installed. A part of the tutorial has you play as Belgium and declare war on France, but expansion packs introduce having to justify wars, which the tutorial does not account for. Because you have no justification, you can't declare war, and the tutorial cannot continue.

    Action Adventure 
  • ANNO: Mutationem: In the original release before it was fixed by a patch, it had a grueling bug after you complete the Harbor Town Freighter area, if you return back to the Freighter, the boat ride to head back towards Harbor Town doesn't work, no matter how many times "go back" is selected, leaving you stuck, more-so if you saved at the point without any backups to get out of it.
  • Beyond Good & Evil is notoriously prone to game-breaking bugs that will end your progress if you save after encountering them.
    • The most common is the dreaded "lost partner" glitch, where Jade's NPC ally will either fail to spawn where they need to, or become incapable of doing a certain action that's required for you to continue. In particular, during The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, if you attempt to backtrack right after releasing Pey'j from his crystalline prison but before spying on the Big Bad's meeting with his Dragon and taking a picture of them, you are guaranteed to get stuck. Definitely make a note of backing up your save data before you fly the Beluga to the moon.
    • One area has an enemy that drops a necessary key when defeated. However, a bug occasionally causes the key to spawn in the wrong place, making it unreachable. Worse is that the spot where this happens is right next to a save spot. A player unaware that they're supposed to be picking up a key might save after the fight and find themselves stuck.
  • BioForge: Drain the sweet, sweet alien battery you got from the first alien leader too much (either by healing or firing your arm cannon), and you will not have enough power to charge up your escape vehicle.
  • Blaster Master:
    • You get a weapon upgrade for your tank which allows you to blow away certain walls, which will respawn after a couple of seconds. Should you get out of your tank and walk through a passage created when your tank blew away a wall, you will have no way to return to your tank after the wall respawns. In some places such as Stage 6, you can blast through the ceiling, but can't get out when the blocks respawn as you can't shoot downwards, and in other places you can get stuck without Hover power. There are a number of places where you also can't kill yourself, forcing you to reset the game.
    • Level 4 has an innocent looking one, until you actually get into it. It's just a smallish dead-end hole that looks like you can jump out of... but it's one tile too deep to make the jump. You need to hover out. If you don't HAVE any hover power left, only one button will save you now, and it's not located on the controller.
  • Castlevania:
    • In Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, using the infamous Succubus Glitch, it's possible to get to some items and rooms long before you're supposed to. Going too far ahead in the plot in this way will remove certain bosses such as Malphis, who guards the Double Jump ability or break events such as the end of the game, potentially making the game unwinnable.
    • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night:
      • If, for some reason, the player manages to max-out the in-game clock at 99 hours, 59 minutes, and 59 seconds before obtaining the Echo of Bat relic, the pathway to said item – which only opens on every even minute of the clock – becomes completely inaccessible, making the place where it's useful nearly impossible to navigate without prior knowledge or an external map.note 
      • You can also make Richter slide out of the castle before the gate closes... with no way back inside.
  • In Dawn of Mana, very rarely while in Chapter 4-3, the enemy needed to give you a special key will not move. If this enemy doesn't come to life, you can't kill him to get the key, thus you can't progress.
  • In Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, because of the events of the first game, Frank is infected with the zombie virus. However, he takes a medication known as Zombrex to counter it, but it only lasts for 24 hours per dose. If he doesn't take it, then it's game over. Early in the game, you are shown exactly where to go to get your first dose which is at a nearby pharmacy. The game tries very hard to prevent you from getting it from other locations by making them physically not spawn until you get the first one intended by the developers. However, there is one exception that they missed. There are security keys you can find that can be used at a bank which unlocks security boxes. 2 of these have Zombrex. If you use these instead of going to the pharmacy, you can still play as normal. The issue is that by getting the Zombrex in the pharmacy, you get a key that opens the back door. By skipping it, you get stuck at the very end of the game because you need to collect some items, one of which is locked behind this exact door. You will be locked out of the final boss fight by doing this. Capcom probably missed this because you would have to go very very far out of your way to do this. You'd have to not only disregard the arrow that shows you where you are supposed to go, you'd also have to know which keys can be used for this and where you'd have to take them, and you'd have to do it all before 8 AM which is when Frank needs that medication. This softlock is not present in Dead Rising 2 because the item you need from that pharmacy is not locked behind a door.
  • Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in the US) is a game that relies on Press X to Not Die gameplay. Towards the last half, there is a timing bug in the PC version (and sometimes the PS2 version) of the game that will cause you to always fail, making it impossible to continue the story.
  • The Game Boy Advance version of the Lord of the Rings game The Fellowship of the Ring has a bug that makes the game unwinnable if you do not save at a specific point during a transition between scenes. Compounding the problem, saving just an instant too early means you're stuck in a sequence of "Load game — automatically trigger scene transition - game freezes - turn off game".
  • Anne McCaffrey's Freedom First Resistance had a level in which the main character had to cross through a brief hazardous area that would inflict minor damage on her in order to reach a plot critical NPC and finish the mission. Problem is, if she was at nearly zero health and had no healing items, it was impossible to get her across the area. And any other party members with more health couldn't be substituted; the NPC would only talk to the protagonist.
  • In Graffiti Kingdom, the fight against Telepin can be literally impossible if you haven't caught on to some completely-unexplained-but-necessary-to-know game concepts (such as swiping monsters with Pixel's wand giving you access to their attacks). Before then, it is difficult, but entirely possible, to get through the game with only the basics. You can technically remedy this by going back into the level to grab some better moves, but it definitely seems impossible on a first playthrough. Many players simply give up and never play again.
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets autosaves when you enter the Chamber of Secrets. Problem is, you really need lots of health potions in there, and you can only get health potions by making them in school before you enter. Oh, and there's no way out once you're in.
  • In Hotline Miami, the "Deadline" chapter climaxes with a van ramming into the building, followed by several armed mobsters and thugs rushing out of it to attack Jacket. Meanwhile, the van's driver lights up and throws Molotov cocktails at him as well. However, these Molotovs don't stop burning after a while; as a result, it is possible for the player to accidentally trap themselves in a corner with multiple "patches" of fire.
  • In Just Cause, the second-to-last mission involves chasing something down and destroying it in a super-fast jet. Some people assume the jet will be useless after this mission and feel free to bail out of their jet as soon as said target is destroyed. The game will then autosave while you're in freefall or parachuting to safety, and you will find out quickly that you needed that jet for the next mission. At best, the jet will be just out of reach of your grapple and zoom away into the distance without you. If you're unlucky, it smashes into the ground in a fireball. You then have no choice but to start the game again, as during these final missions you can't go into free roam and access the mission again that way.
  • Last Ninja 3 was pulled from the Wii Virtual Console when an unfixable bug was found that caused the game to freeze after the first level.
  • Vorador's Mansion, in Legacy of Kain: Defiance, features a stained glass window that Raziel is supposed to blast out with telekinesis. However, in the spectral realm, the window doesn't clip properly when touching it from the outside, allowing a player to accidentally jump through it and into the upper floor when in the spectral realm. Unfortunately, the clipping does work from the inside and accessing the only exits from the corridor require being in the material realm, for which there are no conduits within the corridor. And the game can easily be saved within.
  • LEGO Adaptation Game:
    • In LEGO Indiana Jones, it's possible to make a level unwinnable during certain mounted segments. Riding an elephant into an insta-death pit, for example, causes the player character to die shortly thereafter, at which point he respawns at the last "safe" point - back on top of the elephant, still in the death pit.
    • In LEGO Star Wars II:
      • The "Jabba's Palace" level has a pit that cannot be escaped. However, there is also nothing to kill you, so you must simply restart the level.
      • The Dagobah level is impossible to complete in Free Play if you choose Dagobah Luke as the only Force-user. Dagobah Luke is uniquely coded among the Force-users as the only one who cannot lift the X-Wing to complete the level. In Story Mode, you simply have to switch to Yoda, but early in the game when your roster of characters is small (and you haven't unlocked Darth Vader yet), it's very possible the game will pick him at random for Free Play, leaving you stuck.
    • LEGO Harry Potter has several of these:
      • If you were looking for one hundred percent completion, you need all the character icons, school crests and students in peril. Good luck doing so if you exited the Fat Lady without grabbing everything, and then tried to reenter as any character other than a Gryffindor by mistake. The portrait glitches and permanently seals, where she will wave at you, but the option to recite the password is lost forever. Extremely annoying if you spent hours collecting every other token before realizing the glitch had occurred.
      • There's an entire FAQ written specifically to identify and help avoid the heaps of game-breaking glitches in this game. One particular bug occurs in a section leading to some collectibles. At the end of the hallway, a Lego dragon tosses you upwards back into the classroom — Except, sometimes he misses the throw, at which point you are stuck permanently in that section of the game and cannot continue. If you reset the system, you "only" lose all your progress since your last save. If you instead try to circumvent this by saving, you've just hosed your save file. The game will always load in this corridor with a dragon who will not throw you, and you have to reset your game file to complete the game. Way to go, QA!
      • The game becomes almost impossible to go over 70% completion if you're playing Co-op, at one point in the game you complete a class but never unlock something from the class, you also get no indication that the class was where the unlockable was meant to be unlocked, this leaves you playing the rest of the game assuming that you'll unlock it later only to find that you don't unlock it and simply cannot entirely for the reason that you were playing Co-op.
      • If you simply follow the ghost of Nearly Headless Nick to your main missions in Year 3, the path he'll take you on between levels 1 and 2 will be blocked by a troll that's inexplicably guarding the Lobby Hallway. You actually have to take a completely different route out of the Divination class before it in order to get to it.
    • LEGO Jurassic World has a very frustrating and easy-to-trigger glitch that can render the Gyrosphere Valley level unwinnable. At one point is a see-saw that, if you drive across and off of it before Gray wanders onto it, he'll stupidly wander under it and get trapped. You can't get back onto the see-saw, you can't advance without Gray's abilities, and you're forced to restart the level. This is guaranteed to drive completionists bananas since there's several minikits in the chase sequence prior that will have to be reobtained when you exit and restart.
    • Since some late-acquired characters in The LEGO Movie Videogame have Game Breaking abilities (looking at you, Superman and Green Lantern), they can render some of the earlier levels unwinnable since it's possible to skip Event Flags that trigger events that allow you to progress. Most notably is in the very first level: if you just fly or jump onto the roof to fix the speakers rather than do any of the puzzle solving the game expects you to do, the dance off won't start and you can't get the second set of plans. Particularly frustrating because doing the level the "proper" way is tedious and nobody is going to try it when Wonder Woman can just derp right up there in a second.
    • LEGO Marvel Super Heroes is loaded with these, but there's a notorious one in one of the very first missions. Once you get to play as Hawkeye and Black Widow, you're near electrified water. If you fall into it at a certain spot, your character will be killed, revived and instantly killed again constantly, as a glitch makes the electricity ignore your temporary invincibility. Since electricity paralyzes your character before killing them, you can't move out of the way, but you also can't switch to the other character, having to reload a save in order to play the level.
  • In Little Big Adventure:
    • The museum heist sequence. The intended way of doing this involves using the Red Key Card on the back door of the museum to get to the sewers, from where you can access the room with the alarm switch. Turning it on evacuates the museum, allowing you to enter it — still from the sewers — and take everything you need, with the automatic robot guards as your only obstacle. However, if you're skilled enough, you can just go through the front door, steal the items in broad daylight and escape before getting arrested. Performing such a robbery before obtaining the Red Key Card will cause the game to assume you already have that item, which means you can no longer get it for real. Since the Card is needed to open a few more doors later on, you can't complete the game without it.
    • The game uses a single active save file and autosaves on area transitions. Unless you manually back up your progress using the "copy saved game" menu command, this can get your save screwed up if you were to, for example, drop into a scene from significant height while having only one HP left (which you immediately lose due to hitting the floor) and no extra lives.
  • In Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, it's very possible to lock yourself outside Treacherous Mansion by going to the Nautical Exhibit, putting an object on the switch when there are still ghosts in the area, then entering the door just as a ghost punches the object away. This leaves you stuck on a balcony with the only way out being to restart. Of course, you have to be really, really trying to pull this off, as shown here.
  • Messiah:
    • On the Conveyor level, you enter a room in order to access a platforming section of conveyor belts. If you turn around and leave the room instead, the door will become locked from the inside and you cannot re-enter.
    • At one point on the rooftop level, you're supposed to have Bob crawl into an air vent and get into a control room; a part of the vent collapses under Bob's weight as he enters. However, you can instead possess a cop who is standing next to the vent entrance, shoot away the glass that surrounds the control room (it's visible below you), then jump down there. But if you do so, you're stuck, as normally your way back would be through a collapsed part of the vent.
  • Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves for the NES:
    • There's an item, The Druid Dagger, which was required to destroy an enemy late in the game. Midway through the game, Duncan The Blind leaves the party and takes all his inventory with him. If he has the Dagger then, you will probably be unable to get it again and will get stuck just before the final fight with The Sheriff Of Nottingham.... A bug in the character system does create a one-time-only instance of a character with a random name who carries Duncan's things; but once you pass by him, the character disappears, never to be seen again.
    • The horrifically broken password system in the game (it was hidden for a reason) would put Robin in the proper place but with a different inventory which is often missing anything of value, including plot-critical items. The password that took you to the final sequence would not give you the Druid's Dagger; the game is unwinnable if you use it.
    • A 'hidden feature' allowed rapid fire in the sword duels simply by holding down Start. If a player jumped while holding Start, then Robin Hood would not come down from his jumps, allowing him to spring through the screen vertically and eventually wrap around. It was possible to get wedged into the floor and be unable to jump any more without an apparent reason. The player would now be too low to hit the other sword fighter and too low to be hit themselves, which makes the fight a complete draw. You can't back out of the duel, and so the game has to be reset and started over from the beginning (it was mentioned that the password system is messed up).
  • The first and second games in the Shadow of the Beast series. In addition to having exactly one life, a short (first game) or quick-draining (second game) life bar, and no way to save or continue, you can easily make the game unwinnable by screwing up puzzles and failing to collect necessary items before passing the Point of No Return.
  • A nasty Game-Breaking Bug in Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy will end your playthrough prematurely. In the second Mummy level, you get a cutscene partway through and then find a save point next to an open door. If you save here and then die or quit the game, when you load the save again, the door will be closed. Forever.
  • At one point in the original StarTropics, the player was told to dip a letter into a bucket of water, which would reveal a secret code that was necessary to progress in the game. But the catch was that said letter was an actual physical letter that was provided with the game, and not as an in-game item. If you got the game used without the letter, Internet is the only way forward. The Wii and Wii U Virtual Console re-releases got around this by including a snippet of the letter and said code in their digital manuals, but Nintendo Switch Online players are SOL.
  • An Untitled Story. If you miss the save point teleportation power the first time by avoiding the pit outside Skytown, then miss it a second time in Stonecastle by jumping over it on purpose, and finally going down the upper branch of Farfall, you can end up stuck in a pit with a save point, unable to escape because you don't have the power
  • The NES game Who Framed Roger Rabbit includes a portion where the player is told to find Jessica Rabbit's phone number, and call her. Even after finding the number, it's impossible to call her from any of the phones within the game. You're supposed to call that number from a real phone and a recording of Jessica would give you clues on how to continue. Unfortunately, the number now connects to a sex chat line, leaving any players of the game unable to finish.
  • Wizards & Warriors III: Kuros: Visions of Power can become unwinnable if the player's four-slot inventory becomes too full, since the player can't drop items and there are a few items which have no use until very late in the game.

    Action Games 
  • Airwolf on the Amstrad CPC is effectively unbeatable since shooting either of the switches on the last screen crashes the game.
  • AKIRA for Amiga is Nintendo Hard to the max, but stage 4 is literally impossible due to one of the moving platforms being placed too far away to reach.
  • In the first BloodRayne, the final boss fight is a three-way battle with Juergen Wulf and Beliar that lets you save after you kill either. The problem is the Beliar has a time limit and is quite hard to damage, so if you save after killing Wulf you might find yourself without the time to avoid the auto Game Over.
  • In the Calling All Mixels app, sometimes Major Nixel freezes in midair during his jump attack and stays stuck, with no way to reach him to attack him. This makes the level impossible to beat, forcing the player to restart it.
  • In Dynasty Warriors 7: Empires, using the Rock Slide tactic can block a path from enemies and allies alike. However, it can also block supply lines which you need to win. Thus, using this ability too many times can block supply routes entirely. If you're on the defending side, you'll have to wait for the clock to run out to win. But if you're on the invading side...
  • Overlord used to have a bug in the brewery level where, if you left the level by any means before repairing and turning a wheel that activates an elevator to the lower floor, the items needed for it would disappear. Since going down was required, this made it impossible to continue the game. The game autosaves at all level transitions; unless you had multiple saves, it would be impossible to reload. It was fixed in a patch that thankfully also restored already Unwinnable saves.
  • RoboWarrior: Using up all your life rings before you traverse a water area is a pretty stupid thing to do.
  • Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner has a New Game Plus mode where you can enable several bonuses at the beginning of a playthrough, including increased attack power. However, if you take the attack power, you'll find out near the middle of the game that you're softlocked: a mission that requires you to land a large NUMBER of hits on an enemy mech WITHOUT killing it is numerically impossible with even your weakest attacks. Starting the game over is the only way to revert the "bonus"!

    Adventure Games 
  • The 1997 Blade Runner PC game is unwinnable on modern computers without special measures because one encounter and one bomb are timed based on the speed of the CPU. Yes, computers are that much faster now.
  • The Broken Sword series:
    • The Game Boy Advance remake of Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars had a couple of these because of Game Breaking Bugs. If you go to Spain before going to Syria, then it often causes a glitch which prevents you from going to Syria at all. Also, there is a part early on where you have to make a plaster cast; a glitch lets you do that without having picked up the plaster, which you need to get a key later in the game.
    • Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror has a particularly nasty bug where Nico is unable to pick up a key item if she has already spoken to a certain character on the screen, rendering the game unwinnable. This one catches many players off-guard as they'd tend to save on this screen to look up a Walkthrough. The worst part? It happens very close to the end of the game!
  • In Chicory: A Colorful Tale, the swimming-through-paint mechanic allows for accidental wall-clips, letting you access areas ahead of time with no way to get back. To counter this, a patch was added that allowed for instant teleportation to Luncheon if you got stuck.
  • There are many, many versions of the original Colossal Cave out there. They form a convoluted family tree of ports to other platforms, ports to other programming languages, modifications to make the game more "interesting" (which may or may not work), and so on. One particular branch has a bug that makes the game unwinnable: instead of being able to "get spices," you get told "You can't be serious" if you try. Spices are one of the game's treasures. If you can't collect all the treasures, then you can't even unlock the endgame.
  • Death Gate: For some reason, on the World of Stone you can drop any inventory item into lava, which irrevocably destroys the item. The game even asks if you are sure. It is probably the only way to make the game unwinnable.
  • In cult-classic adventure game Dream Web, during your first mission to kill David Crane, it's possible to get into his hotel without having found a firearm or even starting the series of events to get it. The game won't stop you from getting two screens away from Crane. Without the Gun, though, you can't get past his security guards, and if you've gotten there, the elevator will no longer go back down because you cut the wires on the control panel to stop it from moving and you may have even already entered the room, which you can't leave without getting shot. If you don't have a save prior to the elevator sabotage, you can't get out of the hotel and get the gun. Most of the game is designed explicitly to prevent this sort of situation, oddly enough.
  • At the end of the first chapter of Edna & Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes, attempting to prepare the second cup of tea in the wrong order will result in this trope: if you grab a new teacup before preparing the replacement truth serum in the teapot, you won't be able to pour the tea. Attempting to give the teacup to Mother Superior will prompt Gerret to tell you to add the truth serum first. You won't be able to grab a new teacup from the table because you already have one, and nothing will happen if you attempt to use the teapot on the teacup in your inventory at any point during the process, not even an I Can't Use These Things Together dialog, which is extremely surprising given the Developer's Foresight from the previous game. There's no way to drop items from your inventory, so you're stuck with no way to deliver that cup of tea.
  • Grim Fandango:
    • There's a bug when you are in the elevator in the High Roller's Lounge in Rubacava. On modern computers, the elevator moves too quickly to complete the puzzle, rendering the game unwinnable without patching.
    • After you solve the elevator sequence, it is possible to return to the kitchen and have Manny stick his scythe into the pantry door. Now, the first time you do it (as part of a trick to get into said elevator), Manny gets it back automatically. If, for whatever reason, you decide to put the scythe in the door again and leave it there, the game won't do anything to prevent you from completing the chapter and sailing away from Rubacava without it. This is really counterintuitive, since by then you should be very well aware that the scythe is Manny's most treasured item, but this being a LucasArts game, chances are you didn't expect to be able to screw it up and kept a single save file throughout the game. The kicker? The game has a programmed response for having an empty inventory, even though the only way to make it empty is to get rid of the scythe through the described actions (making the game unwinnable in the process).
  • I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream was edited in Germany to remove Nimdok and his scenario because the scenario was set in a concentration camp. This made it impossible to complete the game — all five characters' scenarios must be finished to reach the last segment.
  • In The Legend of Kyrandia, Brynn asks to see your grandfather's letter when you meet her in the Temple of Kyrandia. If you burn the letter in the temple brazier instead of giving it to her, you'll be unable to progress.
  • In-universe example: in The Lost Crown: A Ghost-Hunting Adventure, Nanny Noah has Nigel playtest a clue-based treasure hunt she's designed for the children of Saxton. There's nothing preventing Nigel from doing so, but later in the game when the kids are supposed to play it, one of the locations they'd need to visit is locked up for the holiday, making it inaccessible and the game unwinnable.
  • Monkey Island:
    • The Secret of Monkey Island:
      • In the original version, it was technically possible to spend all your coins, one by one, in the soda machine, until you don't have enough to pay for the sword, the shovel and the map. You can also use them up by giving them to Otis in prison. In the Special Edition this is impossible, since Guybrush will refuse to put more than one coin in the machine.
      • It was also possible to burn an item you'd need later, though later versions fixed this. A guide, past knowledge or brute force using player can bypass getting a map, only to be stuck when they are required to use it as a fuse.
    • In Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, you need to buy a map piece from the antiques dealer at Booty Island. The intended path involves recovering the figurehead from a shipwreck, which requires devising a way to strengthen your spit to win a spitting contest to raise money to charter a ship (which costs 6,000 pieces of eight). However, you can get 1 piece of eight at a time for polishing one of the Men of Low Moral Fiber's peg leg; this cuts off before you get to 6,000, but if you've bought something else from the antiques dealer, you can sell it back to him to get enough. Later, when Guybrush is captured by LeChuck, he needs to strengthen his spit to escape; if you skipped that path and didn't know about the drinks, you're stuck. The CD-ROM and remakes of the game cap the amount of times you can polish his leg at 19 pieces of eight, however.
  • As with all over day-to-day games, Shadow of the Comet can be rendered unwinnable if you fail to meet a certain person on a certain hour of the day, or fail to get an item at the right time. There's little hint of this.
  • In the PC mystery game Sherlock Holmes: Secret of the Silver Earring, the action takes place over the course of a few days. The game is rendered unwinnable on the first day if Holmes neglects to pick up a particular clue. This seems to be a glitch, rather than by design, since failure to pick up any other clues will cause the game to prevent him from moving forward. But the game will allow him to go ahead even if he doesn't pick up the autographed picture in the young woman's dressing room. The player will be unaware that there's a problem until the fourth day in-game, when he is supposed to show that clue to someone; his inability to do so brings the game to a screeching halt.
  • Monty Python's The Meaning of Life: The PC Game is a point-and-click adventure through the movie and television show as you search for the eponymous philosophical question. Unfortunately, the game has more than one occasion where you can wind up in an unwinnable situation by doing exactly what the game has had you doing the entire time — exploring and clicking on interesting looking junk. It's nearly impossible to reach the last screen because of a fatal glitch that causes a disc swapping menu to fail to appear. As obnoxious as this is, it's almost fitting that something like this would show up in a Monty Python game. The disc swap bug CAN be worked around, but you have to know at what screen it appears to get around it, which you won't know if you aren't looking at a walkthrough.
  • There's a rather inexplicable case of bad design in the game Nancy Drew: Secret of the Scarlet Hand: at one point, an NPC gives you a phone number which you have to call later. Normally such phone numbers can be seen later either in the chat box when making a call or in Nancy's journal... except for this particular one. If you don't (physically) write down the number or memorize it, it will be lost for good. The game cannot advance without that number, and the only option is to look it up from a walkthrough.
  • The indie adventure game Pleurghburg: Dark Ages attempted to avoid all unwinnable situations; the game is never supposed to be unwinnable under any circumstances. Still, one thing slipped; if you entered the park at night without the whistle and are about to be attacked by the panther, you're stuck.
  • Rex Nebular And The Cosmic Gender Bender has a well known bug: depending on difficulty level, the game would discourage or prohibit the player from flooding the city unless all necessary items there had been collected. The problem: it was possible to collect a repair item and use it for its intended purpose, whereupon it vanished. The player then couldn't proceed because they didn't have the item, even though it was no longer needed.
  • In Sensory Overload, enemies would sometimes come out of rooms that were locked to the player, but they could enter the room while the door was open, resulting in them being trapped when it closed.
  • At the very end of Simon the Sorcerer 3D you are presented with the following puzzle: You need to open the CD-ROM drive on a computer in the game, but there appears to be no way to interact with the computer. The solution is to open the CD drive of your own real computer. However, this would not work on all computers even at the time of the game's release, as the game looks for a specific program signal that is normally sent when the CD drive is opened, but not all computer setups are configured to send that signal.
  • In Super Star Force, stopping the fountain in DA 0820 before completing the dungeon in DA 0001 makes the latter impossible.
  • Virtual Corporation, an old PC game played via voice, will throw you out a window if you get too stressed. The only way to lower stress is to go on vacation. The problem comes where the only two vacations you'll be able to afford, the skiing and wind surfing, have QTE that no key can get past. If you don't complete it, your stress doesn't go down. Luckily, it's simple enough to go into your save file, find the stress value, and lower it, only buying automated vacations for the rest of the game.
  • Vision is a great escape-the-room game, but some players have found themselves in an unwinnable situation after failing to pick up the desert marble (the one marble that's the easiest to overlook and the least required for puzzle-solving) before going down the elevator and finding themselves without all the marbles required to complete the final puzzle.
  • Waxworks (1992) is chock-full of them, often getting you stuck in the game long after you made a mistake, such as feeding the dog without lacing the food with narcotics beforehand, not killing the crocodile at the first (and only) chance you get, lowering a stone pillar from the wrong angle (stranding you in the wrong half of the pyramid), not replacing the screw on the gasoline can preventing you from filling up the drill to give the demolitionist...the list just goes on and on.
  • Unusually for an educational game, 1997's Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? (a.k.a. Carmen Sandiego's Great Chase Through Time) can be made unwinnable. Even though a template game (in which the player chooses which levels they want to play) is Unwinnable by Design, the game tries to make sure that the normal game is winnable. But they overlooked a bug in the Aztec time period. When you finish assembling the Headdress for Montezuma, you have to put it in your inventory. But if you give it to Ann Tikwittee to ask what she says about it, then she'll say, "We must get this headdress back to Montezuma, before he blows his top!" and the headdress will be placed back in the inventory... where it will accidentally spawn another headdress. Now, you can still complete the level (and therefore the game) by leaving the duplicate headdress there. But if you haven't yet gotten the Carmen note (required to beat each level), then you'll have to take the duplicate headdress and put it in your inventory so you can get the note. You then walk into the throne room and are forced to give the headdress to Montezuma (he does not allow you to leave the throne room with a headdress in your inventory). But, because you accidentally duplicated the headdress, you're still stuck in the room because Ann Tikwittee won't let you leave either; each time, she'll say, "We must get this headdress back to Montezuma before he blows his top!" It's unknown if it's fixed in any later versions.
  • the white chamber:
    • The game has the protagonist gathering body parts one at a time in order to reassemble a dismembered corpse. One of those parts only appears during one of the game's nightmare-hallucination sequences, and it's possible to just walk out of the room without picking it up, which takes you back into the "real" world, never to return. It's especially frustrating because the protagonist is actually standing over it, and the player isn't likely to see it at all: she breaks open a pipeline, causing her to put her back to the camera, and comments that an arm came out. It's easy to assume that she just picked it up herself and go on about your merry way.
    • One room has a stench bad enough to kill you after some time, which is measured by how many times you've exited and re-entered the room. If re-entering the room one more time would kill you, and you save outside of the room, the game is now unwinnable: you'll die the moment you re-enter it, unable to complete the puzzle within to remove the stench.
  • Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders:
    • Near the beginning, you pick up a scrap of wallpaper, which you eventually need in order to draw a map. Some time before this, you have to light a bonfire, and can, if you choose, use the wallpaper as kindling. The game doesn't try to dissuade you, and you can continue unhampered until you realise what you were supposed to hang on to the paper for... (You could also have used the crayon on the phone bill, but you could lose that too later on in the game)
    • It's possible to slide things you need into the slot at Annie's office before you have the item that motivates her to contact you; since the door doesn't open, you can't get them back, so you're screwed.

    Beat 'em Up 
  • Battletoads:
    • The NTSC version for the NES is just plain impossible when playing with two players simultaneously — there's a bug in Level 11 in which Player 2's Clinger Winger never starts moving, and so the Hypno Orb runs him over every time. Since the level restarts if either player dies, this will repeat until either player runs out of lives, at which point they need to finish the level on their own if they wish to beat it. Thankfully, it was fixed in the PAL version of the game, the Sega Genesis port, and most recently, in Rare Replay.
    • In level 9, Terra Tubes, in the NES version, normally you would pass the first section of the level by destroying the gray, self-destructing robots before moving onto the spinning cog section. However, if you don't destroy the robots but rather bypass them by hitting them once and walking by while they're stunned, a glitch can occur where the spinning cog fails to properly render after passing the checkpoint (only half the cog actually appears onscreen). Said cog will not move or kill you, and should you go right and fall down the tube towards the first gate, it's impossible to die or progress further, meaning a reset is necessary.
  • The Charlie's Angels (2000) video game contains a Game-Breaking Bug in the ship level that traps the player in a loop, booting them back to the start of the level when you complete it if you don't have a memory card inserted.
  • In the original version of the first Samurai Warriors game, there is a level where you must accompany Goemon to an escape point within a certain time limit. There is a nasty bug in two-player mode: if Player 2 reaches the endpoint before Player 1, then the ending will never trigger and you will be stuck standing at the escape point with Goemon until the time limit runs out, wondering what is going on.

    Card Battle Game 
  • The first run of SNK Vs Capcom Card Fighters DS was literally unwinnable thanks to a game-stopping bug that causes it to crash when a player fights a certain character. None of the NPC battlers can be skipped. Thankfully for those who want this game, they fixed this with a second print.

    Fighting Games 
  • Street Fighter:
    • Don't try to be very good while playing Arcade mode in Super Street Fighter II Turbo Revival for the Game Boy Advance. If doing so (getting perfects and Super K.O.s, not losing...) you'll get to fight Akuma instead of Bison in the final stage. Unfortunately, the game has a glitch that freezes the game when the "VS Akuma" screen appears, having to reset it. This game has a lot of bugs, but this one is the most annoying.
    • The "Invisible Handcuffs" glitch. Perform a certain set of moves at the right time as Guile, and the opponent will be frozen and locked against you, in a perfect position to be attacked. Unfortunately, they also don't respond to attacks, being functionally invulnerable. Also, even if the timer runs out, the round won't end. The only option is to reset the game. (This one's known well enough that later games and the anime adaptations like to reference Guile's handcuffs.)
  • Super Smash Bros.:
    • In Super Smash Bros. Melee and Brawl, if you do an endless-time match with pause turned "off" (i.e. activate the setting that disallows pausing during a match), you can't escape the match unless you turn the game off.
    • With the return of Home Run Contest in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, you can send the Sandbag to the left side without triggering the auto-game-end by sending Sandbag forward out of the starting area and then hitting it back towards the left, as the game doesn't check if you go left after leaving that area. This will cause Sandbag to fall infinitely, with no escape except leaving the game entirely. Given the hoops you have to go through to do this, it's almost certainly not happening by accident.

    First-Person Shooters 
  • BioShock:
    • BioShock:
      • "Welcome to Rapture", the first level, has an event near the beginning where a splicer kills Johnny and tries to break into your bathysphere. Rarely, the splicer may not kill Johnny, leaving you trapped in the bathysphere.
      • Arcadia has a plot-critical item in Langford's safe that you need to take to continue the game. However, at that point you can have the Scrounger Tonic, which re-rolls loot found in containers. This can cause the plot-critical item to disappear, leaving you trapped in Arcadia.
      • If you enter Fort Frolic by bathysphere and then immediately leave by the same bathysphere, the curtain that hides Sander Cohen's unfinished 'masterpiece' won't open when you come back. Since you need to have access to what's behind the curtain to progress further in the story, you're stuck here too.
      • In Fort Frolic, if you use a Hypnotize Big Daddy plasmid to have him kill Silas Cobb in the Record Store before he performs a scripted action (summoning his 'cats' to attack you and blowing out the vent that leads out of the store), you'll be trapped in the store basement. That said, you can kill yourself to get teleported to the nearest Vita-Chamber - unless you've turned them off to go for the Brass Balls achievement.
      • Also in Fort Frolic, unlike the other targets, Martin Finnegan can be shattered while frozen. If this happens, there will be no body to photograph, and you won't be able to complete the aforementioned masterpiece.
    • Near the end of BioShock 2, if you have Winter Blast 2 or 3, you can freeze and shatter Eleanor, while she's offering you the Summon Eleanor plasmid. If you do, then you can't leave the room because the door won't unlock until you take the plasmid, which you just lost. While it takes an active effort (or at least the unintentional firing of the wrong plasmid) to cause this, it is possible to mistakenly save your game while trying to reload a previous save, leaving your game unwinnable. Also, if you die during a particular boss fight, the Vita-Chamber in which you respawn is on the wrong side of the door that locked you in with the boss.
    • BioShock Infinite has a glitch near the start of the Finkton level: when you get to the basement of the job center with the motorized patriot and enter the elevator, some players will hold back as they press the button so they can stand in the center. However, when you press the button, the game moves you to the center of the elevator and turns you towards the window, so if you're holding back, you'll back out of it just as the doors close, and will be stuck outside the elevator that you need to take to leave. Time to reload a checkpoint!
  • The Borderlands series:
    • Borderlands: While playing through the Secret Armory of General Knoxx DLC campaign, you eventually confront and defeat the titular Big Bad, and his defeat allows access to the nearby Armory. The hallway you enter is set up to look very secure - you make your way down a hallway towards a glass elevator as heavy doors close behind you with a loud slam. As you enter the elevator, you can see rooms on multiple floors packed to the brim with loot chests of the highest quality. You're meant to push the only button in the elevator, descend into the Armory, and snatch and grab as much loot as possible while a timer counts down. However, the encounter with Knoxx along with the long slog you had to run through to reach him from the closest fast travel station usually left you with a full inventory. If you walked into the Armory's hallway, proceeded to the elevator, and chose to return to town to sell gear, you'd find that you couldn't leave through the entrance you just came from, due to the heavy security doors. If you then decided to Save and Quit, intending to restart in town and sell your Shop Fodder, you could never access the Armory again on your single-player campaign. Many a player 'ported back to town upon seeing the ridiculous amount of loot that they couldn't possibly carry, and made the long trek back to the Boss Fight while avoiding loot, bypassing trash mobs and defeating Knoxx again, only to find that the door to the Armory sealed indefinitely. The game only re-opens the doors to the Armory for future quests after you've looted it in the first place - this will not trigger if you don't enter the Armory proper! While you could join an online game and enter the Armory if the host happened to be running through any of the associated quests - which would actually give you a quest complete, allowing you to move on to the extra missions - there was no way to progress past this point in a single player campaign where you'd locked yourself out.
    • The Wilhelm Boss Fight in Borderlands 2 takes place in an area enclosed on three sides by ice cliffs and a sheer drop on the remaining side. While Wilhelm himself cannot fall off, killing him too close to the edge can result in the power core taking a dive, forcing you to exit the game and then reenter it to fight Wilhelm again. Ironically, the power core turns out to be a trap laid by Handsome Jack. Failure Is the Only Option indeed.
  • Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has no specifically unwinnable points, but given the way the game sometimes autosaves in the middle of fights, you can come pretty close.
  • Unpatched versions of the original Descent have a Game-Breaking Bug that makes the last boss unkillable on any difficulty level except the two easiest ones (out of five).
  • Deus Ex:
    • If you choose to take the subway car back to Battery Park just after reaching Hell's Kitchen, you'll get stuck in a permanent loop where entering the subway back to Hell's Kitchen results in the player being transported to the starting point of Battery Park, ad infinitum. The only way to fix it is to reload a saved game from before the glitch was triggered.
    • After clearing out Battery Park, you're supposed to find the Ambrosia canister. If you leave the zone or dawdle around, Anna Navarre will come to you to inform you she found it instead and tell you to proceed to Hell's Kitchen. If this happens when you're in a corner or dead end of a narrow corridor, you can get stuck forever as she will never back up to let you pass through.
    • There's an inadvertent bug that can trigger in some playthroughs, where Bob Page simply doesn't appear after you've uplinked Milnet and Daedalus/Icarus have merged into Helios. Unlike the previous example, reloading a saved game doesn't help - you'll have to start a new playthrough. Luckily, this bug was fixed in the Shifter mod.
  • Doom:
    • It's technically possible to quicksave right when taking lethal damage and loading said save data proves that you cannot escape fate, except in rare times when disabling Screen Wipe gives you the fractions of a second required to make it out alive.
    • The -nomonsters parameter, which removes all monsters from a level, quite obviously makes it impossible to finish a level that requires a specific monster to die before the exit will open, such as most of the boss levels in the originalnote . This oversight is fixed in some source ports, which constantly check to see if the monsters are alive rather than only triggering when said monsters die, meaning the exit opens as soon as the level starts.
    • Doom:
      • E2M4 (Deimos Lab): In version 1.1, approaching the yellow key, retreating to a different room, and returning causes the crushing ceiling to be permanently lowered and sometimes blocking access to the key. That version forgot the original ceiling height whenever the crusher stopped.
      • In E3M9 (Warrens), it is possible to lock yourself out of the first room by pressing the button to lower the first door in the level and then quickly running through the door before it closes. This will prevent you from beating the level.
    • Final Doom: "MAP31: Pharaoh", the first secret level, was rendered impossible to finish because a vital key was erroneously flagged to appear only in multiplayer. The creators of the pack, TeamTNT, quickly released a patch allowing the key to appear in any mode, which also fixed a node-building error that prevented some enemies from appearing. The fixed version was also included in the official id Anthology, but it wouldn't be until the GOG.com release of the game, almost 20 years later, that this version would be sold by Doom creators id Software in widely-available form. Not that it stopped people from discovering how to complete the level without the key in the meantime, of course.
    • Doom II: In MAP07: Dead Simple, the central staircase raises once you kill all Arachnotrons. If played on Nightmare!, Arachnotrons can respawn and be killed off again, allowing you to raise the central stairs out of reach.
    • Doom 64: MAP09: Even Simpler is basically a remake of "Dead Simple," only with Pain Elementals thrown in. You have to kill every enemy, including the Lost Souls they shoot out, to advance. If they're killed next to some walls, however, the Souls they are supposed to shoot out get sucked outside the map, making it impossible to kill them.
    • Doom³: A number of doors are supposed to lock behind you once you walk through them. However, it's possible to walk through one of these doors and then back out before they close (usually because an enemy jumped out at you), and end up on the wrong side of the door when it locks, causing you to be unable to proceed further.
  • In Duke Nukem 3D, you could actually save while dead. However, the game protected you from ill-timed quick saves, stating helpfully "You cannot "quick save" when dead!"
  • Far Cry autosaves at fixed positions on the map. It's quite easy to trigger one of these autosaves in the middle of combat. If you were in a position where you could not win the fight, then your only option is to reload an earlier save.
  • First Encounter Assault Recon:
    • A minor one in the first game (that got patched later): the game leaves logs for back story in laptops. One of these laptops is actually a mission objective, which you can see before you're told to download the log. Unfortunately, once you download it, you can't re-download it and you'll get stuck. Fortunately a patch later fixed this so that if you downloaded the laptop earlier, the character in the cutscene will mention that you already have the log, thus preventing you from getting stuck.
    • FEAR: Project Origin, unlike the earlier games in the series, doesn't allow for any manual game saving by the player. There's only an automatic checkpoint system which doesn't allow the player to revert to earlier checkpoints. If you find yourself up the creek without a paddle, then you have to restart from the beginning of the level... and some of those levels are long.
  • Half-Life:
    • At the end of "Blast Pit", the pipe Gordon is walking through breaks and drops him in a storage room below. If you don't have enough health to survive the Falling Damage, you have no choice but to load an earlier save or use cheats to progress. The PlayStation 2 and cancelled Sega Dreamcast ports rectify this by filling the room with Soft Water.
    • In the "Questionable Ethics" chapter, you can deliberately trap yourself in the rotating door near the end, by triggering the turning process and moving back, then entering the side part of the rotating door.
  • Half-Life 2:
    • It is possible to avoid picking up the crowbar at the beginning of the game and abuse the physics system to proceed until the Route Kanal chapter where a wall of boards is unbreakable without the crowbar and the player is gated out of being able to go back and retrieve the tool.
    • In the museum where you have to deactivate three dark matter generators, the way to one of them goes through a room full of laser beams. As soon as you cross one, the door closes and you get mowed down by turrets. If you throw a painting from the outside corridor through the laser beams, the door locks permanently. Even if you manage to destroy the turrets, the door won't open so you have to reload your game.
    • Nova Prospekt has one you may not even notice until it's too late. When making your way through the prison to find Eli, there is a large room with a gate leading to the next area that you must press a switch to open. If anything at all is touching the gate when you press the button - even something small like a broken piece of a box - the gate will remain closed, and pushing the button again will not open it again. The game also autosaves after the button is pushed, meaning the player's only recourse is to retreat to an old save file, or to go to the last autosave and try again. If the player has only been using autosaves and/or accidentally causes the glitch on every untainted save file - which, given the nature of physics in the game, is completely within the realm of possibility - they will have no way to leave the area, and no choice but to start the game over completely. This is a particularly cruel fate, as Nova Prospekt is one of the game's final four chapters.
    • Averted in Episode Two, where the commentary states that they designed the autosave system to not save in dangerous places during the strider battle.
  • Halo:
    • Overzealous speedrunning or Sequence Breaking can cause critical enemies (for example, those who open Locked Doors) or vehicles to fail to spawn, or other scripted events to fail to activate, resulting in a stage being unwinnable. If you saved after a Checkpoint of No Return, then you're screwed. Restart.
    • The series's autosaving also often lands players in unwinnable situations — for example, without enough ammo or the proper weapons in a battle. A particularly infamous example is on Halo: Combat Evolved's "Truth and Reconciliation", where a checkpoint sometimes activates just as Keyes is being killed.
      Marine: "We're screwed! We're screwed, man!"
    • In Halo 2 and onward, after being stuck in an unwinnable autosave situation for a few deaths, the game will punt you back to an earlier autosave. If you find yourself in a situation that is possibly winnable but incredibly difficult, then multiple suicides to trigger this might be a good idea. Unfortunately, if you get yourself into an unwinnable situation that (if it was by Design) would be Cruel or worse, then you might live long enough for the system to autosave twice after you trigger it. The games' mercy has limits.
    • In Halo 3, at the end of the game, you have to race to the ship on a Warthog while the Ark is about to explode. There are a few different check points, most of them on the solid parts of the route. But there is one check point right before the final stretch where you can land at an odd angle, just as it is starting to collapse, and you then fall to your death below. The result is that you get stuck respawning upside down over a pit.
    • In Halo 3: ODST's "Kikowani Station" mission, there's a rare-yet-annoying issue in that, sometimes, the phantom that normally activates the second tunnel's exit doesn't do so, forcing a restart of the whole mission. Fortunately, it's rare, but when it happens, you're screwed, with no choice but to restart the mission once more.
      Buck: "Troopers, i've got bad news..."
    • In Halo: Reach's "New Alexandria mission", if you stay at the top of the SinoViet Tower to kill the Drones, then take the elevator back down (or go back up then try to return), the doors at the bottom won't open, forcing you to restart the whole mission, since the game autosaves at the top of the tower.
    • In madda cheeb adventure, it's impossible to beat stage one without losing a life if you have two slivers of health left; if you're lucky, one. That is, because the boss shoots whip after whip of bullets (before just going up and down, shooting two bullets in a row) and you can't escape. The second stage hints that you have to get so many mini-war hogs without getting hit once or else you will run out of time.
  • Hexen version 1.0 had a bug (an error in one of the action scripts — it checked that the number of Green Chaos Serpents left on the level had been reduced to exactly 3, instead of to the intended less than 4) that caused the Episode 4 end-of-episode boss to sometimes fail to appear, leaving the player stuck in a sealed room with no way forward or back. This was fixed in version 1.1.
  • Hunt Down the Freeman has a pretty constant risk of this. Upon launch, there were multiple levels where it wasn't possible to reach the exit, making them inescapable without the risk of console commands.
  • In the Left 4 Dead series, survivor bots will attempt to go to you when you're incapacitated so you can be revived. Bots are also programmed to teleport near the player's location should the bot's path finding fail and get stuck. However, should the player go down in a place the bots cannot reach them, even if it's physically possible to get there, the bots will be confused and unable to reach the player, leaving them to bleed out. This can also happen if the player goes down in some place that you can physically reach out to help them up, but because the bot's path finding isn't programmed to go to that spot, you're boned.
  • Left 4 Dead 2 has The Passing campaign and a Scavenge Mode where the objective is to fill up a generator with cans of gasoline. Naturally, Valve made it where the cans respawn if they are destroyed. However, if a dropped gas can is near a Boomer that explodes, the can goes sailing high into the air, so it is possible that the flying can may land on a rooftop or some other structure that the survivors can't retrieve it from. Unless you have a molotov to hurl to the lost can to destroy it so it respawns in its original place, the game can't be finished. Luckily, this can rarely happen since the direction of an item that gets thrown from an explosion is pretty random. Dead Center's finale has the same gas can objective as well, but it takes place indoors and the survivors are able to access most of the map, so losing a can here is nearly impossible.
  • Legend of the Seven Paladins 3D is a Doom clone that is programmed so badly that the game runs insanely, extremely fast. Most of the time, players will only get a short way into the game without dying from enemies that fire at lightning speed.
  • Marathon:
    • One level of the first game has a pattern buffer in a secret room with a one-shot timed door. Don't save here.
    • Marathon 2: Durandal:
      • One level has a pattern buffer (save point) over a pit of acid which just so happens to be unescapable.
      • Some levels, such as "Colony Ship for Sale" and "Ingue Ferroque", require you to shoot switches with grenades or fusion overcharge shots. Don't have grenades or fusion batteries? You're stuck for good.
      • Using the "skip to level" cheat may doom you here as well, since starting a level this way only gives you a magnum and no other weapons. (Those trying to beat the game using only their fists use Physics Models (mods, in other words) to make magnum bullets activate switches when absolutely necessary.)
      • Some one-shot door switches, such as in G4 Sunbathing and certain Game Mods, can accidentally be deactivated before the door is fully open, preventing further progress.
  • Medal of Honor:
    • In the "Operation Rapunzel" level of Medal of Honor: Frontline, if you happen to backtrack for health items or ammo after rescuing the hostage, he may disappear, rendering the level unwinnable.
    • Medal of Honor (2010) has many bugs, some of which can induce unwinnable situations. For example, in Defend The Crash Site, you are defending a crashed helicopter from the Taliban with a minigun turret, and at a certain point, an enemy is supposed to destroy the turret with an RPG. Unfortunately, particularly in the PS3 version, this Scripted Event sometimes fails to activate, resulting in the mission continuing indefinitely. Another one happens in Belly of the Beast, where you're supposed to cover fire for your team mates as they advance, but again, the event flag for their advance often fails to activate. The only way around these is to restart the mission from the beginning and hope you don't get screwed again, and if that (god forbid) fails, restart the whole game.
  • PAYDAY: The Heist has a system in place where if a player that is holding a mission-critical item leaves the game, those items are transferred to the next player (bots cannot hold or use said items). However, due to random glitches, the check can fail, causing the critical items to be lost and the rest of the level unwinnable since the crew can no longer progress.
  • In one level of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, you have to avoid setting off any alarms and sneak into a truck at the end without being noticed. This level contains a major game-stopping bug, at least in the Xbox version: if you shoot out the last alarm with anything other than the silenced sniper rifle, then the truck driver will still be alerted to your presence, albeit unable to sound the alarm; you won't get a "Mission Failed", but the level will become unfinishable. They should have made alerting the truck driver itself a Non-Standard Game Over. Better keep multiple saves; it's a pain to have to play through this level all over again.
  • Soldier of Fortune:
  • Strife: Quest for the Sigil:
    • There's one case that only shows up if the player cheats: The Front base's location is dependent on how many Sigil pieces you have. If you have even ONE sigil piece, then the Front base is moved to the castle. Problem? If you cheat to get the Sigil early, then you won't have access to the castle and won't be able to get ANY ending without further cheating because Macil, who gives you all the key jobs (except the first one) until the Front base moves, won't be accessible anymore.
    • There's one which can occur without cheating, but it's very rare. The plot path requires that you destroy the computer in the Administration Complex; the plot says that this lowers the forcefields protecting the Administration Complex and the Bishop's Tower, but what it actually does is to unlock the exit back to the Bailey, and a switch inside the door back to the Bailey is what actually lowers the forcefields. Which is fine if the teleport from the Administration Complex takes you to the other side of the door; but if it glitches and sends you back to the Gatehouse where you first entered the Bailey, the forcefields will still be up leaving you stuck. Nor will re-entering the Security Center to get through to the Administration Complex again work, since the bars which opened to let you through have closed again.
  • In the virtual reality game VRPorize, dying and restarting a level doesn't restock your ammunition. Since some levels start off with you almost immediately under attack by fairly damage-resistant enemies, this can easily result in a situation where it's literally impossible to get 100% completion on a level because there's simply not enough ammunition to kill all of the enemies present.

    Hidden Object Games 
  • Immortal Lovers can be Unwinnable in a way only a Hidden Object Game can. One of the hidden object sections has an object that always appears in the lower right corner. On some computers, this object is covered up by the hint button. And no, the object cannot be selected while the hint button is recharging.

    Interactive Fiction 

    Maze Games 
  • The coin-op game Trog features four cute claymation dinosaurs (Rex, Bloop, Spike, and Gwen) collecting eggs and trying to get home. It has a complex egg-laying pattern that sometimes fails to spawn the last egg for a particular dino, making it impossible for that dino to win the round.
  • The original versions of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong had overflow errors that made high levels unbeatable. With Donkey Kong, the timer gave you insufficient time to complete the level before it ran out and you were killed. In Pac-Man, half the screen would be filled with garbage, and the game wouldn't acknowledge that you've eaten every available dot and power pellet, even if you have, leaving the game stuck until you got killed. Downplayed in both cases, since reaching the levels in question is regarded as a victory of sorts.
  • In the Game & Watch game Squish, your goal is to avoid getting squashed by randomly generated moving walls whose directions change after a few seconds. If the walls appear across the entire screen, then a miss could be unavoidable.

    Minigame Games 
  • Many of the games in the old Action 52 compilation (for the NES and Genesis/Mega Drive) are unwinnable because of shoddy programming.
    • Two of them, Alfredo and Jigsaw, are also unplayable (except on a select few emulators).
    • To give you an idea of just how bad the situation with Action 52 is, the game's developers decided to include a small contest in the game. They put a secret, personalized code at the end of one of the games, Ooze, which (along with taking a photo of the game screen to show that the player did beat the game) would have made players eligible for a grand prize of $104,000. Unfortunately, there were two versions of the Action 52 cartridge. In the better-known version, "Ooze" inevitably hangs two or three levels in, making the game impossible to complete.
    • In Star Evil, the boss sometimes fails to show up; and if you beat the third boss if it happens to show up, then the last level is a Gray Screen of Death.
    • Some games, such as They Came, crash when you die or complete a level (again, in the better-known version of the cartridge).
    • Fuzz Power has an insurmountable rock wall in Level 3.
    • Active Enterprises was trying to make the Cheetahmen into a Cash-Cow Franchise. They started on a sequel to the Action 52 Cheetahmen game, Cheetahmen II. They folded before they could release it, but 1,500 prototype copies were discovered in a warehouse and distributed as bootlegs. It's obvious that the game wasn't finished; in addition to the many annoying bugs and glitches and crippled controls, there is a game-stopping bug where the next level fails to load after you defeat the ApeMan in level 4. You can skip to levels 5 and 6 with a Game Genie, a hacked ROM, or a certain good bad bug; but after you beat the final boss there, the game just stays on the boss screen, no ending cinematic, no credits, nada.
    • Ninja Assault is another game with No Ending. After you play through the glitched-up fourth stage and defeat the glitched-up boss, the game just stops. There's a cave entrance on the boss screen, signifying that there should be more levels, but they didn't bother to program them.
    • In the fifth level of Atmos Quake, your ship randomly explodes for no reason, probably due to the glitchy collision detection, making the level unbeatable.
  • WarioWare:
    • WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$: There is a microgame known as "Right in the Eye" which involves threading a needle. On Level 3 (the hardest difficulty) of this microgame, the needle can be placed too high or low to thread.
    • WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Party Game$!: The microgame "Guy Scraper" can sometimes be unable to complete entirely if the game speed is too fast, due to the animation for the man diving off and bouncing on the trampoline taking too long.

    Miscellaneous Games 
  • The second keyholder guarding the final boss of the Duck Life 4 HTML port is unbeatable due to its running level (~155) being higher than your maximum of 150.
  • First Class Trouble has a similar example to the Civilization example above. The game can be set so all but one player is a Personoid, leaving the sole Resident player no way to win the game, as a minimum of two Residents are required for victory.
  • Glider:
    • The two most common ways to make a game of Glider PRO unwinnable are to accidentally miss a star (backtracking is sometimes impossible) or to run out of a necessary powerup, especially helium (powerups are in limited supply, never respawn, are sometimes mutually exclusive, and can be drained all at once by microwaves).
    • There are several vents and transporters in "Slumberland" that let you skip large sections of the house. One of them lets you skip the sewers, which is a great relief except that one of the stars is down there, and there is no way to go back. It appears that this star was originally supposed to be in the room "You Got It," which is where the sewer route converges with the shortcut.
  • Due to the nature of the game, it's possible for players in HQ to be eliminated due to technical issues, such as the question failing to appear, or just randomly getting eliminated for no reason despite giving a correct answer.
  • Insaniquarium has the Tank 6 Glitch, where one can access a sixth tank beyond the normal five. The trouble is, this tank is a Dead-End Room; the only way to escape is to delete your game data and start completely anew. Let's hope you backed up your data before entering Tank 6, so you can restore it...
  • This game based on the Jeopardy game show has a particular question (what does "SWAT" stand for) where the answer is impossible to enter because the game doesn't allow that many letters to be typed in.
  • While Roblox itself is not a video game, many games on the site are unwinnable. In games where you can save, but you are unable to reset your file, it is possible to make a mistake that makes it impossible to win the game.
  • The Subway level in the NES adaptation of Where's Waldo is a maze that is randomly generated. So randomly in fact that there is no check to make sure the game produces a layout that can be completed and there is a good chance the stage may be unwinnable.
  • In The Wiki Game, because the interface does not accept all Wikipedia templates, etc, sometimes you can find yourself on a page which is a Dead-End Room with no links to click.

    MMORPG 
  • Mabinogi's VIP inventory, in which Locks when VIP service ends. You can lock yourself out from various storyline quests by accidentally putting in Key Items.
  • This was a problem in the Fist of Guthix minigame in Runescape. Just like the rest of the game, players can only right click to attack other players that have a higher combat level. Because of this, all the hunted players would gather on one spot in the center and stack on top of each other. The lower levelled player would thus be presented with a large list of "Trade," Follow," and "Walk here" when he right clicked, and the option to attack his opponent would be pushed off the screen, making it impossible to click. As a result, a higher levelled player would acquire a large amount of charges that is nearly impossible for the lower leveled player to get. This happens less frequently nowadays due to fewer players in the game and an update to the right click menu.
  • Star Trek Online features the episode "A Step Between Stars". Early in the mission, there's a point at which the captain of Tuvok's ship is supposed to get killed by the Voth. If you manage to save him, you break the mission progression.
  • In Ragnarok Online, certain maps have mesas or other landforms or rooms that can only be accessed by teleporting to a random cell on the map. A player who doesn't have the teleport skill can use a flywing item to teleport until they arrive at one of these places, and if they run out of teleporting items on that exact teleport and don't know the skill, they are stuck because these places usually don't spawn monsters and if you are at a high level it's unlikely a monster would be able to kill you anyways even if you took off all your armor and buffs and stood there letting it try to hit you for an hour. There are ways to fix this involving the help of another person (like contacting a GM to help you, or another player to teleport until they get there too and hand over some flywings or Butterfly Wings, get close enough to trade, kill you themselves, or warp you), but on your own, there is no way to get out of the situation, to the point that Jerkass players with the Warp Portal skill would make save points at these places and place warps under random people's feet, teleporting them there without warning and, if they happen to not have teleporting items handy, without any convenient way to leave.
  • The MMORPG Trickster Online allows you to sell or accidentally drop (destroy) quest items necessary for the story quests. They cannot be replaced; petitioning a GM will only get the response 'well you shouldn't have done that'. Although the game is still playable, about 1/2 of the single player content is forever lost and all the EXP those quests can give is gone.

    Platform Games 
  • It is possible to create an unwinnable state right at the start of the Flash platformer Absorbed, by simply not taking the absorbtion gun that is the game's primary mechanic (it's right in front of you, and you take it automatically by touching it, so you have to deliberately avoid doing so). This doesn't stop you moving to the next area, which locks behind you. There is then no way to proceed from there.
  • The Addams Family:
    • The Game Boy game:
      • The only two levels you cannot leave by the same way you came in require items from other levels to reach their exits. When you enter The Toybox, you had better have completed the Boiler Room level to have the Hot Coal weapon; the boss in this level is immune to all other weapons from most directions. At The River, if you didn't bring the fish potion with you, your game is over even if you know the hidden route to walk from one end of the level to the other; the boss is unbeatable without that potion.
      • Two optional levels require you to have completed The River. In The Swamp, you need the Icecube item to float across the swamp sections. In Ice box, you need the icecubes to float across the freezing pools of water or the fish potion to swim across.
    • Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt for SNES: in the level 5 basement, it is possible to duck and go through a wall which leaves Pugsley stuck inside the wall with no way out. If this happens reset the game and be careful not to get stuck again.
  • The last level of Aladdin II, a Famicom pirate of Aladdin (Virgin Games), has an uncrossable gap.
  • In Bubble Bobble Plus, the WiiWare remake of Bubble Bobble, while playing Classic mode, if you get an EXTEND on Round 99, something incredibly specific and up to luck, one can skip the final level (Round 100), and go to Rounds 101-104. Rounds 101-103 are the three secret bonus rooms, and Round 104 is the EXTEND cutscene's room. Dying once in Rounds 101-103 skips to the next round, but death in Round 104 has no effect. There's no way to attack the Super Drunk, thusly trapping the player forever. Furthermore, if you use a continue after all players die, the Super Drunk doesn't even respawn.
    • Bubble Bobble Revolution says it has 100 levels, but the North American version of the game has a massive bug that means the boss of level 30 fails to spawn, preventing the player from proceeding beyond level 30.
  • The SNES and Genesis/Mega Drive versions of the first Bubsy game have an enemy placed directly to the right of a checkpoint in one of the canyon levels. If you activate this checkpoint without killing the adjacent enemy and then die later on in the level so that you end up respawning at it, Bubsy will respawn inside of the enemy and die continuously until he loses all of his lives. It is unknown if this was fixed in the Windows 95 port, Super Bubsy.
  • The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 2:
    • The hammer at the beginning of stage 16 is not needed. But if you miss a key early in the level, you'll need the hammer to get back to it; otherwise, you'll have to find an enemy and kill yourself. But as it's also one of the few stages where you can kill every enemy, it's possible to wind up in an enemy-free stage, with no way to beat the level, and no way to kill yourself to try again.
    • Right at the start of Stage 22, you're seemingly forced to get the hammer and pick axe. You can't get very far without the hammer, and you'd be stuck at one part of the level without the pick axe. However, it actually is possible to get past the beginning part of the level without getting the pick axe, by getting the hammer, then breaking the rock at just the right moment that the enemy behind the rock is going the other way, then sneaking past that enemy. It's much more difficult than simply going the other direction and collecting the pick axe, and would probably never even occur to most players that it's even possible to sneak past the enemy here, but is technically possible to do by accident. Doing this leads to getting stuck in one part of the level, since you won't have that pick axe to climb out of an upcoming pit, and if you kill the enemy in that pit, you're forced to reset the game.
  • The Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers game on the NES had a Game Genie code that would make you invincible, but did not prevent you from being stunned by attacks. See, in the game, being stunned and being damaged were two completely different things, and the code caused you to always become stunned instead of taking damage. The result was that if you got caught in certain areas where you were rapidly attacked or if you touched a stationary enemy, you'd be stuck. Interestingly, the Game Genie manual specifically warns you about this in the code's description.
  • In the Sega MegaDrive/Genesis game Chuck Rock, the last level has a rock close to a tall platform with a green dinosaur on top. You're supposed to jump onto the rock and then onto the platform. However, if you throw the rock on the platform to kill the dinosaur, you're as good as screwed. The platform's too tall to overcome with your normal jump, Chuck can't climb, you can't nudge the rock back down, there are no other rocks to use, and there's no way to jump higher. If the player leaves the screen and comes back, the rock doesn't reset. On top of that, enemies don't respawn so the player can't kill themselves, and there's no time limit either so the player is stuck there, without any choice other than to reset the game. Hope you remembered to write down the password...
  • Commander Keen:
    • In Commander Keen Episode I: Marooned on Mars, if you beat a level with a ship part without collecting it, you're screwed as you cannot re-enter levels in the game.
    • If you play Commander Keen Episode V: The Armageddon Machine on Easy difficulty, and enter the secret level "Korath III Base", if you're running the original version of the game it will crash as soon as you enter this level. The bug-fixed version does not have this problem, but the fuse which you're supposed to break in order to get the alternate ending to the game is not breakable on Easy difficulty. Either way, if you're planning on visiting the secret level, make sure to play on Normal or Hard difficulty.
    • Beating the last level of Commander Keen Episode V requires luring a Shikadi mine (which explodes when Keen gets too close) to the Armageddon Machine's achilles heel and using the mine's explosion to take it out, however, there are a limited number of these particular enemies in the level, and they don't respawn. While there are in-game hints to help the player figure out what has to be done without making it (what the developers might have considered) too easy, there is nothing telling a player who has purged the area of this enemy without achieving the win condition that the level is now unbeatable.
    • To complete the last level of Commander Keen Episode VI, you need all four gem keys. The blue one is carried by a blue Blooglet in the first (mostly black) room, on a platform just before the portal taking you to the next room, and once you go through that portal there's no return; so if you do so without first dropping down to that platform, stunning the Blooglet and picking up the gem, you've already lost.
  • In the third episode of Crystal Caves, one of the levels in the Hub Level is located down a deep pit, too deep to jump out. If you drop down into the pit before completing all the other levels, you're stuck. Thankfully, it is possible to leave via cheat codes. The Crystal Caves HD remake fixes this by adding a platform.
  • Donkey Kong 64:
    • If you choose to save in the middle of Hideout Helm, you will return to find one of the Banana Medals can't be collected. You need all the Banana Medals to see the entire ending. Before YouTube, this was one nasty glitch.
    • One of Diddy's Golden Bananas in Gloomy Galleon requires you to enter a mechanical fish and shoot out three lights on its heart (which are blocked by a propeller that spins/stops on a set pattern) within a time limit of 90 seconds. This is normally a fairly easy one to get. However, if you decide to go for it only after getting the Sniper Scope upgrade from Funky, it becomes exponentially harder due to a bug that makes the propeller spin longer than normal. A common strategy to circumvent this is to exploit a glitch that allows you to hit lights that are being covered, but this is difficult to do and doesn't always work. An alternative, glitchless method can be seen here.
  • Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest: The Game Boy Advance version requires you to play a minigame with Funky Kong in the first world in order to gain access to his flight services. If you're in too much of a rush to bother with this, it's possible to get to the Flyin' Kroc level but be unable to ever return to a previous one, making the pursuit of 102% impossible.
  • Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project has an odd one relating to the autosave, where repeatedly dying in a certain location constantly resaves a fraction of a second later, leading eventually to you starting over a pit and dying every time you load.
  • Dynamite Headdy:
    • If you are on the top-right corner of the screen after you defeat Baby Face, and you skip the tally screen as fast as possible, Headdy may not have enough time to get to his spot, and if the tallies are gone before he gets there, the game will lock up. Here is a video.
    • There's a way to lock the game if you land the final blow on Clothes Encounters off-screen, with the Super Head. But if you wait for around 4 minutes, it'll eventually return to normal. Video here.
    • In "Toys N The Hood", you have 2 platforms out of reach. Your goal is to pull one of them close to you with your detachable head so you can hop onto it. If you purposely stand as far away as possible, pull the platform to you, and run away immediately after, when the platform comes to you, it'll be too far away for you to reach the ledge or the other platform. You can't kill yourself either. Here's a video demonstrating this.
  • In the one home computer port of 'Edd the Duck', the 20th collectible star needed to progress past the seventh level is missing, rendering the game impossible to complete.
  • In Epic Mickey, there's a glitch that can occur late in the game, activated if you ignored the machine on Skull Island. After completing Lonesome Manor and starting the quest "Oswald Needs Help", if you go to Ventureland and then back to Mean Street while that quest is active, the game will skip ahead in the story a bit. Not so bad so far, as you can continue the story like normal from this point. However, if you try to go to Ostown, the conflicting events will cause the game to permanently fade to black when you arrive. And since the game autosaves, you'll be stuck if you try to reset and reload.
  • In Stage 3 (prehistory) of Garfield: Caught in the Act, the boss, a prehistoric Odie, will sometimes bounce offscreen. If he does, he will never return, and you will have no choice but to reset the game.
  • Many levels in Geometry Dash are like this, due to updates.
  • Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy: it's possible to hook your hammer around the radio tower at the final part of the game, leaving you unable to move. This was found before the official Steam release, but because the game openly tortures its players, it was not fixed; instead, a voice line was added for anyone who traps themselves on the tower, saying "You got so close, but this is past mending. You got the bad ending." Escaping this predicament is technically doable, but extremely difficult.
  • Stage 4 in Ghouls 'n Ghosts is a direct cause of this. The fourth boss is a giant worm, and the only way to kill it is by destroying the five "wounds" located around its body. However, they can only be reached by throwing projectiles downward, so if the boss is reached with the sword, the game's sole melee weapon, it becomes impossible to defeat, since its range isn't long enough to hit, and the smaller worms it constantly spawns can't drop weapons. This is merely an annoyance in most versions, since dying to the boss puts you back at the stage's halfway point where a different weapon can easily be acquired from a chest or an enemy, but it's a complete death sentence in the Genesis/Mega Drive port, since dying at a boss will put you right back at the boss, stalling all progress and rendering the entire game unfinishable.
  • The TurboGrafx-16 version of the Nintendo Hard Impossamole has shoddily placed Points Of No Return in some levels in such a way that if you missed a Plot Coupon (scroll) beforehand, then it would be unobtainable. Having Monty commit suicide didn't help if you crossed a reload point after the Point of No Return; the mission would be Unwinnable unless you lost all your lives and started from the beginning. Talk about bad level design.
  • In Between has a manually-operated checkpoint system that behaves like a Save State, recording everything as it is and restoring it to exactly that state should you die, such as the position of hazards and if doors have been unlocked. While this can be very helpful, it is entirely possible to brick the puzzle if saved at the wrong time, such as saving when one of the various flavours of Advancing Wall of Doom are close enough to render the rest of the puzzle impossible, forcing the puzzle to be restarted.
  • Jak II: Renegade has a particularly nasty glitch towards the end. There's a kiosk near the racing arena that allows you to replay any of the arena races. Using it puts an icon on your map so that the race can trigger properly. The problem comes in when a late game mission starts in the arena area. If you use the kiosk past a certain point in the game prior to starting the affected mission, the kiosk's mission trigger will override the story mission's trigger, rendering it impossible to start the mission and, consequently, finish the game.
  • One of the Dark Daxter levels in Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier can end up like this; no idea why, but going through an autosave point at a bad time can result in Daxter finding himself with no spiders to use to clog up holes in the ground, and not enough dark eco to smash through a wall.
  • In Jiggly Zone, there used to be a bug where if you collected just the powerup in a certain area before leaving, the medallion shard in the other chest would accidentally be registered as collected. As grabbing all the shards forms the main quest, this would have broken the game. The bug has since been fixed, however.
  • In a stage of Kirby Super Star, there is a room you can enter only by breaking blocks on either side of the door with one of Kirby's powers. Standard issue Kirby is completely unable to move or break these blocks, so if you enter the room, clear out the baddies, but lose whatever powers you used to get in (intentionally or otherwise), you won't be able to get back out. Entering and exiting the room causes the blocks to respawn (but not the enemies), and Kirby can't suck in enemies beyond physical boundaries like walls, so you're forced to hit reset. This is probably the highest level of difficulty you will see in the entire game. It was eventually fixed in the DS remake.
  • Monster Party normally gives you the key to progress to the next round after beating all the bosses in a round. Round 7 has three bosses, but beating two bosses gives you the key and beating the third one takes away the key, leaving you no choice but to reset the game. This is because the unreleased Japanese prototype only has two bosses in Round 7, but the game still checks if you beat exactly two bosses.
  • In Ori and the Blind Forest:
    • One part of Sorrow Pass requires you to use boulders to block death lasers. A glitch may cause one of the boulders to disappear upon reloading or backtracking, or you can get one stuck in the wrong place, leaving you unable to progress in both cases.
    • A similarly infamous glitch in Moon Grotto may cause Ori to be trapped under the laser in the optional bottom room.
    • Ori will sometimes glitch into rocks and get stuck, forcing a reload.
    • In the Updated Re-release, after acquiring the Light Burst in Lost Grove, if you light one or more of the lanterns that activate the platforms needed to escape, then quit and reload, the platform(s) may reset while the lantern(s) remain(s) lit, leaving you softlocked. Luckily, the game keeps the previous five saved games on file so you can easily reload an older but still recent position.
  • Ori and the Will of the Wisps:
  • One area in the final level of Psychonauts features an Advancing Wall of Doom that requires you do a lot of fancy jumping to avoid it, using all of your different jump techniques. However, a seemingly random bug can activate in this part of the level, where your double jump refuses to work... dooming you to a watery grave.
  • Rastan: The Commodore 64 port has a rope swing over a pool of water in Level 4 that is bugged, making it impossible to cross and therefore complete the game without the use of cheats.
  • Shantae (2002): It's possible to reach the fourth dungeon boss early, without having picked up the Harpie transformation dance. Cue Hopeless Boss Fight, as the only way to make the boss vulnerable to attack is to first fly above it as the Harpy and smack it in the head. Dying simply respawns you in the same room, so the only way to get out is to waste all your lives and get a Game Over or reset: both options requiring you to play the whole dungeon again.
  • The Sonic the Hedgehog series has numerous examples.
    • Sonic Adventure:
      • The original release of had several glitches that allowed you to get stuck. You can glitch through the roof of the train station at the beginning of Tails's story, and play and finish Casinopolis before the casino area was unlocked...only to find yourself unable to leave the area (thanks to the pathways to and from Casinopolis still being sealed shut) and stuck there by the game's auto-saving, permanently ruining the entire save file (which has stories for six characters). It isn't impossible to leave the area, but it requires pin-precision platforming to the point where those with less patience might not find wasting that time to be worth it.
      • An even nastier version happens if you manage to pull it off with Knuckles. After he clears Casinopolis, he's whisked away to the Echidna City of the past to encounter a scene of Tikal and her father before being put back in Station Square. If you manage to clear Casinopolis out of order, the trigger for Tikal's cutscene ends up being glitched, leaving Knuckles stuck in the past forever and you with a truly un-completable save.
      • Another interesting example: You can opt to obtain Sonic's optional upgrade in the Last Story and then save and quit. When you load the game, you'll get text indicating what has last happened in the game, just like in any other character's story. When you obtained the Crystal Ring determines what the text says. (For those who haven't played the game, that's not supposed to happen in the Last Story.) When the "previously" text is finished scrolling, the game will freeze. Interestingly, the background art is the CG of Perfect Chaos as he looked before his final in-game design.
    • In Sonic Adventure 2 for the Sega Dreamcast, some discs had an error which made you fall through the floor at the beginning of the last level, meaning there's no way to stop it. The Cutting Room Floor speculates this was done intentionally for Copy Protection purposes.
    • Sonic the Hedgehog 2:
      • In Wing Fortress Zone, there is one point where Super Sonic can jump off a rising platform when at its peak and barely reach the next level up, which looks like a shortcut, except there are walls on all sides, and the way you came was a floor that can only be passed through from the bottom. The only way to continue is to run out the timer. (There's other places like this, accessible mostly via glitch.)
      • There's the infamous "Stupid Pit" in Mystic Cave Zone. It has spikes at the bottom, and is far too deep to jump out of. Get all seven Emeralds, turn Super, fall in, and you now must wait for your rings to run out. An otherwise functionally identical-to-the-original mobile port of the game replaces this spike-filled pit with a spikeless pit that leads to a redone version of the infamous Dummied Out Hidden Palace Zone if you fall in.
    • Sonic 3 & Knuckles:
      • During either act of Marble Garden Zone, while playing Sonic with Tails following, it's possible to glitch Tails off the screen so you go through the rest of the Zone solo. Doing so prevents Tails from returning to aid you in fighting the Zone's main boss; you're stuck off the screen and out of reach until you reset the game.
      • Also, you'd better not be Super Sonic when you reach that main boss, or Tails will not appear either. A similar thing happens if you replay that level, play as Super Tails, and hit Eggman more than 8 times before he takes the battle into the skies. However, this was fixed in at least one later rerelease. (specifically, Sonic Classic Collection for the Nintendo DS)
      • Better not screw around playing Tails with the second controller in Hidden Palace, or he may not automatically get into place to fall to the bottom of the level, making it impossible to proceed.
      • In Carnival Night Zone, Sonic can get stuck in a quarter pipe's wall if the player makes him go too fast, and it's impossible to get Sonic out. The dev team evidently knew about this but didn't have time to fix it: the American manual Hand Waves it by saying that they are traps that Robotnik lays to take advantage of Sonic's speed.
      • In Launch Base Zone, if you spindash into a ramp, Sonic will glitch through it and get stuck in it until he dies from the time running out.
      • Knuckles normally does not go into Death Egg Zone at all (his game ends at Sky Sanctuary), but if you decide to play as Knuckles in Death Egg via level select, you'll find that Act 1 is impossible to complete because the boss's core is too high for Knuckles's lower jumping height.
    • The Past version of Metallic Madness Zone 2 in Sonic CD has a certain area where the player is expected to use a diagonal spring to launch Sonic up to a platform, that of which is needed to order to progress through the rest of the zone. Unfortunately, it doesn't have enough launching power for players to reach the platform with it, resulting in the player being unable to complete the level. The game isn't entirely rendered unwinnable at this point, but this does force the player to have to time-travel into the Present version in order to complete the stage... which is a tall order due to both the structure and the sheer size of the level itself. This only exists in the original game, however; the PC port (which is included in Sonic Gems Collection) and the 2011 remake thankfully address this by changing the spring's launching power to be strong enough for the player to access the platform.
    • Sonic Megamix, a hack of Sonic 1 ported to the Sega CD with enhanced graphics and new level design, has a glitch in version 4.0b right at the end of Starry Night Zone Act 2 that can get you stuck in the wall. It's rather consistent if you're moving quickly, and it's a glaring problem in an otherwise wonderful hack.
    • Shadow the Hedgehog:
      • In the Hero mission of The Doom, sometimes the Heal Units necessary to save the kidnapped researchers can glitch out and get stuck in midair, making them impossible to use, although the mission can still be completed if the Heal Cannon has been unlocked.
      • There's another one in the fight against Sonic and Diablon. The gimmick of this fight is to bounce off of Sonic in order to reach and attack Diablon. However, if he falls off the arena (say, if he went to attack Shadow near the edge and missed), he doesn't respawn, and Diablon cannot be hit.
    • In Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), it's possible to glitch past a rock wall early in Shadow's episode, which skips having to get the blue Memory Shard upgrade needed to activate Chaos Boost and break the wall. However, defeating Mephiles Phase 1 requires using Chaos Boost, and if you saved at any point after beating Kingdom Valley without the upgrade, you cannot beat Shadow's episode on that save file.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom Rehydrated had at least three spatulas that could become unobtainable because of glitches: the "Annoy Squidward" one in Bikini Bottom (If you enter Squidward's house, talk to him a few times but not enough to get the spatula and exit, the mission becomes impossible to do), the sandcastle one in Goo Lagoon (sometimes the screen flashes black randomly in any point of the level and from that point on the game will think you already got that spatula) and the slide one in Rock Bottom (touching the spatula in the moment it despawns will make the game think you grabbed it, but it's actually still unobtained). The 100% completion secret ending would also become unobtainable if you got the normal ending first, because the final boss could not be re-fought unlike in the original version of the game. These were all thankfully addressed in subsequent patches.
  • In the PlayStation 2 version of SpongeBob SquarePants: Revenge of the Flying Dutchman, a loading glitch prevents the game from working properly.
  • Spider-Man (2000) is unwinnable on modern PCs due to a strange choice in how cut scenes are managed: NPCs' actions are exactly defined, but Spider-Man himself still uses game engine physics in cutscenes, just with preprogrammed control inputs; and since the game engine is still running for him, he can actually die and end the game. This means that variations in timing - which are 100% certain on modern machines compared to ones from 2000 - will result in moments such as Scorpion's monologue being interrupted by Spider-Man smacking into the window behind him and plummeting to his death (he was supposed to swing in through the window, but timed the controls wrong). Spider-Man will also bang his head on a windowsill and fall to his death while chasing Venom in one of the cut scenes in that level, which makes the game unwinnable; the former scene is skippable, the latter is not.
  • The Game Boy original version of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back included an unwinnable situation in the first level. Near the end of the Hoth caves stage, there was a long jump that needed to be crossed, with a stack of ice blocks on the other side allowing you to reach your destination. However, the ice blocks are destroyable, meaning that if you accidentally break enough of them (particularly by riding your Tauntaun while attempting the jump—its weight automatically breaks through ice blocks), you are stuck with no possibility of finishing the level. Possibly Unwinnable by Design.
  • In the Game Boy original Star Wars: A New Hope, you can find each of the main characters from the movie (except Chewbacca and C-3PO) and add them to your party. However, you don't need to find any of them except R2-D2. Obi-Wan Kenobi is located in the back of a cave out in the middle of nowhere, and is notable in that he provides you with the less than useful lightsaber and also has the ability to heal your party a certain number of times. However, if you left Obi-Wan to rot on Tatooine then you'll quickly regret it upon reaching the trash compactor level of the Death Star. The sewer monster from the movie is seemingly immune to your blaster, and even if it isn't the damaging water rises too quickly for you to kill it that way. The only way to get past the dianoga is with the lightsaber provided by Obi-Wan.
    • In the NES version, you have to get certain things on Tatooine before leaving the planet in the Falcon. You have to at least get R2-D2, but unlike the Game Boy version, the lightsaber is obscenely useful, so you'll probably get Obi-Wan, and you have to get Han to leave. You do not, however, have to explore all the seemingly useless caves to find the little shield pick-ups. Failure to get any of these means that the Falcon turns into a one-hit wonder during the piloting sections, which are among the most difficult in a game that's already Nintendo Hard. Assuming you actually manage to survive the asteroid field that you encounter immediately after leaving Tatooinenote , then you'll make it through the extremely difficult Death Star platforming sections (including 3 bosses) and immediately run into the TIE fighter escape from the Death Star piloting sequence, in which it is almost impossible to not get hit at least once.
  • A rather ridiculous example from the notoriously terrible hack of Super Mario World, Super Mario Superstar 1: the final boss does absolutely nothing. Doesn't move, doesn't attack, doesn't take damage, can't die... This obviously makes it completely impossible to win or see the ending.
  • The disastrous DOS port of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989) is unwinnable due to no fault of the player, since there is a jump in the sewers of Area 3 that is impossible to negotiate due to a low ceiling. Unless, that is, you use a cheat code to walk through walls or skip levels, or take advantage of a particular glitch that also allows you to skip this.
  • In the Game Boy Color pirate Thunder Blast Man, an even worse port of the Famicom Rocman X, the "city stage" boss is unbeatable due to a Game-Breaking Bug.
  • In Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose!, there's a part near the end of the second level where the game takes control away from you so that Buster can show off and stand as close as possible to the edge of the roof of a train wagon (which is next to a bottomless pit, naturally) during a Auto-Scrolling Level before he dashes off and uses a convenient ramp to make it to the final part of the stage right before the screen is about to push him off the train. The problem is that the game defaults to R button being set as "dash", and if you've changed it to something else, Buster will just stand there and get killed repeatedly since you can't change controller settings in the middle of the game.
  • In order to beat the next to last level of the 1993 Sega Genesis X-Men (1993) game, you need to destroy a computer terminal and wait for Professor Xavier to tell you to "Reset the computer now!" How? By pushing the reset button on the console itself. This made the game impossible to beat on the Sega Nomad since that system didn't have a reset button.

    Puzzle Games 
  • Some computer versions of the classic 14-15 puzzle have an inappropriate shuffle routine (one which lays down the tiles in just any old order, instead of taking the space on a random walk through the tiles or swapping an even number of pairs of tiles, either of which procedures guarantees a solvable position) and thus generate an unsolvable position in 50% of cases.
  • In Angry Birds 2, in some of the boss stages, it's possible to knock the boss pig off the left side of the screen, which renders him unbeatable since unlike the original Angry Birds, you can't launch your birds backward (trying to do so resets the slingshot).
  • In the iPhone version of Bookworm, you have to collect words on various lists (body parts, vegetables, pets, etc). The word "Gold" is on the "Colors" list and the "Minerals" list, but you can't collect it from "Minerals" so you can't ever complete all the lists.
  • The American version of Bubble Bobble Revolution for the DS has a glitch that causes the boss to not load in Level 30, making the game Unwinnable. The bug was fixed in the v1.1 release.
  • In Candy Crush Soda Saga:
    • It's possible (though again very rare) to get a release-the-bears level into a state where the soda level is short of the candy string, but cannot be raised because no more soda bottles are appearing. Careless use of boosters to destroy most of the candy on the level is one way to reach such a state.
    • In level 49, the middle of the level (the top when you come in) is filled with locked blue candies alternating with cupcakes. There's also a separate part of the level containing a color bomb (floating) and a wrapped blue candy (fixed at the top). The idea is to raise the soda level enough to get the bomb next to the wrapped candy, so you can match them and blow all those locked candies and cupcakes out of the way; but it is possible for the bomb to go off prematurely, in which case your only hope is to make another one and match it with a blue candy, which is very unlikely.
  • Some (but not all) Windows copies of Chip's Challenge have a bug in Level 88 that effectively renders it unwinnable, due to increased aggressiveness of the walker enemy. This would later become known as the "Spirals corruption". Fortunately, failing a single stage enough times gives you the option to skip it.
  • Computer Spider Solitaire can be rendered Unwinnable if you clear away almost all of the cards before dealing the last set (this is rarely even possible, but it can happen). The game won't deal any more cards unless all the open spaces are covered, and if you don't have enough cards in play to cover them, you're stuck. This can be solved by simply planning ahead, but it's a crushing way to lose, since just moments ago you were doing exceptionally well.
  • The Crimson Room escape game has the player enter a randomly-generated 4-digit code to open a safe. The code to the safe is provided by a memo, which has the URL to a separate webpage written on it. Now, several sites have made efforts to preserve the original game, but cannot replicate the webpage needed for the safe code, forcing the player to brute-force up to ten thousand combinations to proceed. While some hosts try to avert this with an earlier version of the game that doesn't randomly generate the safe code, learning the code without looking for a guide is still impossible.
  • Level 29 of Cut The Rope 2's third medal is impossible to get due to the stars being placed too closely to miss all three. None of the powerups you can take into the level can help you due to the candy hanging over a bottomless pit and the hint will always give you the 3-star solution no matter what.
  • In the version of Freecell distributed with Microsoft Windows, game 11982 out of 32000 is unwinnable. Windows XP and onward extend this to 1,000,000 games. The same seed-based RNG is used, so as earlier, 11982 is impossible. Including that one, there are eight unwinnable deals. 146692 is the second one. Taken even further, 1282 out of the first 100 million deals are unwinnable, which is one out of every 78,003.
  • If you play NullpoMino with one of the "Nintendo" rulesets, don't pick modes with a win condition that require you to play at speeds exceeding 1Gnote  such as any Grade Mania mode. Since the Nintendo rulesets do not have the lock delay necessary to play at higher fall speeds, unlike the "Standard" and "Classic" rulesets, you'll find yourself in a situation just like Level 29 in NES Tetris, i.e. you can't move pieces all the way to the left or the right, preventing you from making lines. It gets worse if the mode starts in 20G (i.e. instant-fall speed), such as any Speed Mania mode, in which case you'll be unable to do anything at all as your pieces helplessly stack to the top for a quick Game Over.
  • The first episode of Paganitzu features a mechanic that makes the player's hat fall off at random times. The hat remains in position even if the player dies and restarts the level, which allows it to disrupt your game in multiple ways:
    • The hat acts as a path-disrupting obstacle for spiders, so if you are very unlucky, on a level where there is no physical obstacle between you and a spider (eg 14, 17, 20), it is possible for the hat to make a spider immediately come after you and kill you when the level starts. If you're even more unlucky, the spider will come for you faster than you can retrieve the hat, over and over again until you run out of lives.
    • If the hat is in the way of another object when the level resets, then that object will not appear. This can sometimes be an advantage, but if the thing it replaced was a critical boulder, too bad. This one at least can be fixed by collecting the hat and then dying again.
    • If the hat is dropped in your starting location, then the player's position will not be reset after dying; you respawn in the same spot you died. This is occasionally exploitable, but can easily lead to situations where a level cannot be finished even by dying, and only the level warp cheat code can save you.
  • In the second Professor Layton game, one of the 8 tea ingredients is a reward for completing a puzzle that is Permanently Missable Content. While this doesn't make the game unwinnable, it does make it impossible to unlock the extra puzzles awarded to "tea lovers", and subsequently gain enough picarats (points) to unlock the art, movie, and music galleries (which is a shame, because nobody plays this game for the plot).
  • In Puzzle Quest, it's possible to accidentally make the siege of Silvermyr unwinnable if you spam too many spells; the Magic Node (adds +5 to all skills when enemy uses a spell) will buff its skills to ludicrous levels (Battle 90+) meaning that any damage done to it will do nothing or actually heal it!
  • Shanghai became a popular implementation of Mahjong Solitaire, and cloned frequently. While the more common versions guarantee that the game is solvable, there's other variations that simply have tiles randomly placed (similar to as if the player layed out the tiles without a computer) with no consideration on whether or not the result is winnable.
  • Starship Titanic: The first time you pick up the parrot, it will escape after a few seconds and leave you a feather. This feather is needed to make the "mother" Succ-u-bus, in the ship's bilge, sneeze and become unblocked, allowing you to collect any items that were posted without an address. However, if you move quickly enough, you can post the parrot, before it drops the feather — and if you didn't provide an address, then it goes to the bilge room, and The Key Is Behind the Lock.
  • Superliminal: Due to the way the physics & map loading works, there are multiple ways to induce a Game-Breaking Bug. One example is the bouncy castle & pool room you can break the game by manipulating the castle & your movements in such a way that you can fit through the vent at the top of the map instead of completing the puzzle as expected. This breaks the physics and textures on the map. Fortunately, the game provides a Puzzle Reset to get out of such a situation.
  • The Witness generally makes a good effort to avoid having Permanently Missable Content, or letting players get stuck in areas. However, the swamp may be the exception: it's a tricky area to navigate, with several sections involving platforms that move when an associated panel is activated. The problem comes when said platforms can be triggered to move without the player standing on them (which is actually required for some of the environmental puzzles), and the control panel unable to be used to move the platform back. Sometimes, you may be able to cimcurvent this by taking a ride on the boat or using one of the unlockable shortcuts to get to the now unreachable location. If that's not the case, you're going to have a really bad time finding a spot which gives you the perspective to activate a panel from a long distance that doesn't even allow you to see what you're doing (and that's if you can remember what the solution was). This is a particularly painful example.

    Puzzle Platformers 
  • Portal:
    • It is possible, if you try very hard, to accidentally lose a weighted storage cube to a portal glitch that makes it randomly disappear; this makes most levels unwinnable.
    • In the instances of making the levels unwinnable that the developers have figured out, GLaDOS (your instructor for the game) will practically call the player an idiot, stating that it is no fault of the Enrichment Center that you have managed to trap yourself.
    • A much easier way to screw up your game completely is to fall into toxic waste and simultaneously hit one of the badly placed autosaves.
    • It is much easier to make the game unwinnable when playing the bonus maps (the harder versions of Rooms 13-18) by, say, dropping a weighted cube in the goo where it cannot be recovered. This is also played with in one of the rooms: you have to drop the Companion Ball into the incinerator before the timer goes off. This involves moving a lot while a timer is running. If you deliberately make the level unwinnable, GlaDOS will open an "emergency escape hatch," which means that you have to move about a tenth as far to get the ball into the incinerator.
    • Portal and its sequel have certain rooms where you can trap yourself, making it impossible to continue. (In the Xbox Live port of the first Portal, there is even an achievement for trapping yourself so that GLaDOS had to help you escape.) That said, Valve found most of the possible ways to trap yourself, and added dialogue on your state as well as providing a way out (by lowering a wall or dispensing an extra cube, for example.) That said, they didn't find every possible trap, so some weird cube or portal manipulations may leave you permanently trapped. Another example would be piling cameras under the weighted companion cube to support it while it's partway on the button, going through the door where the button to open the incinerator is, and then shoot a portal to make the camera fall through and the cube come off the button, so the door closes and you're trapped.

    Racing Games 
  • Crash Team Racing has a slight bug with the way carts are reset after they fall off of the track. The game has a set distance that is recovered to place the player's carts, regardless of what section of the track is (or isn't) there at the time. This can be especially bad on some tracks that require a long boosting sequence to clear. Fall short, and enjoy the endless loop of the game resetting your cart in the middle of empty space, or a standing start on a single acceleration panel launching you only halfway ad infinitum.
  • In the PlayStation game Formula One '98. Switching on the rules, tire wear and fuel depletion options, and then choosing a full 100% race distance has the potential to render said race completely unfinishable. The reason? A bug exists in the game which means you will more-often-than-not receive a Stop-Go penalty for speeding in the pitlane, and upon leaving the pits, you will instantly be disqualified for not serving the penalty. Since you will have to refuel the car at some point during the race, you're pretty screwed.
  • There's a bug in Forza Horizon 4 that affects the Seasonal Playlist. If you visit one of the Downloadable Content expansion areas (Fortune Island or Lego Valley), do not stay there when the season changes if you're going for 100% in a given season. Going to these locales causes the photo challenge (where you need to take a picture with one of your vehicles in a specific setting) to lose its completion mark and if the season changes while you're away from the mainland, it stays incomplete. This is especially annoying if you're trying to max out a series as you have to wait an entire month for another stab at 100%.
  • The original F-Zero (1990) had a level called "Death Wind" that was impossible to beat with the Golden Fox on Master difficulty. This is because the Golden Fox had the best handling but the lowest top speed, and the AI racers were just too fast for the Fox to catch them. With every lap having an increasingly strict requirement as to what position a player could safely be in, this meant outright failing the course after a certain number of laps had passed. The level has been beaten only once with the Golden Fox on a Tool-Assisted Speedrun, and that was because the speedrunner had the car in second place "pushing" him.
  • Some of the Gran Turismo series tend to be this.
    • In the original Gran Turismo if you fulfill the garage with 100 Dodge Concept Cars using the Trade option and since those cars cannot be sold at all, this makes the events FF Challenge, 4WD Challenge and UK vs. Japan to be impossible to complete due to the car being an American FR car.
    • In both Gran Turismo 2 and Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec is possible to make the game unwinnable at the very beginning of the game by completing all licenses in gold (sounds Nintendo Hard though?) and in case you're playing the latter, win all 10 Arcade Mode time trials in Gold then sell all of the prize cars, spend all of your money buying cars then sell all the cars you sold. Rinse and repeat until you don't have any money to buy a car.
    • In Gran Tursimo 6 you can make the game unwinnable at the very beginning if the player claims the Mercedes-Benz AMG Vision Gran Turismo for free, completes both gold in all Sierra Time Rally and Ayrton Senna Tribute events (where you win prize money and cars only once), sell the prize cars, have a kart and then repeat the same method of spending all of your money and then sell the cars and repeat the procedure until you don't have any money making sure that the only car in your garage is a kart. Since karts are not allowed to compete in non-kart events, this makes the game unwinnable. However if the player has 15th Anniversary cars in the garage, this makes making the game unwinnable impossible to do since you can't sell 15th Anniversary cars.
  • In Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3, to face the last opponent and be able to finish the game, you must defeat the other 599 opponents. But one particular opponent, Whirlwind Fanfare, only appears when you have 100,000,000 CP; All CP needed / earned was divided by 100 for the US release (to reflect dollars rather than yen), but both she and another wanderer who have monetary requirements, Exotic Butterfly, did not have their values adjusted. This would have been merely annoying (you'd just have to grind more), had the US version not also introduced a maximum currency cap as a result, unintentionally or otherwise, of the currency deflation, and cap itself is at 99,999,990 CP, 10 CP short of the what is needed for Whirlwind Fanfare to appear. As such, the US release is unwinnable without the use of a cheat device.

    Real Time Strategy 
  • In Blitzkrieg 2, it's very easy to break certain scripts and make missions unwinnable by simply getting in the way of AI controlled ally convoys. For example, during the defense of Sevastopol, if you accidentally put your naval vessel in the way of the sail barge as it enters/leaves (Which is a part of a critical defense objective), the barge will remain as it is even when you move the vessel away and the mission's script will break, forcing you to, either, destroy the vessel yourself or restart the mission.
  • In Desperados 2: Cooper's Revenge, there's a level with a sheriff NPC which you are not supposed to be able to kill; due to a bug, you can kill him. Speaking to this NPC triggers a mandatory scripted event. But if you kill him before talking to him, then the scripted event will never happen and the level (and thus the entire game) becomes unwinnable. The worst thing about this is that it doesn't become clear immediately; you may play for a long time wondering why nothing is happening and overwriting your save files. If you didn't have a save from before killing him, then you'll have to restart the enormously long level from the start. A published patch is supposed to fix the bug, but it doesn't.
  • In one level in Desperados III, one of your characters, McCoy, is unconscious and needs to be carried to a boat at the end of the level. One of the other characters can throw bodies he's carrying, with no requirement that he (or, anyone else) be able to reach that location by any other means. The boat has an unreachable roof in throwing distance, but throwing McCoy on there doesn't count as bringing him to the boat, and the game only tells you this when you've completed all the other objectives in the level. Hope you didn't quicksave in the meantime.
  • Empire Earth: The expansion adds some extremely powerful civ powers that are still available in the campaign menu if you play the original game's campaigns in the expansion. Unfortunately, this also makes several missions unplayable because you can no longer build the required unit.
  • In The Forgotten, due to a somewhat fussy mouse control over a secret drawer, the player could end up skipping over a key required to enter a room on another floor. So when they enter the elevator, and use another key they found to release the safety so it crashes into the basement. Well Congratulations, you're missing the key item to end the game and now the elevator's broken, so you can't get back up (yes, there is a reason why this planned 7-part series only got the first game out).
  • Men of War series: Due to the series' versatile yet wonky physics engine it's entirely possible to place important items/vehicles into unreachable places or even destroy them outright. For example, in Men of War proper the last Soviet mission, "The Flying Dutchman", has an objective to capture a welding machine and deliver it to a checkpoint, so you can cut your entrance into a German submarine. However, the submarine is connected to the pier only with flimsy pathways; one wrong move, and the welding machine will fall into water, completely out of your reach. At very least the game makes a separate autosave after completing each objective.
  • Myth: The Fallen Lords: in mission 22, "River of Blood", your army starts before a massive wall and your objectives are to enter the perimeter and secure a bridge inside the area. The only gate is blocked by a wooden palisade, but you can blow it up with your dwarves... unless for some reason you decide to kill them, forcing you to restart since there aren't other units capable of throwing explosives - thus you become stuck outside the wall.
  • Pikmin (2001) has potential to become unwinnable. Libra is placed high atop a large cliff side in the Forest Naval. You can get it down without problems most of the time, but there is a small chance that your pikmin will misstep on their way back down, taking it and them to the abyss below. Libra won't respawn in its old spot, and you can't win the game if you save this: you need all the vital parts at least to win, let alone all the ship parts, and Libra happens to be vital.
  • In The Settlers IV, thanks to later expansions, this happens in the tutorials. One of the tutorial levels instructs the player on the construction of Eyecatchers, decorative items that improve soldier morale. One of the expansions added a gold bar cost, but without modifying the tutorial level, resulting in the player running out of gold bars and being unable to finish. A later tutorial introduces the player to the Viking race, and has the player build a boat. Another expansion-added option is the ability to infinitely produce weapons or tools, and the tutorial starts with it enabled and you can't turn it off, meaning that by the time the average player reaches the point where the boat needs to be built, the AI has used up all their iron bars.
  • Spore:
    • In the Tribal and Civilization stages, your tribe's/civilization's fall takes you back to the last save point. If you saved at a moment where you didn't stand a chance, then you're caught in a "Groundhog Day" Loop of defeat. Your only recourse is to reload the creature on a new planet.note 
    • In the creature stage, your first nest could be in the water. Trying to swim to shore got you eaten by the sea monster.
    • In the tribal stage, your chieftain might randomly float miles up in the air, making it impossible to do mission-critical things that require the chieftain.
    • In the space stage, the spaceship you're sent to scan after you leave your planet sometimes failed to spawn. Since you need to scan it to get the Interstellar Drive and leave the star system, proceeding was impossible.
  • StarCraft:
    • StarCraft has one in the very first non-tutorial mission, "Wasteland". The mission objectives are 1) find Raynor and don't let him die 2) build a barracks 3) train 10 Marines. However there's no failure trigger for being unable to train more Marines because there are no more minerals on the map. What makes this especially bonkers is how wasteful you have to be with your minerals to reach this point: aside from the cluster of minerals near your base, there's another hidden mineral cluster that brings the total available to somewhere north of 5000 minerals. Of course a barracks and 10 marines cost 650 minerals total (plus you start with 5 marines that count towards the total). Essentially this is only an issue if you're doing it intentionally, but nothing stop you from blowing it all on building to the point that the mission becomes impossible. Given the limitations of the Trigger system shown in the StarCraft editor, it might not have even been possible to create a failure condition for this regardless.
    • It's technically possible to run out of resources before building everything required in the tutorial mission itself, "Boot Camp". The mission objectives are to build 3 supply depots, a refinery, and gather 100 vespene gas. There are 7400 available minerals and it only takes 300 to build everything (you start with a supply depot that counts towards the total). You could instead blow it all on building Command Centers and SCV workers, but this would be even crazier than running out of resources in the "Wasteland" mission.
    • In StarCraft: Brood War, mission 2 of the Zerg campaign, you are given one SCV handling a psi emitter. Your task is to go near stranded zerg units and capture them with the power of the emitter, then build your base with the two initial rogue drones you can mind control. Except, if you order to both drones to start morphing into hatcheries, the game thinks that you don't have no more available (finished) buildings nor builders (since the drones are turning into hatcheries), and awards you with a sudden defeat screen.
    • StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void unbelievably has this in "Templar's Return", part 2. Accidentally kill off too many of the enemy's mechanical units? You're screwed, there's no way to proceed. Thankfully, the game was merciful enough to autosave for you right before the start of that part of the level.
  • Warcraft III has some examples that would very likely have to be done intentionally, but also some that are downgraded to merely "unplayable the way the devs intended", if you play Reign of Chaos after installing The Frozen Throne.
    • In the second prologue campaign level, "Departures", the first quest is to build a burrow, war mill, barracks, and train 5 grunts. The enemy won't attack or build the bridge that you need to cross to complete the other quest until you do this. The gold mine has 30000 gold and it takes less than 2000 gold to build everything the quest requires. It is possible to run out before completing the quest by spending it all on buildings and peons for example, but in all likelihood this would be done intentionally.
    • In the second human level, "Blackrock & Roll", the first quest is to build a barracks, 2 farms, and train 6 footmen. Even if you kill the enemy hero to complete the other main quest first, you still have to do this quest to complete the level. The gold mine has 20000 gold, you can get more by killing the various creeps on the map, and it only takes 1200 total to build everything that the quest requires.
    • In the fourth orc level, "The Spirits of Ashenvale", the main quest is to harvest 15000 lumber. It is technically possible to exhaust all sources of lumber on the map without reaching 15000, which there is no failure trigger for, but there is virtually no chance this would happen unless done intentionally. Even doing this intentionally is pretty crazy. First off there's way more than 15000 lumber to harvest on the map, and the enemy doesn't even cut down trees since they're Night Elves. If you tried harvesting it all, it would be difficult to keep on top of spending so that you never reach 15000 (everything costs gold too). It essentially requires destroying most of the trees without harvesting them, such as with catapults. But also, there are 5 enemy "Trees of Life" that you can destroy to get 3000 lumber each for. That alone is 15000 total, so you'd have to make sure you have less than 12000 when destroying them. As if that's not enough, there's also the Pillage upgrade which, if researched, gives you gold and lumber whenever your melee units attack enemy buildings. So you'd have to destroy all enemy buildings without reaching 15000 too.
    • The penultimate human level has Arthas sinking his own ships (and blaming the mercenary monsters he hired) to prevent the royal edict from calling his men home. The game recommends using Muradin's Storm Bolt to sink the ships, but the expansion mechanics removed mechanical units from the list of acceptable targets.
    • The fourth undead level has you use goblin zeppelins and sappers to move around, even recommending you use zeppelins to drop sappers into unsuspecting enemy bases. The expansion forbids sappers from entering zeppelins precisely to prevent such a Game-Breaker strategy.
  • In Evil Genius, Katerina Frostonova's ability is Cold Assassin which triggers once she is on the island. This ability makes her choose a target and kills them in one hit, bypassing all security measures in her way since she also turns invisible. She is also immune to physical attacks and endurance attacks, meaning she almost can't be stopped. It doesn't last forever, but guess what this means if her target is the Evil Genius (the player character, whose death causes Decapitated Army) and they're in a spot she can reach?

    Rhythm Games 
  • beatmania IIDX 9th Style. The game itself is already buggy, but if the song "General Relativity" is played as the first song after a machine bootup, all note judgements no matter your timing will be POORs, thereby making clearing the chart impossible.Explanation
  • DanceDanceRevolution UNIVERSE 3 has one mission in Quest Mode that is impossible due to the way the timing windows of notes end up working. It requires you to get all Goods on a small section of the song "Streamline", but you're guaranteed to get at least one Great because of how fast the notes move; the timing windows overlap each other, making getting all Goods impossible. As a result, a few customization items (and the achievements for both completing all missions and unlocking all customization items) go forever unattainable.
  • If you plan on doing a Full Combo run of Guitar Hero II, do your self a favor and save your sanity by not even attempting to FC "Trodgor". Thanks to an oversight in the engine's cutoff rate regarding excessive strumming (dubbed "The Strum Limit"), it's impossible to fully hit all the notes at the end of the guitar solo, which requires you to hit a 30 note fill lane. The strum limit cuts off all further inputs at 15. Note This isn't an issue limited to Guitar Hero II, as all Rock Band games before 3 had the same issue, made even worse due to how the HD systems handles Harmonix's engine, as people found out the hard way trying to hit the even longer note fill lane in "Green Grass And High Tides"'s second solo.
  • The specifics of the Rock Band 2 star cutoffs mean that the score required to get a 5-star do not go up in direct proportion to how many notes are added - instead, the cutoffs take what is called a "base score" (every note taken at 1x, all sustains held to full) across all of the parts and multiply them by a number that increases depending on how many players (and which parts) there are. There are also two different challenges that strip overdrive from all songs in the setlist, one of which tasks you with getting five stars on every song in the setlist. Ace of Spades cannot be 5-starred with a full band unless overdrive is used. Biggest Show Ever adds Ace of Spades as an encore, strips away all overdrive phrases from the songs in the setlist, and penalizes you severely if you get a 4 star on any song in the setlist. Rock Band 3 uses a refined method which avoids these problems for stars, but it's occasionally impossible to get 5 spades on a song in the story mode, depending on the song, the number of players, and what you need to do for the spades.

    Roguelike 
  • Ancient Domains of Mystery has two bonus dungeons that only open at certain levels; the Pyramid and the Minotaur Maze. If you reach a certain level without completing them, they close up for good, rendering everything inside unobtainable. It's possible to enter them, drop one of the Chaos Orbs, then leave. If you gain that level while the orb is inside, the orb is irretrievable, and you can't open the locks on D:48. This is nigh-impossible to do unintentionally.
    • In older versions of the game, if you became entangled in webs on D:49, you would be completely incapable of breaking free, and would be trapped, slowly starving to death, one floor away from victory. There is no reason ever to use webs on D:49, since no monsters ever spawn there.
  • If you make it to the top of the tower in Azure Dreams a second time, the only way out is a Wind Crystal. You could be stuck there forever if you're unlucky enough to never encounter a Wind Crystal or have the last one you'll ever see stolen by a Picket.
  • Just like its remake, the original version of Baroque has voice and item lists, which have to be filled by talking to NPCs and registering items, in order to obtain 100% completion (and some bonus art). The lists can't be completed in a single game, so you have the chance to restart while keeping your database intact, in order to eventually get everything with repeated playthroughs. However, in what was clearly a design oversight, one of the voices can be missed permanently if you don't get it before registering 20 items. And restarting won't do a thing, since your game data and system data are separate. Your only option is to delete the system data and restart filling the lists from scratch. Made worse from the fact that this mistake is especially easy to meet, because the method of obtaining the voice is rather obscure (you must die three times in a row before talking with the Collector), and because 20 items are usually registered pretty quickly into the game. Good thing you don't actually need 100% completion to see the ending, but still painful for completionists. The problem was fixed in the remake, thankfully.
  • Crypt Of The Necrodancer occasionally creates a "trap" that consists of a valuable item surrounded by four arrow pads. Once you pick up the item, one of the four arrow pads will push you back should you try to leave the square, unless you destroy some of them or have an item that protects you from traps such as the Boots of Levitation or the Heavy Boots. Normally, this wouldn't count as unwinnable, since once the current stage's background music ends, you are forced onto the next level, so you can just wait. However, if you play as Bard, all rhythm-related elements of the game are removed, including the time limit, so if you get trapped between the arrow pads, you have no choice but to quit the game.
  • Cult of the Lamb can reach an unpassable point after the first tutorial crusade due to the random nature of the treasure chest drops in each dungeon. If the Lamb finishes the crusade with less than 30 coins, then you will be unable to build the Shrine, which costs 30 coins. And you will be unable to go on any more crusades until you build the Shrine.
  • NetHack:
    • Version 3.4.3 had bug C343-424, which can render one of the Plot Coupons permanently unusable if you use it incorrectly. If the candleabra was lit in the wrong place with one turn of fuel left, it couldn't be refilled. It took 12 years for the release of Nethack 3.6.0 to fix this bug.
    • It is also technically possible to die before even taking a single turn, though the theoretical odds of this are somewhere around 1 in 3 million.
    • If you manage to piss off your Quest Leader before completing the Quest, for example by converting yourself permanently or failing the alignment test too many times, they will not let you into the Quest levels, which house one of the three end-game artifacts you must have to complete the game. The only way forward would be to wish for the Wizards' Quest artifact, which enables you to teleport between level branches. However, you can't wish for your Quest artifact, so if you are a Wizard, the game is unwinnable.
    • You can also become stuck if you destroy the Book of the Dead before using it to start the final phase of the game; this can only be "accomplished" by jumping into lava without fire resistance while wearing an Amulet of Life Saving—you die, and are brought back to life, but the Book is destroyed. This is highly unlikely to happen by accident, since fire resistance is very easy to obtain, the Book is usually acquired right before you need to use it, and lava is rare outside the Plane of Fire (which is way past the only part of the game that requires the Book.)
    • Since shoplifting is serious business, shops are a good place to trap yourself. If you use or break some of the store's wares, the shopkeeper will block the exit until you pay them back. If you have insufficient gold and sellable items, can't sneak out (requires digging or teleportation), and aren't strong enough to kill the shopkeeper, you're stuck. A "liquor emporium" works well for this, since everything for sale is fragile glass bottles, and the shopkeeper only accepts gold and potions as (re)payment. Trying on a cursed cloak of invisibility with no means of uncursing itnote  is a more plausible way to get trapped in a shop (you can't unequip cursed items, and shopkeepers will block the door when you're invisible, even if you're already inside).
  • In Tales of Maj'Eyal, killing Aeryn before she tells you about the slime tunnels makes it impossible to reach the final dungeon. Attacking friendly NPCs in this game is never necessary (and while it might be in character for a Ziguranth PC, the campaign doesn't assume a raving fanatic).
  • ToeJam & Earl: The first game has a "Random World" mode where all the levels are randomly generated. When playing in this mode, you'll occasionally come across a level that has multiple landmasses with large gaps of empty space between them. If an elevator or ship piece is on a separate landmass from the one you start on, you must use a present that allows you to travel to this other continent, such as a present that grants temporary flight or teleports you randomly. However, the game becomes unwinnable if you don't have such a present - this can happen because the game outright didn't generate one in the accessible area or on any previous levels (meaning your game was doomed from the start), because you already used up any such presents, or because your only way of obaining one is via mail order and you don't have enough money to buy it or any way to gain more.

    Role-Playing Games 
  • In The 7th Saga, it's possible, after fighting Gariso, to be stuck in an area with monsters too tough for you to handle, so don't fight him until you're at least level 35. This probably weren't so bad in the Japanese version which gave better average stat gains per level for party members.
  • Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura really tries to avert unwinnability, and if nothing else, you can consult a guide and wander the map until you find the next location on your quest. However, at one point, you need to get to the Isle of Despair, which requires the aid of Captain Edward Teach. Kill the Captain, and you're permanently locked out of the Isle and the game cannot progress.
  • Atelier Series:
    • In Atelier Iris 2, the item "Flay Hammer" is required to proceed at a certain point in the story. If you do not have it already, you cannot learn how to make it at this point, so the game becomes unwinnable. To be fair, it's so difficult to miss that you'd have to go out of your way to avoid having it by this point.
    • In Atelier Annie, events are triggered by entering locations; all but the final assignment, the Cosmic Conis, will be given to you even if you arrive late. The last assignment will only arrive if you leave your lab and re-enter it on a specific date, and if you don't, you'll never get it, even if (because you only have a few weeks left before the contest ends) you spend that day holed up in your lab. You have to be able to leave, and come back in, in order to trigger the event. Since there's no indication that there even is a final assignment after the last monthly one, because it's a plot event that's not part of the official contest, it's possible to play through the game several times and never know why you keep getting the bad ending.
    • Atelier Sophie: The Alchemist of the Mysterious Book: The Optional Boss Tormented Beast can be this. Tormented Beast has some very strong healing, but cannot kill the entire party in one round. If the party have strong resurrection items, it is possible to get stuck in a loop where the boss cannot kill the party, but the party cannot harm the boss faster than he heals himself. You cannot run away from boss fights, so the only way out is to force close the game. Hint: level up your weapons first.
  • Baldur's Gate:
    • Baldur's Gate:
      • There's a nonstandard game over in which, if you level accusations at the Big Bad without the evidence on your person or the person of one of your party members, then you will get called on it and hit with a flamestrike spell, against which there is no save and which instantly kills you. Since the invitation's icon looks like any of a dozen scrolls you might be carrying around at the time and just drop somewhere to free room in your inventory, and since non-magical game items left on the ground decay after a certain amount of time...
      • When you first enter Baldur's Gate, you meet two rogues, Marek and Lothander, that will harshly threaten you if you don't stop messing with their organization. After some time in the city, Lothander will show up asking to talk. If you agree, he will confess that Marek poisoned your food and that you have 10 days to get the antidote from him. If you refuse Lothander's request to talk, you don't get any warning and Marek doesn't spawn, but the game-flag for the poisoning-countdown still triggers. Even if you agree to talk, Marek still won't spawn until you help Lothander, and Marek's antidote won't spawn if you don't talk first before killing him (it will then be dropped by his corpse). Many players killed Marek before he became hostile and some even killed Lothander before he could explain the situation just to roleplay revenge for the previous threats, only to inexplicably die after 10 days. Without a save from before the dialogue, and before the internet could explain what happened and offer solutions with cheats, the playthrough was irredeemably screwed (unless you rush through the ending and beat the Big Bad before the 10 days expire).
      • In the initial release of Baldur's Gate, before the first patch came out, it was possible, though very, very rare for Gorion to kill the Armored Figure during the cutscene at the beginning of the game. This caused the game to lock-up and crash. Since there is no plot immortality flag in BG 1, they instead raised the armored figure's HP to 9999 to keep him from getting killed.
      • If you start as a wizard in either Baldur's Gate or Shadows of Amn and have only 3 Constitution, then you can't win. You will die in the first in-game cutscenes because enough points of unavoidable damage are dealt to you that your pathetically low Hit Points will be gone. In game terms, this makes sense — in the tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, if any character with a Constitution of 3 ventures out beyond a hermetically sealed clean room, then they're probably not gonna make it.
      • Using Otiluke's Resilient Sphere on NPCs (to prevent them from getting killed in battle) can sometimes break quests because their triggers can't fire properly.
      • During the Prologue, Gorion casts a number of Level 3 spells but autokills any enemy he targets with the spell once it is cast. Stay out of his line of sight and use spells like Cloudkill or Stinking Cloud to pacify him from a distance, then awaken him with offensive spells, arrows or melee. The best option possible is to bounce a lightning bolt off the stairs so it hits him multiple times. With Gorion dead, you can't leave Candlekeep. The spells mentioned can only be learned after you leave Candlekeep, so you have to go out of your way to import an old character for this to happen.
      • It is possible for your main character to be killed the right moment where you cross a transition into another area. This might lead to an autosave. If for some reasons you didn't do any other previous save and this one overwrites your only autosave, you're basically condemned to reload a perpetual dead character until you restart.
    • Some plot relevant items can be dropped in area with limited access, that will become unavailable after leaving them.
    • Baldur's Gate II:
      • There is a point at which you have to fight Irenicus (and a bunch of minions) in Spellhold. Normally, you just have to get him down to a certain amount of hit points, triggering a dialogue in which he teleports away. You can then exit Spellhold and continue the game. However, if you somehow get extraordinarily (un)lucky and Irenicus fails his save against Disintegrate, then he does indeed Disintegrate - which renders the game unwinnable, since he's no longer around to trigger the dialogue and you can't move on. Of course, by all in-universe logic, you'll have won right then because the rest of the game is about chasing and stopping him.
      • One of the designers of the game, Dave Gaider, made a mod for the Throne of Bhaal expansion pack, making the last battle of the series far more difficult. One of the features is that one of your old enemies, the vampire Bodhi, is teleported in from the Abyss to fight on behalf of the Big Bad. The only problem is that, by then, any clerics you may have in your party are so hugely overpowered that, if you enter the last battle with "turn undead" on, she explodes into chunky giblets before she even has a chance to say her menacing dialogue, stopping the game in its tracks.
      • The game can become unwinnable if you accidentally hit a plot-crucial NPC.
  • Both Baten Kaitos games have remarkably similar situations in which the game can become unwinnable. In the first game, you can't escape the battleship Goldoba until Giacomo, Folon, and Ayme have been defeated, but there's no place to level up on the battleship, meaning you're screwed if you're underleveled. In the second, the Holoholobird attacks after a disk swap and a temporary Point of No Return, which will trap you in the Holoholo Jungle, in an area with no enemies to grind on. At least the first game has Kalas warn you that you shouldn't leave Mintaka and board the Goldoba until you're absolutely ready. The second game, however, has no excuse.
  • It is possible in older versions of Bloodborne to trigger Rom, defeat her, then trigger Amelia and defeat her then touch the skull, effectively reverting the Moon Phase back to Night right after a player had it at the Blood Moon phase, which walls off parts of the game and ruins a play-through. In order to do this, a player had to deliberately sequence break the game using glitches only a speed-runner would actively be trying to use.
    • It is possible to fight two cut bosses from the game by inserting specific glyphs which will never come up by accident as they aren't tied to any chalice. The bosses are hard due to glitches, but if the player isn't aware that the only way to return to the dream is by throwing themselves to their death off of a cliff, the player may exhaust every other option until they realize they can't escape this area which has no lantern. As such, without this knowledge, the player dooms themselves to a glitches area they can never leave, and the game autosaves the players progress upon entry.
  • In the third dungeon of Byteria Saga Heroine Iysayana the heroes have to find a unique item, then run into enemy soldiers when leaving the room. Casting an Exit spell immediately after opening the chest would leave you unable to trigger the cutscene and continue. Later versions fixed this by temporarily disabling the spell.
  • Champions of Norrath has this issue with a boss fight in the first chapter. To reach the Spider Queen boss, you have to bring a NPC to the door of the boss chamber. The NPC opens the door in a cutscene, and once you enter, the door locks you in for the boss fight, also done in a cutscene. Nothing too bad so far. After beating the boss, a door to chapter 2 opens and, like most bosses in the game, she drops equipment, and since there's a good chance you can't wear some it, the logical thing to do is take it and use a Gate Scroll to teleport back to town and sell it. Still not a big deal, since you can Gate Scroll back to where you used the first one. The problem comes when you either use another Gate Scroll out of town or use the teleport pedestal to do some more adventuring. The old Gate Scroll jumping point gets deleted, so you can't Gate back, and since the door to the room opened and closed by cutscene, the player can't open the door to the room, effectively locking you out of chapter 2 permanently.
  • Chrono Trigger has a potentially unwinnable Optional Boss with Spekkio, whose final form has 100% Evasion against normal attacks and thus is only vulnerable to magic (he also only attacks with magic). One high-end armor for Lucca completely negates magical damage done to her. Now if you equipped Lucca with a Berserker Band (the character does nothing but attack, with no player input) to speed up battles, you will be treated to an endless cycle of Spekkio hurling devastating magic that fills the screen to no effect and Lucca shooting/whacking Spekkio to no effect either until eternity's end.
  • The golf minigame "Spheda" in Dark Chronicle (Dark Cloud 2 in North America) can be made unwinnable via a bug in the randomly generated dungeons design: after clearing the level of enemies, the game will spawn the sphere and the "distortion" (the hole) at random, then calculate the number of strokes you can make as a function of the distance and the number of walls between one and the other. Unfortunately, sometimes the two objects would spawn close to each other, with a single wall in between... but to get there, you'd have to traverse the entire floor. The game would then give you 1 stroke to sink the ball. It's even worse when Spheda spheres will change color whenever they hit the floor, the ceiling, or a wall, so even if you can make a miraculous U-turn shot, chances are the ball won't be the right color and will bounce off the distortion. Thankfully, any given level's Spheda can be replayed by beating the level again.
  • In Darksiders II (all versions) there's a bug where one of several energy barriers in certain levels don't open even though they should, making the level and thus the entire game non-completable. (Incidentally, it seems to be a kind of Disaster Dominoes of causality. Apparently it happens after having been playing for several hours contiguously, and the reason is that, perhaps due to some overflow or leak, in certain cutscenes a sound fails to play, which in turn causes the cutscene to fail to complete properly, which in turn skips a trigger that would have opened the barrier, and this trigger never happens again because the game assumes it can't be skipped in any circumstance.) In most cases if the player immediately quits and reloads, the game will revert to an autosave from before the cutscene. However, many players, not knowing this, have wandered away and caused the autosave to be overwritten by new ones, after which the trigger that opens the barrier becomes essentially lost, rendering the game unwinnable. The only option is to restart the game from the beginning.
  • Dark Souls:
    • Once you obtain the Lordvessel, Ingward gives you the key that allows you to drain the lower section of New Londo, allowing you access to the Four Kings boss fight. Killing him causes him to drop the key, and is often used for Sequence Breaking. However, a rare bug causes him to not drop the key when killed, preventing you from beating Four Kings without further glitching.
    • There's an even more infamous softlock going around, where if you deal enough damage to Priscilla (typically by means of Red Tearstone Ring, Crown of Dusk, and Dark Bead), her death dialogue might glitch out, preventing you from leaving the Painted World. The only known way to fix this bug is through save file manipulation or by deleting your character entirely, which is incredibly frustrating as the Painted World is a very late-game area. Even more infuriatingly, this bug was never fixed in the Remastered version of the game.
    • The Curse status ailment not only instantly kills you, but it also permanently cuts your max HP in half until you cure it. Originally, getting Cursed repeatedly would keep cutting what's left of your HP in half, up to a minimum of 1/8 of your maximum HP. If you were to get Cursed to 1/8 of your max HP and not have any Purging Stones on hand with which to cure it, you could easily get trapped since pretty much anything will be able to kill you in one hit at that point. Fortunately, the game was patched to remove the stacking effect, and you can no longer go below 1/2 of your max HP.
    • You can get stuck during your first run through the Painted World of Ariamis by aggroing the area bossnote  and letting her kill you, then discard all of your weapons and armor. Normally, they'll sit where you left them waiting to be picked up again, but dying or quitting the game makes them disappear permanently. After that, you're left mostly defenseless with only a weak punch to fight with. Exactly one enemy in the area drops either a shield or a spear, both weak and available in the starting area of the game. Going in under-leveled and you won't have enough natural resistance, either. Since you can't warp out the first time you get there, you'll be easily killed in one hit by pretty much everything here, boss included. You can try Cherry Tapping the boss, but it will require both incredible luck AND skill. Your only other option is to power level your way out by killing the Mooks in the area, but even then you'll have some difficulty and you'll need to get to the Absurdly High Level Cap.
  • Dark Souls II: The Duke's Dear Freja is a giant, two-headed spider who is completely invincible everywhere except her heads. You can cut off her heads by dealing enough damage to them, but this amount is so high that you will most likely kill her before even cutting off one head unless you focus on one head exclusively. However, if you use the Warmth pyromancy to deliberately heal the boss, you can cut off both heads and still keep Freja alive. Without any heads, you can no longer deal any damage to her, and your only option at that point is to kill yourself and start the fight over.
  • In The Dark Spire, it is possible to advance the One-Winged Angel's quest line before obtaining the key item Angel's Bracelet. This causes the player to be unable to obtain the key item Black Orb, rendering the game unwinnable.
  • Diablo:
    • The original game disables the "SAVE" option when you die. However, it does so a few frames late, and during these few frames it's difficult, but possible to save already dead and watch your character die instantly each time you reload. There's only one save slot. While you can start the game over with your character's current stats (much like a New Game Plus, except accessible from the very beginning), you'll lose anything you had left lying around in town (which is likely to be a lot, due to Grid Inventory and Nothing Fades). But hey, it's your own damn fault for saving when you knew you were dead.
    • You can just plain save while surrounded by monsters and one hit from death. This is obviously user error. Another variant is to save immediately before getting dealt a final blow such as by a projectile, which is more of an accident.
    • This can screw up first-time Diablo players who come from Diablo II. In Diablo 2, you CAN save and exit when you die and get away with it. In that game, you will be brought back to town carrying whatever was in your inventory when you died. Anything on the ground or that you dropped(potions, usually), were gone... If you're used to that, the change in save-after-death in the original can burn.
    • Multiplayer characters can screw up in a different way: there is no regular save function and dying in multiplayer mode causes your items to fall to the ground. If you die in a place where you can't get them back (there is one notable enemy type that ignores the safe radius around level entrances and is also invisible, so you can die very quickly after entering a level, only to see a mass of hidden ones manifest around the stairs) and have no choice but to leave the game, you lost all of your items permanently. Good luck completing the game after that.
    • Diablo has strong roguelike influences and can screw you over in numerous other ways. Black Death in particular take away 1 hit point permanently on striking (with no indication that this is the case) and can render the game unwinnable if you are playing very badly and get hit hundreds of times, leaving you with a tiny amount of health. You have to try really hard to make this happen, though.
    • It's possible to make the game unwinnable by abusing the Chamber of Bone entrance in a hilariously stupid way. You need to teleport there before you use the book to open it (either with a scroll of teleport or using a scroll of town portal then going there from town) and leave yourself stuck in a sealed room. Yes, you need to be completely stupid to do this unless you're doing it intentionally for the lulz.
  • In Diablo II, if you lose everything, then you can still go back to where you died and pick up your body. Since it's a pain without your best weapons, you may decide to just quit the game and reload it instead. Doing this too many times causes the game to stop at the loading screen with a "Bad Dead Bodies" message. The exact inner workings of this are unknown, but for the most part it happens because of data corruption involving mods.
  • Digimon World:
    • In some PAL copies, there's a glitch which prevents you from accessing a dungeon by stopping you from speaking to the guard who is supposed to run away and let you in. Not being able to get in there has the knock-on effect of barring you from several areas of the game.
    • An inordinately tough boss battle can be accessed by speaking to a certain character, then leaving his building via the only exit, at which point the boss appears. That building contains the game's only save point, and is where you respawn if you lose a battle. Some versions do reset the event under certain circumstances.
  • Disco Elysium:
    • There is a specific late-game Shivers check that must be passed before you can find where the suspect is hiding. While the odds of passing the check increase the more things you do on the coast (to the point of it having a 97% possibility of success), there is still a 3% chance of doing absolutely everything you can do to re-open the check and rolling snake-eyes. If you don't have any more skill points or any more oppportunities to gain EXP (e.g. due to having done everything else you can possibly do), the game would become impossible to complete. The Final Cut softened this point by also adding an Encyclopedia check here as well, so you'd have a second chance to get it.
    • There is one sequence break that wasn't considered - if you wait all the way until the island fortress before examining the Ledger (an extremely early game item necessary to examine before you can see your character's stats on the in-game menus), and read the letter in the hidden compartment, your Player Character will fall unconscious. He will wake up in Kim's car in front of the Whirling-in-Rags Hotel on the mainland. The boat used to take him to the island will still be docked on the island and all the plot flags have been tripped, so there is nothing to do.
    • A bizarre case of this can occur in the meeting with Evrart Claire, the Union boss. He will demand that you sit on an extremely uncomfortable chair - so uncomfortable it actually causes a hit point of damage. While this may have been meant as a joke, it means that if you get beyond a certain point in the conversation with 1 HP and no healing items, there will be no way to end the conversation without Evrart insisting you sit on the chair - and if you do, you die! (Some older versions of the game would even crash at that point, endlessly waiting for the death animation to complete, when in fact it can't start because the "sitting on chair" animation takes priority.)
  • At the end of .hack//G.U. Vol. 3, when you're inside Cubia before fighting the final boss, there is a save point. If you save there and aren't strong enough to beat the Anti-Existences and/or Cubia's Core, then you will of course die; when you die, you reload one of your save files. Thus, if your only save is at that point, you're screwed. The game does recommend that you save on a separate save file since you can't return to town, though.
  • Dragon Age: Origins:
    • There is one sidequest in which you escort a blind templar through a building and fight a couple of demons along the way. There is a cutscene that triggers after you kill the first one, but if you get impatient and talk to the templar before it happens, you end up stuck in that room - the only two doors out are both locked and impossible to pick. Luckily, the game autosaves at the start of the area, so you won't lose much game progress by resetting.
    • Play through the game without ever taking a level or making a hard save. Get into a fight with an autosave at the start that you can't win at your low level. It's also possible to make the two candidates of the Orzamar throne distrust you, forcing a hard restart.
  • Dragon Quest: With some unorthodox inventory management, it's possible for Princess Gwaelin to take the Staff of Rain when she gives you Gwaelin's Love, causing it to disappear forever. Congratulations, you now can't beat the game because the Staff of Rain is one of three items you need in order to receive the Rainbow Drop, the item that opens up the path to the final dungeon.
  • EarthBound (1994):
    • Stonehenge Base is home to the enemy Starman Super, which has a very rare chance of dropping the item 'Sword of Kings'. This is one of Poo's items that cannot be sold or dropped. If a player was determined, they could fill up everyone's inventories as well as Escargo Express with around 90 of them. This will prevent the player from being able to get other required key items for progression, like the Sauerkraut item from Tenda Village for the Lost Underworld, locking the player out of the final sanctuary location. This actually still can be bypassed though. Due to the developers including a debug menu that can be accessed through glitches, a crafty player could access the debug menu and use it to forcibly remove items from their inventory.
    • The debug menu is accessible in the game legitimately, which presents many softlocking opportunities. For example, you could just warp to a late or endgame area while at a low level and save without unlocking the ability to teleport, which would strand the player against enemies they cannot beat, and even if they could, there's no option for them to escape. The Cave of the Past is especially an offender, given that it's not possible to go back to the main world. it's even possible to go to level 99 and use the debug menu to remove Paula and then go there. Even with the massive level advantage, the final phase still cannot be beaten without her. Or at a low level, a walk through walls glitch could be used (especially if it's done while Paula left the party) to just simply enter the final dungeon, where the player can't progress or leave for the same reason. Also there's no currently known way to get to the debug menu while in the area (glitches or not), so the player can't just use the menu to revert everything without hacking.
  • Early in Exit Fate, you can sell all your equipment and use all money you have now to buy consumables, then waste them, and you'll be permanently stuck in a town where you're required to rest at an inn, but don't have the money to do so. Many Role Playing Games try to avoid the "You need to rest at an inn to advance the plot but you don't have the money for it" problem by either making the stay at the inn free just for that time or having someone else pay for it.
  • From Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon, in the level with flying cobras and gas spores, you can encounter a priest of Darkmoon lost in the maze and standing on a pressure plate. If you kill him, the door to the room closes with no way to open it, forcing you to reload the last saved game. There is a way to keep the door open, however (to get the treasures next to the priest), by luring beforehand a monster into the frame and paralyzing it or turning it to stone; the door then can't close even if the pressure plate is released. This clearly wasn't anticipated by the makers, though, since the whole level gets wonky afterward. Notably, the monsters now all look like priests (but still makes flying cobras sound and can poison you). Not quite a Game-Breaking Bug as you can still continue playing, but if you've done so before solving the riddle for exiting this level — which is done by feeding various items to a series of magic mouths in the walls — then you are stuck because the magic mouths are no longer there.
  • Fable III has a bug that can happen if you access the menu at some areas. Instead of simply opening up a screen with options, Fable 3's "menu system" transports you to your sanctuary, then transports you back when you're done. The bug in question causes you to be transported a few inches below where you should, causing you to fall under the map forever. Worst yet? The game auto-saves every time you leave the menu, and there is no disabling it. Try to re-open the menu to get transported and find another way out? You can't. You're falling, it's an action, and the menu won't open up during actions. Ironically enough, you can open the save/load screen and walk around the save/load room, but nothing else. The game also won't allow multiple save files for a single character. In other words: got this bug at the end of the game? Tough luck.
  • Golden Sun:
    • If you saved the game during the Playable Epilogue you'd get stuck in it, unable to leave Lalivero and unable to do anything there but view the ending. This wasn't a huge deal if you were completely done with the game, but since you were stuck in Lalivero you couldn't go back and complete the sidequests or find Djinn you missed (and may have wanted to transfer to the second game). The worst part is, many players didn't even realize they were at the end of the game until the credits started rolling. The story clearly wasn't over -Saturos and Menardi were dealt with, but Felix and Alex escaped, Jenna, Kraden and Sheba hadn't been rescued, and you'd only been to two of the four elemental lighthouses. Many players' first thought after completing Venus Lighthouse would be to save the game... And in doing so, trapped themselves in the epilogue they didn't even know they were in. The sequels fixed this by making it impossible to save after beating the Final Boss.
    • Save after the Mt. Aleph boulder falls and Jenna's parents, Felix and Kyle supposedly die, then do the Sanctum cheat, (L, start and select) and congrats, You are in your room, you can't go back to Jenna's house because a boulder is blocking the way, Isaac is on his own, and you can't trigger the cutscene with Saturos and Menardi, and you can save after you do the cheat, and you'll have to restart the game.
    • In The Lost Age's Mars Lighthouse, if your inventory is full when given the Mars Star, you won't be able to proceed, thus not be able complete the game. Hope you have an earlier save point beforehand.
    • The devs added amusing cutscenes if you do something like navigate Morgall Forest without the Force Gem (getting you stuck in Altin) or give Piers the Lash Pebble before he leaves the party (getting you stuck outside Lunpa's house). The cutscenes fix the respective problems, leaving you free to continue.
  • Gothic, due to its open nature, has the occasional possibility of screwing up if you really go off the rails. For example, you can lure a mid-game boss out of his lair and cause him to fall into a lake, making him impossible to target and thus, impossible to kill for a game-critical item. Luckily there are cheat codes that allow moving NPCs around.
  • Grandia II: In the first battle against Millenia (a Hopeless Boss Fight), the battle is scripted to end when Millenia casts her Zap! spell. She can get caught in an AI loop that causes her to never use Zap!, and it's impossible to end the battle in any other way (her HP doesn't decrease, and you can't escape the battle).
  • Icewind Dale:
    • In the expansion pack Heart of Winter, there is a scene in which a fight breaks out among members of the tribe the player has been assisting, with the expectation that the player will pile in on the side of the rebels. During this scene, if a friendly tribe member is inadvertently hit (which can easily happen with the mess of area effect spells available to the party by then), all other friendly tribe members will immediately turn hostile. The game will give no indication that this has happened. If this is not noticed and an earlier saved game isn't reloaded, then it is possible to slaughter the entire tribe without realising something is amiss until the NPC who is supposed to trigger the next sequence of events instead attacks and mercilessly butchers the party. If this situation occurs and an earlier savegame is not present, then the game is unwinnable.
    • Freeing the salamanders' slaves before finding and clicking the broken rope bridge to the ice giants' cave means that the only slave capable of teaching you to repair it is gone. You are now unable to get the sixth sigil required to meet the final boss.
  • In Inindo for the SNES, you eventually reach a point where you must complete a Fetch Quest to be rewarded with the key to unlock the door to the rest of the game. When you complete the quest and talk to the person with the key, you are asked if you have space in your inventory to accept it and given a yes/no option. If the first character in your party does not have any free spaces in their inventory when you say yes, then the key disappears. There is no way to get another one. If you save the game before realizing that — say, you checked your inventory beforehand and saw that the second character had space in their inventory and assumed that was okay — then the game is now stuck in an unwinnable state.
  • Knights of the Old Republic:
    • Anyone who doesn't know how to race swoops should never play the first game using autosaves alone. The game autosaves at loading screens at set intervals. It may autosave in a position where your swoop is just about to explode.
    • There's an interesting glitch called the "galaxy droid" that gives you access to a debug menu that allows you to reach any area. If you go to areas that you should not be able to reach, then you may not be able to leave.
    • Choosing Mission to rescue you on the Leviathan can cause what's known as the Carth Glitch. If Mission is stealthed when she sets everyone free, then the game will hang during a later cutscene while Carth is talking. Carth's mouth will continue to move, but the scene will never move on. This occurs because Mission is supposed to talk after Carth but, since she's stealthed, you can't detect her. If your Awareness is high enough, then you may eventually see her and the game will then continue; but few people choose to level Awareness on the Player Character.
    • Speaking of the Leviathan rescue mission, to break the other party members out you need a certain amount of computer spikes to access the terminal and open the detention bay doors—and the game gives you a finite amount of it during the prison break sequence. Accidentally quitting the hacking interface requires you to access the interface again, which costs more computer spikes re-access it, so you could run out and not have enough to open the detention hall, worse if you've picked a party member with no "computer use" skill points. This is normally alleviated by freeing a prisoner who will thank you by giving you a single-use hacking device, but if you also accidentally quit the hacking interface while using this device, the device and its benefits are gone as well. Time to load an old save.
    • The Star Forge is borderline impossible even if you pick the right teammates. Due to the fact that the space is much wider than others, it is very difficult to keep your party together, as they will attack anything on sight and not ignore anything, no matter what you do. Plus, there are endless waves of powerful enemies that are randomly generated from multiple directions. And if you make it past all that, you have to fight Bastilla by yourself. Then, you have to fight Malak, also by yourself, and if you haven’t chosen the right build, you may never actually be able to finish the game.
  • Early in the sequel Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, T3-M4 must slice a computer. However the number of available data spike is so limited that using too many will result in you being unable to proceed.
  • In Lagoon, it's possible to save virtually anywhere as long as you're not in the middle of a boss fight, even if you're about to fall down a Bottomless Pit.
  • In Lands of Lore 2, it is entirely possible to drop an absolutely vital item into a river and you'll never see it again. The third game makes this impossible.
  • One can make an unwinnable save-state in The Last Remnant, but only by deliberately doing so.
    • Going to an area with incredibly high level monsters (compared to the current party), making them aggressive towards Rush, having them chase Rush into a corner and then saving will make the game essentially unwinnable, since upon loading there will be no way to avoid the encounter, and subsequent defeat.
    • Right before you fight the Disc-One Final Boss, you are trapped in a Plot Tunnel with no way to go train your characters. If you overwrite your only save file then and are too weak to beat the boss... This is crazy because the game has way more save slots than any player would need, and the game adds an extra warning just for that section before overwriting your save files telling you that you can't go back if you are too weak, so the only reason to have a single save file and overwrite it then is because you want to trap yourself.
  • In The Last Story, if you initiate a sidequest like the Kraken quest and you're not powerful enough to beat it, you're screwed. There's no way to reset a quest either, so you have to start the game over from the beginning.
  • Indie game Legionwood can be rendered unwinnable due to how area transitions work on the overworld map. If a tile that transports you to a new location happens to be right on the shoreline of one of the continents, you can accidentally enter it with your ship, and then be unable to access your ship again as it'll be blocked by said tile.
  • The final few stages in Luminous Arc 2 can be cleared quite comfortably with your levels on par with the enemy, with a little intelligent strategy. However, doing so can land you at a Final Boss that's mathematically impossible to beat with any party combination thanks to its high defenses and HP regen. Fortunately it's easy to revert to a point where you can grind, but that means doing the preceding three battles over again when you want another crack at it. Without any one-use items you ate up the first time, those aren't refunded either.
  • In Mass Effect, it is possible to flip the Mako in such a way that you cannot return to the Normandy nor exit the vehicle. You cannot move the Mako any further either. The only way to get out of the situation is to load back to the previous save.
  • If you spend all the money that it's possible to earn in Mass Effect 2 before undertaking the Reaper IFF mission — which is difficult, but not impossible to do if you have few or no DLC packs, and go around splurging all your money on upgrades, probes and fuel — then you'll have no way to reach the star system where the mission takes place, as it's the only story-critical mission not to take place in a system with a mass relay. Though likely not a problem that a lot of players encountered, enough ran into it that BioWare made sure it couldn't be repeated in Mass Effect 3 (where you get free fuel refills whenever you return to the Citadel) or Mass Effect: Andromeda (which doesn't bother with fuel at all).
  • There are several points in Mass Effect 3 that are unwinnable if you're only carrying the Acolyte pistol (or a number of other weapons available during a New Game Plus). For example, during the mission on Mars, the player character is forced to shoot with whatever pistol they have equipped at an enemy who is charging at them in slow motion. Slow-firing pistols or ones with non-standard properties may not be able to kill the enemy in time, resulting in automatic death.
  • In Might and Magic IV, people running around with no space in their inventory can lose the one unique weapon required to harm the Final Boss. It is technically possible to get another copy of the weapon with a cheat code, as long as you know the code (and aren't playing a translated version where the code was changed into something undocumented).
  • Monster Hunter: If you go on a capture quest and run out of tranquilisers, the quest doesn't automatically end in failure, but it may as well.
  • Monster Rancher has a few:
    • It's possible to make Monster Rancher 2 Unwinnable. You get a Game Over if, at the start of the month, you have less than 100 G and are unable to feed your monster. In normal gameplay, the only way to get this situation is if you saved after the last tournament of the month your monster could possibly enter, you have no items to sell, your monster is too young to sell, all of your monsters in storage are too young to sell, and your monster never brings you any item you could possibly sell for money out of the blue. You can also do this at the very start of the game by creating and combining monsters before going to the Ranch, resulting in an instant Game Over.
    • In Monster Rancher 3, a minor plot battle in the jungle region of Kalaragi turns into a story-stopper if you lose. Your rival, Gadamon, will (if you lose) demand that you bring her a Dodorin Fruit when next you go exploring. Fair enough, especially when another character tells you where to find them — except that when you search the spot, the game recycles the dialogue from the end of the conversation telling you how to get it, and you get nothing. Not only can you not progress in the subplot, but this brings the entire story to a halt - no other events are available. If you win, however, you progress as usual through the story. Your reward for the subplot's completion? A Dodorin Fruit.
  • In Chapter 5 of Mother 3, it's possible for you to get stuck between a moving NPC and a wall inside His Highness' Room. The killer? Said NPC is a Save Frog, meaning the last time you probably saved was right after getting stuck, and due to a programming oversight (combined with the fact that saving the game also saves your exact coordinates within a given room), it will never move out of your way, effectively ending the game and forcing you to start over unless you kept a backup save. Even the fan-made strategy guide for the game advises that you should avoid that save point completely and tough it out until you get to the next one. Fortunately, recent versions of the Fan Translation have fixed this.
  • Odin Sphere: During Chapter 2 of the original, try not to have a full bag when you get to the Forest of Elrit. The Alchemy system is introduced there, and there are things you'll need to pick up in order to move the game along. If your bags are full when the Tutorial begins, you won't be able to drop excess items to make space since it disables all but the Materials you pick up, effectively casting you into limbo unless you reset the game.
  • Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis:
    • If you close the door to Pollux's house in Billsville, it will automatically lock. Since no NPCs ever open the door and there's no key to it, closing it while inside the house will leave you trapped forever.
    • In the second Vex Chamber, it's possible to push one of the blocks over or into the escape path. Since you can't pull them, you can't get it out of the path to solve the puzzle, nor can you use the escape path, for obvious reasons.
  • Penny Arcade made two otherwise nigh-perfect games, but at one point it's possible to hit an unbeatable snag. After being forced into the mental institution, you have to shock your brain back to health. The second and third levels of this mini-game feature unrotatable blocks of damaged tissue; if one of those blocks is at the edge and can't be reached, you have no choice but to quit and reload.
  • Persona 3: the second boss battle can easily put the game into an unwinnable state. The player has no control over the protagonist for the entirety of the day of the fight, which is not known beforehand, and the last chance to save is the night before — and since a boss battle is imminent, saving seems a smart move. Before the battle begins, you're treated to multiple cutscenes and a brief fetch quest, then warped to the dungeon, sans your party members. After battling your way to meet them, you'll be treated to yet another cutscene before the main battle. Even if you've conserved all your magic points and healing items for the main boss (assuming, of course, that you knew it was coming and weren't sidetracked by the battles to your party members), you're still facing two enemies that can constantly change their weaknesses and strengths. Oh, and you need to equip a different weapon — the weakest weapon, in fact — in order to give your party a full spread for physical attacks. As a bonus, only two of your party members are capable of healing spells, including you, and since you're using turn-based tactics, anyone knocked down by the enemy wastes a turn climbing to their feet... only to be knocked down again by the next enemy strike. (Whether or not they fall unconscious depends on whether or not you choose to heal them.) It's an annoying but not difficult battle, but your non-standard lack of control on the day of events makes it possible to put yourself in a situation in which you're under-equipped and under-prepared but unable to fix the problems. Given the expected player level, you also don't have the items you need yet — some healing items work outside of battle, some only work within, but you don't yet have access to the options that restore more than a handful of hit points. You can try consulting a strategy guide, but if you still can't win and your last save takes you back to the day of the battle (again with the goddamn cutscenes), you can either Rage Quit or start over. You need a save at least two days in advance of the battle if you've tried and failed.
  • Phantasy Star:
    • In the original Phantasy Star I, the game can easily become unwinnable near the end; if the player has the bad idea to save in this particular situation, then they will eventually want to destroy the cartridge. Upon landing in the air castle, the player must fight a particularly tough boss after a long and confusing dungeon. Afterwards, there are three ways to leave the Air Castle: the heroine's teleportation spell, a teleportation item, or a magic nut to turn your cat ally into a flying creature. But it is likely that the heroine will have ran out of MP casting her strongest spells against the boss, that the cat will have bit the dust halfway through the dungeon (rendering him unable to use the magic nut), and that the player will have forgotten to bring a teleportation item. Ten bloody hours down the drain!
    • Also in Phantasy Star I, it is possible to decline to take plot-important items such as the Amber Eye or Nuts if your inventory is full. If that happens, the item in question will be inaccessible for the rest of the run, and you will be forced to start the game over from the very beginning.
    • In Phantasy Star III, a bit of Script Breaking at the beginning of the game can cause you to be unable to leave the starting town: if you use an escape item to leave a jail cell before another character can free you, the event flag to remove the guards at the town's exit will not play, trapping you in the town forever. An NPC even breaks the fourth wall to praise you for your ingenuity before informing you that, regretfully, you will need to start over.
    • In Phantasy Star Universe, there was a glitch in the MAG event mission at the very end. Each player has to take the warp individually to the final block and then stand at a gate which will only open when everyone is accounted for, letting everyone in to spawn the monsters and smash things up until you kill the final one. The glitch? At times, the monsters would spawn before the gate was opened. It's mostly harmless if you ignore them and take their attacks while waiting for everyone to get to the gate; but if someone kills the monsters with ranged attacks, then the monsters will stop spawning around the third wave or so, making it impossible to finish the mission.
  • In Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, you could theoretically squander all your money (for example, by repeatedly buying a bunch of crap from the market then selling it back at a loss immediately) the day before a payment is due and then save your game without keeping a backup save in another slot. This doesn't actually render your save file useless though, since a Game Over simply gives you the bad ending, then sends you into a New Game Plus minus all your money and any rewards you would've gotten for beating the game.
  • Very early in RuneScape before a method of banning rule-breaking players had been programmed, there was an inescapable area called the black hole that rule-breakers were trapped in. When players started breaking the rules to get sent to the black hole deliberately just to see what it was like, an item to enter and leave the black hole was added. Some players then trapped themselves in the black hole by dropping the item that allowed them to leave (possibly due to being tricked into doing this by other players).
  • Saint Seiya Ougon Densetsu:
    • The player can make the Final Boss unwinnable without realizing. The final boss is fought with two characters (Seiya and Ikki), and the player must use the "Talk" command on him with Ikki before Ikki is defeated. Failing to do that, the final boss will be invincible and no attack from the (resurrected) Seiya will ever do damage to him, eventually leading to his death and a game over.
    • The game, as it's an adaptation of a manga/anime series, allows the player the choice of doing the battles in the same order that they happen officially. However, one can go outside canon and beat the second-to-last boss Aphrodite with Seiya...which leads to him dying and Shun being the only choice left to cross the Path of Roses (which constantly drains his life). However, the exit at the end of this area (Seiya's mentor) only appears for Seiya, leaving Shun unable to continue until his life drops to 0. Oops.
  • In Secret of Evermore for the SNES:
    • There is one part of the game where a scientist gives you an airplane to use for a fetch quest so he can build a rocket to send you to the end of the game. It is possible, through an obscure glitch, to land back in the scientist's lab without the plane. If the player hasn't completed the fetch quest, then the game is now unwinnable (and it is possible to save, ruining the player's progress about 3/4 of the way through an SNES RPG).
    • It's also possible to get stuck in the third part of the game, the medieval land, after defeating the Chess monster and going through a cavern and ending up in the desolate town. You climb a massive bunch of ramps, and at the top you are brought back to the populated town, where you are expected to fight a boss in the castle. Go through the cave again, and you're stuck in the desolate town because your airride won't come back.
    • One dungeon is filled with collapsible bridges. This is standard fare for video games; but unlike the standard Magical Self-Repair Bridge, once these collapse, they're gone forever. This leads to unwinnable situations—if you use an item or formula to escape before defeating the dungeon's mini-boss but after crossing the bridge to get to the dungeon, you'll be unable to return and thus unable to complete the dungeon. If you're unfortunate enough to save while you're outside, then your save file is rendered unwinnable.
    • The area before the Verminator is inescapable and inhabited by nothing but fast-moving rats that are worth a piddly 4 EXP each. If you're underleveled and you saved, then the game is as good as unwinnable. Was it mentioned that this area is 3/4 of the way through the game? Ironically, this boss can be avoided altogether by utilizing a glitch in the previous area; but if you ever go into his room, then the game will lock the door and not open it until the code signifying you've beaten the boss goes through. Since the boss doesn't appear after you've used that glitch, it will be impossible to initiate this code, and the player will be forced to reset. Unwinnable revenge!
    • The Great Pyramid Extension can only be visited once, but contains an essential scene that is available later. If you go there before visiting Gothica, the game becomes unwinnable.
  • Early in Secret of Mana, the player is supposed to go to the Water Palace. At first, there is a Cannon Travel that only goes to the Water Palace. But, if the player uses Cannon Travel to go to the Water Palace, then walks back to that same Cannon Travel, then the player can use it to go Gaia's Navel and skip the Water Palace. But, the player must go to the Water Palace to Talk to Luka before being called back to rescue Undine. If not, then the Undine quest will not be available. Thus, the player will never get a crucial spell needed to progress. This leaves the game in an unwinnable state.
  • Shadowrun:
    • The game on the Sega CD can end up being unwinnable as a combination of three factors: the game has only scripted battles, set points where the player characters gain experience and a highly customizable character building system. The end result of this is that it is entirely possible to build up your characters in such a way that they cannot win a mandatory battle, and the game offers no possibility of straying from the main storyline to grind.
    • Failing to select the "talk" option in conversations on the SNES (including the first person you talk to at all) can lead you to miss important "keywords" required to advance the plot much later on. As can visiting the professional doctor first, since he'll fix you up without triggering the cortical bomb in your skull. Meaning that you never learn of its existence and again, can't ask the proper questions to advance the plot.
    • In the SNES version, if you sell all your weapons before being sent to the caryards, an NPC hands you a gun that is weaker than any other gun in the game, can't be acquired any other way, and only exists to keep the player from getting stuck in the arena with no weapon. After getting back out, you can still sell all your weapons and armor, hire bodyguards and then run around accomplishing nothing until there's no money left.
  • In Shin Megami Tensei IV, you can get stuck at Ouji and Minami Senju before you get the Global Airship if you spend the 500 Macca to go there when you have less than 700 Macca total (as it only costs 200 for the return trip) and don't have the Scout Bonus or Fundraise apps or enough App Points to purchase one. Note that you can still buy your way out...if you spend the real-world cash needed to get the DLC mission that can give you more App Points (unless you are in a region, or your 3DS's region is set as such, where the DLCs weren't greenlit for sale, like in South America. Which bounces back into this trope, as well as being the so-obscure-we-don't-have-a-page-for-it problem of Unwinnable by International Trade Politics).
  • The C64 game Space Rogue was, for all intents and purposes, virtually Unwinnable because the required Plot Coupon item needed to rig your ship to go to the ant invader's home sector cannot be obtained. It is supposed to be a randomly drawn item from Robocrook's chance game (making it a pure luck scenario), but it never drops. In the PC version, this was fixed, but there's not much in the form of in-game help, and there was no GameFAQs to look this stuff up on back then. After the third or fourth random piece of junk, most people stopped checking with Robocrook and didn't know they had to.
  • In Stick Ranger, it is possible to sell all your weapons and then blow all your money, making it impossible to fight bosses to progress in the game or gain any new weapons.
  • In the DreamForge game The Summoning, the door to the final level can only be opened if you possess 5 black and 5 white pearls. But the level before the door contains only 5 black and 4 white pearls. The only other white pearl is back near the entrance, 30 to 40 levels previous, and you cannot return there. So if you didn't pick it up, dropped it to save inventory space, or sold it, the game becomes unwinnable.
  • Tales of the Abyss has a glitch where, if you remove the game disc from your console while on the world map, the mountains and oceans won't load, letting you walk anywhere. If you're dumb, you can use this to break your save file:
    • If you put the disc back into your console, the map will re-appear, and if you were standing on unwalkable terrain, you'll be stuck there. If you save in this state, you'll be stuck forever.
    • If you start the Mushroom Road sidequest before entering The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, Luke leaves the party to give place to Asch. You can then go all the way to the other end of Mushroom Road to get out to the world map (in a cliff where the Greater Flightstone is) and then use the world map glitch to get out of there without getting Luke back. This lets you play as Asch for as long as you want,note  and Asch replaces Luke in every scene (except for one needed to get Tear's Infinity +1 Sword, which will not trigger). If you finish the game while using Asch, you will start the next cycle without Luke. Once you get to the tutorial battle, the game freezes because you don't have any character in your party. If you saved your clear data over your only file, you are now stuck inside Duke Fabre's Manor forever.
  • In Tales of Destiny, it is possible to equip the Sorcerer's Ring (a puzzle solving device) to a character who leaves the party and cannot be regained until a certain amount of in-story progress has been made. If you give the ring to someone like Johnny or Woodrow, it's not too much of an issue, as you can get them back before you'll need it again, but if you give it to Mary, or worse, Leon... Later games averted this by making the Sorcerer's Ring a key item that doesn't need to be equipped.
  • In TaskMaker, you have to find an object requested by the title character to advance in the game. Should you choose to Bestow the task item to an NPC and then kill them, it will very likely not be on their person when they die. However, there are often far better objects that you can Bestow, and you don't really have to Bestow in the first place (it's mostly used to calm down angry monsters, but only up to a certain level).
  • Transistor: The Permanence limiter makes functions overload whenever you uninstall them. An insane player might try to use this to overload all of their functions, but functions start uninstalling normally again when you're down to your last four. There's only a set of three functions in the game that are completely incapable of dealing damage if you restrict yourself to them... Jaunt, Mask and Void. But with the Recursion copies of those functions, it is therefore possible to make sure that your last four functions can't deal damage. Since the game uses a profile system for saves, leaving this state requires restoring a manual backup.
  • A certain sidequest in Treasure of the Rudra can be done right after a bridge gets broken. You're supposed to get on with the plot a bit first, and stumble upon the sidequest location in the process. Doing the sidequest as soon as it's available will land you on the other side of the broken bridge... with no way to get back.
  • In Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, it is possible through a bug that the slowing down effect of the fat Tzimisce things in the sewers of Hollywood will last for the rest of the game. That is not so much of a problem until you have to get out of a cave with a timed explosion, where it will be impossible to even get near your boat.
    • Another bug caused the game to crash at the point where the video for said explosion is loading.
    • There is a bug that can cause you either to be trapped in the elevator at the Asylum or to be trapped on the second floor, unable to summon the elevator to return to the first floor.
  • Wasteland 2: The very last act of the game requires you to get through two locked doors, within a rather short time limit. Three or four points in Lock Picking should get you through without too many re-tries. If your final party includes no one with high enough Lock Picking (or Brute Force), OR they died in the final battle, AND you have no one with spare skill points, AND you only have one save, AND you made a hard save immediately after the battle, THEN you are screwed.
  • In The Witcher, if a quest-critical NPC dies you cannot complete their quest. Well and good, except that it's possible for Vesna Hood to die after you've completed the Escort Mission section of her sidequestnote , making it impossible to collect her sex card. Then, if Geralt allowed the Scoia'tael to take the smuggled goods in Act I, doing things in the wrong order in Act II causes a sidequest target to be assassinated by the Scoia'tael for drug dealing before Geralt can get to him.
  • In X-Men Legends, one of the missions takes place on board a warship, and its last section sees the X-Men deep below decks, at which point the ship has been so thoroughly damaged that it's on the verge of coming apart. Jean Grey uses her powers to try and keep the ship together so that the X-Men can rescue a number of crewmen who are trapped in the area, but can only keep it up for 15 minutes (which can be slightly extended by welding some damaged walls). Several save points are accessible during this sequence, which naturally record how much time is left. It's entirely possible to save with so little time left that rescuing any remaining crewmen in time would be impossible, leading to an endless loop of a Non-Standard Game Over in which the ship sinks with the X-Men on board... which we're told via a dialogue box which suddenly appears on top of whatever was happening at that moment.
  • In Xenoblade Chronicles 1, one quest on the Fallen Arm spawns the Bright Wisp, which drops a key item. Unlike every other enemy that drops a key item, the Bright Wisp respawns. If you defeat it 100 times and loot 100 of these key items, the game will prompt you to discard an excess item (99 is the limit), but as it's a key item, it can't be discarded, and the game is stuck.
  • In Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Loloka's Collectopaedia Card was unable to be completed in the base game until patch 1.1.1. One of its items, the Gogol Vuaga, couldn't be found in the game due to the developers having forgotten to create a reference between the item and the enemy that's supposed to drop it. Unfortunately it's also one of the few cards that can't be completed simply by paying Nopon Coins.
  • Fairly early into Xenogears, there is a level where Fei goes by himself into a cave piloting his gear. There is a service robot he encounters, which the game gives you the option to fight and kill. This robot also sells you gear parts, which you'll probably need to survive the wave of boss battles ahead. If you save your game after killing the robot, then the upcoming battles are nearly impossible without a gameshark. And no, you can't just grind to obscene levels, that's not how Xenogears works.note 

    Simulation Games 
  • In Animal Crossing: New Leaf, bamboo shoots planted in the ground will grow and spread uncontrollably if the player doesn't regularly play. If the town is neglected for long enough, it can block you from being able to go anywhere but your house. Players that are unlucky enough to be there without an axe and shovel are stuck there and have to start an entirely new town.
  • A fairly mild case in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The game may assign you Nook Miles+ missions that are impossible to complete — for example, asking you to sell a particular item or have fossils assessed when the relevant facilities are closed for renovations. Incomplete Nook Miles+ goals aren't swapped out for new tasks until midnight, meaning your ability to earn miles may get significantly hampered by impossible tasks taking up space in the queue. If you're able to visit another player's island, that can solve the problem, but only if whoever you visit isn't undergoing the same renovations, which they likely are if they started playing the same day you did since progress is tied to the console's calendar. note 
  • In Dyson Sphere Program, the game can be made unwinnable if the player paves over every single spot of water on the starting planet without researching the technologies that are required to fly to other planets. However, there is no way to do this accidentially, as it requires ludicrous amounts of a "Foundation" item to be made and used.
  • The trading/combat game Elite has one star-system, Oresrati in Galaxy 8, which is over 7 light-years from any other; hence, it is only reachable by Galactic Hyperspace (or the "unlimited hyperspace range" hack). It's of insufficient tech level to sell you another Galactic Hyperspace. If you're not using the "unlimited hyperspace range" hack and don't have a recent saved position, then you're basically screwed.
  • Harvest Moon:
    • In A Wonderful Life, ordering new machinery can render the game unplayable if the machinery arrives on the first day after a chapter change. The only way around this is to avoid ordering machinery in the last season of a chapter, since the exact date the machinery arrives is random.
    • Similarly, in the North American Harvest Moon DS, two glitches caused both the Witch Princess and the Harvest Goddess, and only them, to be ineligible for marriage. You couldn't get the Witch Princess because the game didn't keep track of dead animals; you couldn't get the Harvest Goddess because Buckwheat Flour was on her lists but not in the game itself. Fortunately, you could still finish the game by marrying another girl. The glitches were corrected in an updated version (DS 1.1) and Harvest Moon: DS Cute. Not that you could marry them in the western translations of the latter..
    • A similar glitch happens in Another Wonderful Life. If you woo all three of the bachelors to full hearts and experience all their heart events, then there is a random chance that you will be instantly locked with Rock. Then Rock will be the only one who will propose to you or accept the Blue Feather; Gustafa and Marlin will reject your proposal as if you still lack something, even though your hearts are all accounted for and you witnessed all their heart events. It tends to happen more if you witness Rock's heart event last, but it is not a guarantee.
  • In Kerbal Space Program, it is technically possible, when playing a career-mode game, to completely bankrupt your space program and make it impossible to continue. To get in such a state, you have to completely destroy both the Mission Control and Administration buildings in the Kerbal Space Center by crashing rockets or aircraft or what-have-you into them (if Mission Control is intact, you can get contracts from there to slowly replenish your space program's funds; if Administration is intact, you can select the Bail-Out Grant strategy to get a large lump sum of funds, although this comes with a substantial reputation penalty), and blow through enough of your existing funds to bring your total funds below the level needed to repair either building, and not have craft or parts landed anywhere on Kerbin (or orbiting and able to be deorbited and landed/crashed back on Kerbin) which can be recovered for the needed funds, and not have any contracts that can be completed (or, for multi-part contracts, that have any individual parts that can be completed) using any craft that you can afford to build with you remaining funds. Given how eager the Kerbals are to pay you lots of funds to fly missions for them (very), any career-mode player who isn't trying to deliberately run their space program into the ground will accumulate enough funds to repair a destroyed Administration or Mission Control building very early on in the game, and Administration and Mission Control (especially the former) are two small, low-profile buildings situated well out of the way of launching rockets or planes, making them fairly hard to hit squarely and destroy with a rocket or plane even if you are aiming at them, so you have to be trying pretty hard to get yourself in a situation where you have no way of getting more funds.note 
  • In the Hell's Kitchen: The Game version for Nintendo DS, you can't get the 100% in the weeks two and three, making the game unwinnable.
  • MechWarrior:
    • The original game for the PC required you to head to a specific planet to begin the sequence to beat the game. But after a certain point in time, going to the planet results in an unceremonious 'Game Over' screen. Typically, by the time you're able to build up your forces to a respectable level, it's too late.
    • As told here, MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries originally shipped with a game-stopping bug where the dropship fails to land at the end of one of the missions, making the mission and thus the game unwinnable.
    • In Mechwarrior 3, it is possible to destroy a mission's objective from the previous map. This then carries over, making it impossible to do in that mission.
  • Motorsport Manager has some examples of this:
    • At the start of each season, you have to choose suppliers for each part of your car. Thing is, once the process is started, you have to finish it before doing anything else, and the usual cash injection you get at the start of the seasons happens after this. This means that if you don't have enough money to choose suppliers, you are forced to quit the game and reload an earlier save.
    • You can choose to give your drivers less fuel than required to finish the race... even if the championship your team is competing in bans refueling. You get no warning on whether you are giving them not enough fuel, so you only really find out that you've given away the race halfway-through.
  • Rune Factory:
    • In the first game, saving in a cave while poisoned and sealed can render your game unwinnable if you have low enough HP and no cures for the Status Effects. Later games rectify this, however.
    • There's also the issue of entering a cave accessible only during the winter and being in it when the new year starts. At least in this one, the game politely locks up.
  • Satisfactory has two known examples of this - The first is through allowing too much radiation to accumulate at your home base, causing you to enter a loop of dying and then respawning in the lethal area. The other is more obtuse - Your home base requires a unique component - The Hub Parts. Ordinarily, these cannot be destroyed, and they are one of the only items to be returned to you on death if you happen to be carrying them. However, placing the Hub Parts in the inventory of a Lizard Doggo, then either losing or killing it, the Hub Parts are deleted, preventing you from progressing your game further.
  • SimCity: Wasting your starting cash on absurd items and failing to create the basic infrastructure to earn money to progress can result in an unwinnable state. This actually caused the original SimCity to add a lose condition. If you mess up too bad, you get a game over.
  • The Sims
    • The original game would allow households with no adults but only children exist. Children's actions were extremely limited in the game; they can only make money through random grade events and paintings, can only eat snacks from the fridge, cannot pay bills, and barring mods or a spell in the Makin Magic expansion, cannot grow up to be functioning adults. Adoption of children wouldn't come in until the second game, so there was no way to put an adult into the family.
    • In the console version of The Sims 2, one of your objectives in the alien crash site is to "meet an alien". If you have previously met both of the aliens living here, it is impossible to complete the goal, which is required to progress in the game.
    • The Nintendo DS version of The Urbz has a mission where your Urb is kidnapped and you control their pet, who has to save them. If your Urb had a hoverboard and you press the button to ride it during this segment, your pet will become stuck forever. It's also possible to save your game in this state, which would, of course, be a very bad idea.
  • In Wing Commander Prophecy, your carrier is equipped with Imported Alien Phlebotinum that can be destroyed by enemy torpedoes in the third Hrissith System mission. Nobody will say anything about this at the time, but when you try to fly Mission #5 ("Defend our Imported Alien Phlebotinum!"), you will lose instantly — before your fighter has even launched (fortunately, the "Flight History Terminal" makes Save Scumming easy).
  • Zoo Tycoon: If you spend too much of your money and don't have enough animals and/or things to sell to get some back, you can be put in a situation were you cannot buy more animals and things, and if you don't have enough animals because they all died or something, you cannot even slowly make more money because you won't get enough guests. The only solution other than restarting or loading a save file is to use a cheat code to make more money.
  • In Zoo Tycoon 2: Endangered Species, trying to adopt a Galapagos Giant Tortoise would cause the game to freeze or crash for some players. One scenario in the campaign requires the player to adopt and breed these animals. Because of this, said scenario could be unwinnable for those affected.

    Sports Games 
  • Subverted in Arc Style: Baseball!! 3D in an instance where, if you hit a fly ball to right field and the right fielder dives to catch it, he/she might go inside the wall and no one will come to pick up the ball, leaving all defenders idle and stalling the game. You can get out of this glitch by driving all your runners home (an inside-the-park home run), which will trigger a cutscene and a fade to white that will get things back to normal (your next batter will step to the plate like nothing happened). Now, what could happen if you were the defense and the CPU was the offense... Only Trope-tan knows.
  • The launch version of NCAA Football 12 somehow managed to omit Boston College vs. Virginia Tech off the playing schedule. However, the game's back end recognizes that it is there, and simulates the game without the player's input when you advance the weeks. Since even a single loss can put a team out of the running for a national championship and injures are FAR more common in simulated games, players can easily lose the game and be eliminated from title contention through no fault of their own. Or, they could win the game but lose several star players, which can have the same effect overall.

    Stealth-Based Games 
  • Batman: Arkham Knight: If you get to Founder's Island early via Sequence Breaking and then attempt to arrest either Professor Pyg or Riddler after defeating him after completing his trial on Founder's Island (which, normally, locks out the Batmobile from moving onto it until after story events allow it to roam on it) permanently locks Batman in the Batmobile since, at that point in time, it's assumed that you did the story events that allow the Batmobile access to Founder's Island, and taking Riddler/Pyg to the GCPD lock-up after defeating him simply leads to an empty waypoint and doesn't allow you to offload Riddler/Pyg into the GCPD, forcing you to start all over again in order to get out of it.
  • Metal Gear:
    • Metal Gear: To progress through Outer Heaven, you have to rescue a number of hostages that will increase Snake's rank that will allow him to contact operatives to pass through certain locations. But if you accidentally kill a hostage (one of which is important to one of the contacts), Snake's rank will decrease and that specific contact will no longer assist him, preventing further access throughout the base and forcing you start all over.
    • Also in Metal Gear, during the passage of the game where you rescue Gray Fox, if you run straight through his cell without untying him and run past Shoot Gunner/Shotmaker to retrieve your M92F, you can then go back to Fox's cell and murder him. You don't get a game over, but you take a massive hit to your Rank from which it is impossible to make up the difference, meaning it is not possible to get in touch with Jennifer at the point in the game when you require it.
    • There's a glitch in Metal Gear Solid where, if you inexplicably decide to backtrack all the way to the bottom of the comms towers after a certain point in the late game, the lift back to the top of the comm tower will never appear.
  • Thief:
    • The "Killing Time" mission of Thief: Deadly Shadows consists of a descent from the top of a clock tower into the basement. The highest difficulty requires you to get all three pieces of "special loot" on every level, one of which is a diamond gear, found in the first room. However, unless you're specifically looking for it, it's difficult to spot, and likely to be bypassed on first-time playthroughs. Later on, you find a message that clues you in to look out for that particular gear, thinking that even if you miss it, you can usually just backtrack— but not in this mission. About halfway through, there is a big vertical chamber which is easy enough to fall down, but once you've done so, explored the rest of the level beyond, and cannot find the last piece of loot, you're better off restarting the mission, as the vertical chamber is virtually impossible to climb back up.
    • Several levels in the original game required lighting torches with fire arrows in order to complete. The problem is that fire arrows are rather rare and it was entirely possible to run out of them and be unable to complete the level. In the Thief Gold Updated Re-release, the designers added an invincible "fire ghost" enemy that would drop fire arrows when attacked to these levels.

    Survival Horror 
  • Alone in the Dark (1992) has a soft lock situation where the player character clips out of bounds and a splash is heard as if falling into water, after which they are permanently detached from the background and doomed to wander the void until you restart or reload an uncorrupted save.
  • Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare has a frustrating glitch where a plot-critical item simply didn't appear. The only option was to grit your teeth and reset.
  • Clock Tower:
    • Clock Tower: The First Fear:
      • There is a possible hiding spot from Bobby that lock you into multiple different unwinnable states depending on the game's mood at the time. Normally, it would be Unwinnable by Design (or a chance of such, anyways) for Jennifer to climb up the shelves in the garage to evade Bobby, and further kick down the ladder she climbed to keep Bobby from climbing up after her. After you pat yourself on the back for a clever idea, you'll soon realize, oh crap, Jennifer can't jump down, and Bobby further crashes your parade by crashing through from the ceiling to impale Jennifer, who now can't run away from him, killing her. On the game's bad days, however, sometimes Jennifer can still trigger these events even if she hadn't kicked the ladder down. Worse, sometimes Bobby can crash from the ceiling immediately after, standing between you and the possibly-still-accessible ladder to climb down, and even worse, corner Jennifer by making her back up toward the left of the screen while menacingly following her. The problem comes when the game further gets confused that the boundaries that should've stopped Jennifer to the far left of the screen aren't recognized as such, so instead of have Jennifer stop to be impaled by Bobby, she continues to back away well off the screen while Bobby follows her, neither stopping to do any escaping/killing and forcing you to restart.
      • There's one escape point on the second floor that involves Jennifer jumping over a hole which Bobby can't make and instead falls. If you do this you have to grab the rope and tie it to the bannister to climb down to the first floor (since the gap is now too wide to jump; Bobby smashes part of it when he tries). However if you instead go into the storage room without using the rope, there's a 50/50 chance that either Bobby or a harmless cat will pop out of the crate. If it's Bobby, you're S.O.L: you can't interact with the rope in "chase" mode, there's nowhere to run, and when Bobby kills you you'll respawn in the room and immediately retrigger Bobby coming out of the crate (it's randomly chosen at the beginning of the game; it will always be Bobby if he popped out once), and your only option is to start your game over.
    • In Clock Tower: Ghost Head's second level, there are several zombies on the map which you can lead into traps that incapacitate them and allow you to escape, but most of them merely cause the zombies to return to the room where they were first encountered, and only work once. Not so with the broom in one of the restrooms, which has unlimited uses and causes the zombies to disappear permanently. However, while a savvy player can certainly use this to their advantage, there is a certain part of the level which requires the player character to change into their alternate personality Bates, and the only way to trigger this change is to get attacked by a zombie and escape. If you only cleaned out the zombies in the most critical areas, good for you, but if you took out every single zombie on the map, you're screwed, unless you're willing to wait a LONG time for a zombie to spawn in and enter the room you're in.
  • In Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, the Festival lens unlocks upon completing the Ghost List. But the game has a glitch where six ghosts don't count as having been photographed, leading to the Ghost List being incapable of being completed.
  • In Deadly Premonition if you happen to replay a previous chapter before you finish the game (common with those who want to complete Emily's sidequests, which require specific circumstances to access) and you complete it (save points are disabled during replays, so you have to finish a chapter to save it), it can cause items you need to progress to disappear, like the key to the diner in chapter 9 (it can also happen in chapter 23), once it's gone there's no way to progress through the story any further or get the key back without restarting your game. Fortunately that's fairly early in the game, so it won't take long to get to that point again, but it is infuriating if you've been doing sidequests and collecting trading cards.
  • Evil Dead: Hail to the King contained a particularly frustrating unwinnable glitch. At the start of the second disc, you're supposed to save the game at a save point immediately upon arriving in Damascus, then leave the area, fight some skeletons for the parts needed to open the town gate, and then proceed. If you do this, then reloading the game if you fail triggers the second disc's opening cut scene, and all's well. However, if you run to the area with the skeletons, then turn back around and then save the game and reload it, the enemies will vanish — along with the items you needed to collect from them. You're now stuck outside the city with no way to get through the locked gate, and with the game saved at that spot.
  • The Thing (2002) has a stage where the player descends a long staircase (similar to the staircase sequence in Metal Gear Solid), and has to deal with automatic turrets on every level, scalding steam vents, seemingly endless streams of scuttling creatures that pop out of dead bodies (and attack you from front and behind), and the medic, the only hope of surviving the stage, turns into a monster at random points. If the player doesn't have enough health packs, or enough firepower, it's impossible to get through the stage (though there is one way to make it easier, if you leave the medic near the top of the staircase and run back up to him to get healed instead of having him follow you, he doesn't seem to turn into a monster).
  • Resident Evil:
    • In Resident Evil 0, if you fail to give Billy Cohen sufficient firepower before triggering the Centurion boss battle, you're screwed; it's the only boss battle in the game where you're mandated to fight it with Billy, and you can't exchange items with Rebecca due to it holding her captive during the fight. Fortunately, the only other mandatory boss-fight for Billy, against the Queen Leech, isn't such a big deal, as it's actually just a matter of surviving long enough before it gets killed in a cutscene.
    • It's entirely possible to do this in Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5 if you sell all of your weapons and do something with the cash like purchase nothing but First-Aid Spray, ammo or grenades. It's also possible to kill merchants. Kill the merchant right before the Salazar fight ... goodbye Leon!
  • In Silent Hill: Downpour, you get the Forensic Flashlight in the Centennial Building. You can switch this out with a standard flashlight in the police station if you hadn't already grabbed it. Then, if you enter the orphanage, you are stuck with a large number of enemies that are invisible without the Forensic Flashlight's ultraviolet setting. Not technically unwinnable, but getting through is statistically impossible.
  • ZombiU is notorious for the number of ways you can accidentally glitch your game into being permanently unwinnable, largely due to one of the game's central mechanics: when you die, you will respawn as a new survivor at the Safehouse and your previous survivor will become a zombie at the exact spot where you died. A great concept in theory, but it's one which can cause a whole host of problems. For instance, after completing the tough Arena fight towards the end of the game, you'll be told to "Get to Safehouse". However, if you die before you make it back there, even though you respawn in the Safehouse, the mission will never update because you skipped past the entrance you were meant to use to trigger the dialogue which continues the game. Time to start all over! Another example: there's a rare chance that when you track down your previous survivor, they might have glitched out of bounds where they are unable to be killed. That's bad enough as it is because they'll have all your old supplies on them, but if they had any mission-required items, they're lost forever and the run is dead. The kicker of all this is that when you die, the game immediately overwrites your previous save, so if you now find yourself in an unwinnable state, there's absolutely nothing you can do. The only way to prevent these issues is to just never die in the first place, and good luck with that!

    Third-Person Shooters 
  • Ratchet and Clank:
    • Some versions allow the player to skip a vital gadget midway through the game. Planet Orxon is initially played as Clank, as it's polluted by toxic gases that Ratchet can't breathe. As Clank, you're supposed to collect the Magneboots (allowing Ratchet to scale metal shafts), before getting the coordinates to a planet where you can acquire an oxygen mask. You're then supposed to return to Orxon and, as Ratchet, use the Magneboots to complete a mission. If you missed them as Clank, you can't get them.
    • The HD remake of Ratchet and Clank has a save manipulation glitch in which the Deplanetiser can point upwardsnote , regardless of the boss being defeated or not. This can cause a situation where a player has to beat the boss in a ridiculously narrow timeframe of 30 seconds.
  • Due to glaring level design bugs, the final boss in Slave Zero is unbeatable at Hard difficulty: his HP simply exceeds the combined damage that all the ammo in the final arena plus those in your magazine can do. There are indeed other ammo pickups but they happen to be buried inside a wall, so you can't step on them. There is even a supply flier that drops bullet boxes; however the boxes, once dropped, miss the script that allows to pick them up (you just run through them). So you just unload all of your ammunition in his face, then either settle in the center tower (where his missiles cannot touch you) and wait for the end of the world, or you let him kill you in frustration. He can be defeated with the Valhalla missile launcher, but the player likely took the upgrade to the highest tier missile a few levels back and a replacement is not provided in the weapon selection area before the final arena.
  • In the first three Syphon Filter games, you can trigger a checkpoint just as you're about to be headshot or otherwise instantly killed, or triggering mission failure, trapping you in a Cycle of Hurting. Timed missions can also autosave with too little time on the clock.
  • True Crime: New York City has a laundry list of randomly occurring Game Breaking Bugs that can cause certain missions or the game to become unwinnable, making Save Scumming a necessity. Even worse, the Xbox version has a big bug late in the game that rendered it completely unwinnable due to no fault of the player.
  • True Crime: Streets of LA has a particularly bad (though rare) bug that can make the game unwinnable. Given that the game is a GTA-type, driving cars is natural. So is blowing them up. Ramming a car enough times will make it blow up. Simple enough? But certain in-game cutscenes do not make your car invincible, and the idiot drivers on the road do not stop when your car does. If your car has just enough damage and another car smashes into it during a cutscene, making it explode, then the game will continue after the cutscene on the assumption that you are dead. Add that the game saves after most cutscenes...

    Turn-Based Strategy 
  • In Banished, you can make it impossible to expand your town by wasting all your stone and iron (for instance by making tools and paved roads) and/or abandoning them on the other side of a river and dismantling the bridge that leads there, leaving you without enough stone to rebuild it. Since your only source of those two resources besides gathering are the Mine and Quarry (and they require stone and iron respectively) is the Marketplace (which also requires Iron to build) you're essentially left stranded.
  • Item World maps in the Disgaea series being Randomly Generated Levels can potentially produce maps that are unwinnable if you're lacking units capable of reaching the exit or the enemies on the map. Random Geo Effect combinations can produce even sillier results, such as a situation where the moment one unit attacks another in melee, they punch each other in an eternal counter loop (Always Counter) yet inflict negative amounts of harm by doing so (Reverse Damage), producing a loop that only ends when you reach for the power button.
  • Fire Emblem:
    • Due to the Permadeath mechanic and the random nature of stat increases, it's possible for a given playthrough of almost any game to be unusually difficult thanks to important units being crippled (although the series usually drip-feeds you enough new units with fixed starting stats to prevent the game from being completely wedged).
    • A specific method occurs in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War - if Quan and Ethlyn survive Travant's ambush in Chapter 5 and if you let them conquer Phinora Castle, which is your next step at that point... Congratulations, now Phinora is an allied castle and you can't conquer it back, meaning that you're stuck in Yied Desert with no way to advance further in the game (since your progress is very linear, conquering a castle disables the Invisible Wall guarding the next one). You have to try really, really, REALLY hard to pull the whole thing off; every enemy present has a horseslayer, so one or two hits is all it takes for them to kill Ethlyn, due to their mechanics, they can get in a good dozen attacks per turn, and the two are stuck in a desert, meaning they will be moving at a snail's pace and enduring these attacks a lot.
    • You can make Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade unwinnable by managing to get everyone except Lyn killed in Chapter 3. (This isn't too easy, as Chapter 3's enemies are very weak.) Then in Chapter 4 you'll be tasked with protecting a NPC with Lyn guarding the way, but the tutorial will force you to move her away to talk with an enemy leaving the NPC completely defenseless. You can also pull this off by killing off everyone but the main characters in the final chapter (and leaving them at base level), at which point you simply don't have the firepower to defeat the final boss, even with Athos.
    • Defied in the tutorial of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance; if you throw away Ike's sword just to see what happens, Mist will scold and re-arm you.
    • In Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem, you can recruit the enemy general Sheena, who will then un-recruit herself and become an enemy if you kill one of the soldiers of her nation. If you hand her the Plot Coupon item Lightsphere and then kill a Gra soldier and turn her back into an enemy, then it won't drop when she's killed, and it also won't go back to the convoy at the end of the chapter like it would if she were an ally unit. You are no longer able to defeat Hardin, since he can only be damaged by units holding the Lightsphere, and since his defeat is required to clear his chapter, it results in you being stuck there forever with an invincible boss.
    • Throughout the series, one can break everyone's weapons, then spend all your money on non-weapon items. Congratulations, you can no longer damage your enemies! In theory, you can resolve this on chapters where a new character joins the party, since they usually have weapons equipped, but in practice, this is going to be rather difficult. Fire Emblem: Awakening rectifies this by giving Chrom the Falchion to start with, which is unbreakable and unsellable, and if he dies it's Game Over anyway. Still possible, however, if you give the weapon to someone who isn't Chrom (which is stupid in itself unless you give it to the original Marth due to anyone else either being unable to use it or already having one), making it impossible to retrieve it anymore unless that person happens to be there. It's not possible in Fire Emblem Fates, due to ditching the durability mechanic for all non-staff weapons. Fire Emblem: Three Houses allows player units to fight with broken weapons, albeit with penalties that make the weapons practically useless, and some units can fight with their bare hands.
  • An early mission of Front Mission has Driscoll hanging around outside the main battle area in his ridiculously overpowered wanzer. Normally he just leaves when you rout all the other enemies and you win. However if you make the mistake of attacking him (which is quite easy to do accidentally thanks to the game's dodgy targeting controls, or intentionally as up until now your goal has been to destroy all enemies and he's been established as Royd's nemesis), he'll start coming after you. Once this happens you have no choice but to either fail the mission or reset; he won't stop until all your units are toast and all you can manage back is Scratch Damage.
  • King's Bounty has an area which can only be reached by flight, and which contains only a single treasure spot. If said treasure spot contains non-flying creatures, and you were to recruit them and then ditch your flying creatures, and you didn't have any Town Gate or Castle Gate spells, you would be stuck there forever.
  • In UFO Aftershock, it's very easy to render the game unwinnable by simply failing to complete the mission where the Starghosts first appear (either by losing the tactical mission or letting the mission time out in the strategic mode). This mission gives you a research topic which is absolutely crucial for finishing the game and if you miss it, you won't get a second chance.
  • In UFO Aftermath, one research requirement is to complete a mission on the biomass, so that you can get a sample of it to research (the actual mission doesn't matter, as long as you do something on the biomass). It's possible to let your bases get gobbled up by the biomass, and you can only initiate missions in neighboring territories. If you fail to initiate a mission on the biomass, and let your bases get overtaken by it, then you can't research how to stop the biomass from spreading. It also does not spread across water: if you're pushed off the continent where it appears (usually Africa/Asia), you'll be unable to progress.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monster Coliseum, it's possible, in a match, to end up with pieces that can only move in certain patterns against one that manages to evade them perfectly no matter how hard you try to box it in, and since the A.I. doesn't know when to quit, they'll happily continue to avoid your pieces with it, despite being unable to do anything else. In such cases, the only way to end the match would be to surrender or let the AI destroy your Symbol.

    Turn-Based Tactics 
  • XCOM Terror From The Deep has the Tasoth Commander. Researching one of these makes researching the Cool Starship for the final assault impossiblenote . Thankfully, patches keep Tasoth Commanders from showing up for research.

    Visual Novels 
  • The Ace Attorney series has a save-anywhere system with a single save slot. This is ordinarily not a problem, but in some trial sections, it's possible to advance into a dialogue tree where every possible outcome results in a penalty. If you save in the middle of one of these when you're one penalty away from losing, you'll need to restart the chapter. The 3DS games alleviate this by having regularly-spaced continue points where you can restart with full health (lose in a cross-examination and you'll restart at that cross-examination, for instance), and the 2019 re-release of the original trilogy has 10 separate save slots to use.
  • During the second day of investigation in the fangame Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Case 5: Turnabout Substitution, it is possible for the game to not add one piece of important evidence to the Court Record, even though it is supposed to do so. Since that evidence is necessary the following day in the courtroom, when cross-examining Rhea Wits, it makes the game unwinnable.
  • In the original English release off Animamundi Dark Alchemist there were two major bugs that caused players to be unable to finish it, one sometimes causes the game to not display text late in the game on some routes and cause it to hang, and the other more seriously was it fails to register gaining a key item, permanently locking the player to "A Quiet Corrosion", one of the worst endings in the game where Lillith rots away due to an untreated infection. Thankfully they released a patch to fix both issues.
  • In Digital: A Love Story, there is a story-stopper that can be triggered after less than three total BBS connects. Curiously, it is almost guaranteed that it will never happen on someone's first playthrough. The problem? Using a certain "fix" on your Amie causes * Emilio to stop sending messages to you. Not that big a problem, right? except that all BBS activity up until she disappears is triggered by her conversations with you, so you never get to do long distance calling.
  • Jake Hunter Unleashed has a particularly insidious one in the last chapter. At the beginning of the case, you get an option to pick your partner from three characters: Yulia, King and Sam. Choosing Yulia makes it so you cannot access the critical "deduce" option later, thereby preventing you from finishing the case.
  • In A Little Lily Princess the event pretaining each route require to spend resources, which are obtained via doing weekly activities. The resource output of each activity has a Luck-Based Mission element to it. The game offers the player the option to play one route-exclusive event per week-end, or to skip it the week-end to keep the reources for later and/or get an extra chance to collect the resource needed to continue a chosen route during the following week. If the player keeps skipping week-ends, eventually the story mode (basically the events that happen over time regardless of route) runs out of events. This leaves the player with just the activity and event choice screens, over and over again. If the player still refuses to play any route-exclusive events and keeps clicking "Skip Week" until a hundred weeks have passed, all the route-exclusive events become unplayable and the player is locked into a loop where they can't do anything but click "Skip Week". Forever.
  • In Lux-Pain, the game can become Unwinnable during Chapter 7. If you take too long finding Yayoi Kamishiro when she is obviously suicidal, then you will be told that Liu Yee is going after her and get an automatic game over. Your time is basically measured by Nami's phone conversations with you. If you save your game after she's talked with you three times, then the game is Unwinnable. Luckily, the game warns you and tells you to make a new save before all this occurs; you should be fine as long as you follow the game's advice.

    Web Game 
  • The Cartoon Network website's old Shockwave game based off the Big Game XXIX: Bugs vs. Daffy special always shows the losing screen even if you beat the game, probably due to the fact that Daffy Duck won in the original special.
  • In Garfield's Scary Scavenger Hunt, if you've already picked up every available donut box and inventory item, but neglected to pick up the cheese in the TV room AND your scare meter is over 90%, it's game over. Trying to get the cheese will spring a trap that puts your scare meter over 100%, and Garfield will run out of the house in terror. But you have to be playing really stupidly to trigger this - the cheese is one of the first items you see, and you're unlikely to get your scare meter that high unless you're a complete beginner or just messing around.
  • Question 106 of The Impossible Quiz is glitched on the HTML5 build of the game originally found on theimpossiblequiz.io, as the arrow found on the end of the track that you're supposed to follow with your mouse cannot be clicked and as a result the task cannot be completed. Playing the original Flash release from archival services like Flashpoint will allow you to complete 106 as intended.
  • Neopets:
    • The Flash game Meerca Chase 2 involves avoiding Red Neggs which end the game when touched. It's possible for them to spawn in places that are unavoidable, such as appearing directly in front of you or forming a blocked in wall with the previous ones spawned. The number spawned increases the longer the game runs, meaning this is more likely to happen after you've been playing for a while.
    • The site allows players to start a fight in the Battledome with no faerie abilities and only one item with limited uses note  equipped. After the item has been used up, you have no remaining available actions and there's nothing you can do aside from going to the "challenges" page and withdrawing from the fight.
  • Platform Racing series:
    • Some levels feature the use of randomly moving blocks. Though rare, every once in a while, a confined level may have the path obstructed by these blocks.
    • Also rare, but players with the warp item can sometimes reach unintended areas with no means to get back on the course.
  • In Pottermore, during the Chamber of Secrets section, you're supposed to brew some Polyjuice Potion to proceed. To do this, you have to play a potion making minigame, and if you screw up too badly, your cauldron blows up and you've to purchase a new one. Fair enough, except there's a limited amount of money available to collect in the game, so if you blow up too many cauldrons, you may end up unable to proceed.
  • In the Flash game Victory Girl/Pulsar Pureheart on DeviantArt, one of the titular super-heroine's moves is ice breath, done by pressing Insert. The problem is that Mac computers don't have an Insert key on their keyboards, making it impossible to use the move if playing on a Mac. Unfortunately, using ice breath is necessary to get through the tutorial as well as defeat the boss at the end of the main stage, making them un-clearable.

    Wide-Open Sandbox 
  • Fallout:
    • Fallout: You can trigger a dialogue where someone informs you there's a spy in the Followers of the Apocalypse. Great, now you just need to find out who it is and get rid of them, right? Wrong. This quest was never actually implemented—but the consequences of not helping the Followers were, meaning you automatically get their bad ending no matter what you do.
    • Fallout 3:
      • Like Oblivion, some quest-critical NPCs are invincible, but some are not and can die when wandering the Wasteland. Especially once you start seeing deathclaws and packs of radscorpions as random encounters.
      • The infamous Lamplight Vault Access Bug: as the main quest progresses, you discover that a critical Vault's main door is inaccessible (That door isn't even connected to the actual Vault map). Instead, you have to get in via Little Lamplight. But THOSE accesses are blocked until you unlock the proper dialog with the proper NPCs, even if you find the NPCs independently. Fallout 3 is so open-ended that it's possible to complete the quest that unlocks one of the dialog paths before you find Little Lamplight, or you might find and talk your way into Little Lamplight before the main quest fires the need to go there. If you do either of these things, then BOTH dialog paths are pre-empted from the game as if they never existed, and you can't complete the main quest at all. You'll likely be hours of gameplay and dozens of saves down the road before this bug rears its ugly head. The only known solution is to fire up the console and use a clipping cheat to move past the barriers.
      • Load up on Rad-X, Radaway and the best hazard suit you can get, then try to get within discovery distance of the irradiated Vault 87 itself (the place it will lead you does unlock a new place on your map). But unless you brought more than 300 Radaways (you'll need three a step even with the strongest hazard suit, Rad-X, and the radiation immunity perks, and it's 50 steps through the toxic area), you're dead. And if you set the game to quicksave when you find a new place, your file is now permanently Unwinnable. If you happen to try to quicktravel to a less toxic area, then you'll be DOA.
      • At least one NPC in the city of Megaton will occasionally commit suicide while the player is out of town or asleep. He has a tendency to go for strolls on a difficult-to-reach roof area, and will sometimes fall and die, taking his quests and rewards with him.
      • The Pitt shipped with a bug that froze the game instantly when approaching the Downtown area. This was so bad that Bethesda pulled the content from the Marketplace to fix it.
      • There are also numerous physics and architecture glitches, both outdoors and indoors, that can cause your character to become stuck in various places and rendered permanently immobile, forcing you to load, quit or cheat and noclip out (if you're playing on PC). It's enough to make you extra careful not to run into certain nooks and piles of rubble, especially if you're playing the console version.
      • The game gives you the impression that you can take your time on the "Scientific Pursuits" quest (aka the search for your father) when in fact putting it off after other quests will make the game Unwinnable due to certain game design glitches and you won't even know it. You're asked to "search for info about your father" that will "reveal the location of Vault 112", but the lack of specifics have a high likelihood of throwing you off.note  You'll probably end up looking all over the wastes for Vault 112 and/or the necessary resources to find it, including getting the Vault locations from the Vault Tech Headquarters, or getting the Explorer Perknote . Neither of them reveal the location of Vault 112 on your map, and it's easy to look in all the Vaults for more clues since, well, what better place to find info on Vaults than other Vaults? If you go to Vault 87 you can complete a quest that you're not supposed to complete until after "Scientific Pursuits", and if you do so you'll end up unable to get inside the Citadel or the Jefferson Memorial rotunda lab, two locations your quest marker will point you directly towards. And you won't even know until you've spent at least an hour or so rescuing your father from Braun's simulation, taking a round trip through Rivet City all the way to Jefferson Memorial all while rummaging through some story exposition.
      • It is possible to become permanently sealed in Vault 106 with no legitimate means of leaving. If you close the vault door behind you as you enter there is no option to open it from the inside, causing you to be trapped forever.
      • Mothership Zeta has a fatal bug that may cause you to get stuck on the Observation Deck: Sally is supposed to crawl through a vent and open the door from behind, but she just stops there, either at the observation window or behind the door. This is because Somah sometimes doesn't teleport up to the deck from the Engineering Core, resulting in the required scripted dialogue failing to activate. This seems to consistently affect a given saved game, so the only solution is to reload an older save and hope it doesn't happen again.
      • Megaton has two significant problems: first is a bug that can cause every NPC to spawn an inch or so higher every time you enter the city. While not immediately problematic, eventually they'll get high enough the whole lot will crash to their permanent deaths. The city map also has several 'gaps' which strolling NPCs can fall through (and most of them stroll) and out of the world. This won't kill them and any quest markers involving them will point to an area near the School, but they aren't in the School, they're under it, in an area called "The Void" that the engine recovers terminally falling NPCs to. This can happen to Walter the maintenance man (obnoxious but not debilitating) and Moriarty (far more problematic, as he's a plot NPC). On PC you can use a console command to warp right to them or put them back in place; on consoles you're out of luck.
    • Fallout: New Vegas:
      • An oversight can cause the Mr. House quest line to be stuck at the sixth part if you gain infamy with the New California Republic, and by this time, you'll already be banned from both their and Caesar's main quests. Your only option now is to go Wild Card.
      • Doing the quest "How Little We Know" too early (i.e. before being assigned it by Liza O'Malley) makes it impossible to complete the main NCR quest, "For the Republic, Part 2".
      • New Vegas lets you kill everybody (except children). A robot named Yes Man, whose mind is uploaded into a new body every time he dies, is the player's safeguard against rendering the game unwinnable because they've killed everybody else. But due to a bug, Yes Man may not respawn if disintegrated with energy, potentially leaving nobody left to assign the endgame quests.
      • It's possible to get trapped in the bunker from which the Dead Money DLC is accessed, as the game says that a non-existent key is required to go through the exit hatch, even after completing the add-on. The only way around this is to remove the system cache, restart the game, and click "cancel" when asked to update.
      • Near the end of the Dead Money DLC, the player is expected to either fight Christine to the death (and use an item to open an elevator) or ally with Christine (and have her open the elevator for you). You can anger Christine into turning hostile, and then run away until she stops behing hostile. The resulting mix of contradictory event flags leaves you unable to open the elevator, and Christine won't either. If Spoiler Warning's encounter with this state is any indication, console commands are the only way out of this situation.
      • In Old World Blues, if you choose a certain speech option when talking to your brain, you get stuck in an infinite dialog loop.
    • In Fallout 4, the original game was impossible to permanently screw up because the Minutemen would always be an available option for the player and couldn't be made hostile, and there was solid railroading to keep the player on the plotted path for the first half of the game. However, the designers of the Nuka-World Downloadable Content didn't take that into account. Joining the Raiders turns the Minutemen into enemies, but the Raiders have no victory condition of their own and no way to destroy the Brotherhood of Steel or the Institute, so if you've made enemies of everyone, you can't finish the game. An Obvious Rule Patch was released shortly after the launch of the DLC that prevents the Minutemen from becoming hostile to the player. Preston Garvey will chew you out every time you talk to him, but will otherwise continue to act as normal, giving out infinite radiant quests and main story quests as designed.
  • Grand Theft Auto:
    • Oh so many spots that you can access with a tall car and misplaced curiosity...and can't get out again (except maybe per Suicide by Cop). Especially apt Cosmic Playthings manage to fall into the bridge fundaments under the billboard at the hairpin in Wichita Gardens. (As usual, trying to repeat this experience voluntarily doesn't work.)
    • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is home to the "Ryder Softlock", which makes the game unwinnable early on under an extreme edge case. In the mission "Ryder", you are required to get a haircut and buy a pizza. If you don't have enough money to do so, Developer's Foresight kicks in and will give you $50 and $2 respectively for both of those tasks. However, if you have negative money, the game will not account for that and still leave you without enough money to progress. The only way to enter the negative is to gamble in Las Venturas, which outright requires you to travel there early and brave a high wanted level, before gambling into the negative and going back to do the mission.
    • San Andreas has a well-known glitch occurring in the later mission Madd Dogg. You're supposed to line up a truck full of hay under down-and-out rapper Madd Dogg before he jumps to his death, but for still-unconfirmed reasons he can commit suicide as soon as the mission cutscene ends. Fans speculate that this is caused by too many cheats being saved, though this has been mostly discredited. Another theory is that the pedestrian riot cheat has been activated, which makes Madd Dogg walk off the roof to attack the nearest person. There is no way to complete the story mode on the same save file if this happens.
    • The worst Game-Breaking Bug in all of the series has to be the Purple Nines glitch in Grand Theft Auto III. If you complete the D-Ice mission Rumble, it clears the existence of an entire gang. The problem occurs that once you save, the bug affects all saves so the game will never load any more Purple Nines. That makes D-Ice's first mission impossible on any future game saves, as it entails gunning down a set amount of the now non-existent Nines.note 
    • Grand Theft Auto IV's last mission features a jump from a bike to a helicopter. You then hang on the chopper and have to press a certain button to climb into the cockpit. Some copies are affected of being unable to get into the chopper, regardless how often you press, making this an Anti-climax. PC Gamers have the option of changing the button in the options; console users are still screwed as no one from Rockstar Games knows what the bug is or where it came from.
    • A semi-rare bug in Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned can lead the game to not give you any more missions after the museum mission is finished, meaning the game story can't progress and so the game can't be finished. Nothing appears on the radar, and no amount of calling or driving around will cause a radar blip for any sort of mission to appear - the only real fix is to reload from a save, although even that might not save you.
    • In Grand Theft Auto V, the Prison Break heist in Online has a bug where you can't lose the cops once you've gotten the prisoner into the plane and taken off. The 5-star wanted level never goes away.
  • In Legend of Mana during the Heaven's Gate event, there are two battle arenas that just barely overlap. If you trigger the 2nd one while the first is still active, the game will lock up.
  • Minecraft:
    • In order to reach The End dimension, you need to activate the end portal, found in Strongholds, which only spawn 3 times per world. Generation bugs can cause the portals to be incomplete, and if all 3 portals are incomplete, you're screwed. A later update upped the number of Strongholds per world to 128, dropping the probability of this occurrence from "moderately unlikely" to "astronomically unlikely".
    • At times, it's possible to start a new world... inside a hill, or in a lava lake (or, in Minecraft 360's case, underwater). Should this happen on Hardcore...
    • It's possible to find a 2-block deep hole in the (indestructible) Bedrock, and jump in with nothing in your inventory. Be sure that the area around you is also lit up or sealed off so that it will be impossible for any mobs to enter into the hole and kill you/aid in your escape. Rage Quit. After Beta 1.8 added a hunger meter, it became possible to starve to death in hard mode, though in peaceful mode you can't lose hunger, and in easy and normal mode you can't die of starvation. And of course, in Hardcore mode, dying ends the game anyway.
    • You can also make a pool of lava in your respawn point. This is a common griefing strategy, since it also ruins the game for anyone else who dies or tries to enter the server without having already created a bed-spawnpoint somewhere else.
    • You can get a command block (this has to be obtained with a console command itself, even on creative) and set it up to the command /kill @a. This will kill everyone on the multiplayer server and yourself (even on singleplayer) if you activate the command block with a redstone impulse. The unwinnable part comes in when you set that command block to repeat mode AND always active (goes off 20 times a second), constantly killing everyone with no way to recover except editing the map in an external program and removing the command block.
  • No Man's Sky
    • In the beginning, you are normally given a basic ship that doesn't come equipped with a hyperdrive. As a result, you're forced to go through a tutorial section that gives you the blueprints for a hyperdrive and the fuel cells needed to power them so you can craft them when needed. The problem comes if you've purchased the special pre-order ship which comes with a hyperdrive already installed, so players who redeem the ship too early may unknowingly completely bypass the tutorial section and then end up in a situation where they're stranded on a remote planet unable to refuel their ship because they don't know how. Luckily, this was patched after launch to launch the tutorials that unlock the crafting recipe when getting any ship that lacks a hyperdrive.
    • It's possible to claim a crashed ship only to discover that the planet it's on doesn't have the required resources to get it fixed and take off. Better not forget where you parked your old ship!
    • It's also possible for the game to start you on a planet with extreme conditions, a dearth of the elements needed to restore life support, and place your starting ship miles from your spawn point. It becomes punishing tedious or even completely impossible to get to the ship alive.
    • Survey missions from the Nexus run the risk of becoming impossible to complete if the flora, fauna, or minerals were discovered already by a previous visitor. This issue is more common in Expedition mode, which has everyone start on the same planet, as the Space Anomaly offers missions to nearby systems.
  • There is one mission in Saints Row: The Third where, after a cutscene, you will have to kill a brute. However, if you're playing on a slow computer, the game will fail to load the cutscene, causing the brute to kill you before you can do anything.
  • Saints Row IV cannot be beaten in co-op, because desynch between the two players will cause them to automatically fail the pre-Final Boss trench run sequence no matter how well they perform. This bug exists on all versions of the game and was never patched.
  • In Starfleet Adventures, a Star Trek: The Original Series mod for Escape Velocity Nova, the first thing the player does is the Kobayashi Maru, which, true to form, is designed as an Unwinnable Training Simulation. Beating the scenario results in you being stuck in the empty sector used for the sim, with no way out.note 
  • Subnautica lets you modify your PRAWN-suit to include a grappling hook, allowing you to hook onto things for better mobility. The problem comes from the fact that you can hook onto anything big enough for a hook to latch onto. This includes, among other things Reaper Leviathans. Reapers usually follow quite strict patrol routes, however, they are not bound to a location. Grappling onto them results in them flailing wildly to shake you off/use your PRAWN-suit as a chewtoy, which completely negates their pre-programmed path. They often travel quite large distances while doing this, and once you un-hook and run away, they assume their patrol route wherever they ended up. If one (or multiple, depending on your dedication to grappling apex-predators) ends up near your base, you better hope you have a backup base ready to go, otherwise you're royally screwed.
  • In X3: Terran Conflict, firing the Unfocused Jumpdrive takes you to a randomly generated Unknown Sector. Firing it again takes you back to wherever you jumped from. Each firing costs a predetermined amount of Energy Cells; just in case you've used your very last to fire the unfocused jumpdrive, every Unknown Sector you spawn into has a crate of energy cells free for the taking. If you destroy that crate, however - which is almost impossible to do unintentionally - you're stuck there forever. Fortunately, the game being a mod-friendly PC exclusive means there's no situation that can't be gotten out of by cheating.
  • MDickie's now-legendary biblical-era The You Testament is very easy to make unwinnable, as discovered during a Let's Play by Something Awful regulars Chip Cheezum and General Ironicus: If you create a very, very short character and step into a pool, you can not climb out, and have to start all over again. You can see the effect in action in this video, towards the end.


 
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Video Example(s):

Alternative Title(s): Accidentally Unwinnable, Unwinnable By Insanity, Unwinnable By Mistake, Other Video Games, Softlock

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Inworld Origins

While playing the Inworld Origins demo, Critikal encounters a game breaking bug in which none of the NPCs are willing to talk to him (the gimmick being that they can react to his voice), which literally broke the game as he ends the video right there and then.

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5 (2 votes)

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