This question is about progression and "punishment" when you lose. A lot of games will make you loose progression when you lose. This creates tension and thus, make the game feel "hard". They'll often do that with extra lives
However, a common sentiment is that redoing the same things over and over is annoying, which is a fair point tbh.
So how do you make your game "hard", but not annoying and repetitive when it's not a randomised or procedural generated one?
For example, in Shovel Knight, a typical action 2d platformer, there's no extra lives and no Game Overs. So when you die, you just lose money. And even then, you can get that money back. But you get thrown back to the last checkpoint, so you lose all that progress you've made up to that point. And some might argue that getting back to were you died at can be pretty annoying especially when you keep dying over and over.
So is there a way to "fix" that, and make games just hard and not "annoying" or is that actually an immutable part of hard difficulty? Would a game where there's nothing to lose even be fun?
Now, some other games do something else entirely : instead of making you lose progress, you lose something else (collectibles, equipment, etc). That "something" can more or less be important in order to progress. But then another problem arise : when it's not important, where's the risk then, where the challenge? Some players might not care about what they've lost and just move on. And if it's important to progress, are they just stuck at the same spot, doomed to redo the same stuff over and over until they find a way to progress? Wouldn't that more or less be the exact same problem as the initial one?
For this reason people that suck at Mario 64 would just keep dying over and over and never unlocking new levels. They wouldn't lose progress per se, they'd just be stuck. And if people aren't patient, they might give up on your game.
What do you think?