Instead of Corpse Runs, what’s your favourite alternative for death consequences?
Howdy everyone! As I’m sure many of us have seen, there’s been some discussion here about soulslike elements in metroidvanias recently, especially on the topic of corpse runs (aka returning back to where you died, to retrieve otherwise permanently lost items/currency).
Firstly to clarify: this isn’t meant to spark the debate again about the value of soulslike aspects in MVs lol. Nor do I think that inherently soulslike aspects are good/bad! If you love corpse runs then please feel free to ignore this post.
But for those of you who aren’t a fan, I’d love to know what different approaches you think metroidvanias can take that replace corpse runs as a mechanic. In many cases, death in video games needs to have some sort of consequence, or else the player has no real reason to avoid it.
The obvious choice to me is: just don’t make the player really ‘lose’ anything at all, other than progress to an extent. They’re respawned back at the last save point and they just have to, well, do the same thing again. This is obviously tried and tested across the genre, but I’d be really interested to hear any more ‘novel’ approaches than that one too.