SPELLBOUND
A game where you can never die sounds like it’d make you fearless. Why worry about failure when you simply fall unconscious and wake up somewhere else? It turns out the opposite is true in. Failure costs something more precious than a videogame life – it costs time. Time to heal, to rest, to repair gear, to travel all the way back to the site of your defeat to try, and possibly to fail, again. Immortality is more terrifying than death.
He stripped me of my belongings and threw me into his dungeon
You can’t just reload your last save when you lose a fight, because constantly auto-saves your progress. Every lengthy trip across the map (there’s no fast-travel or mounts), every purchase at a vendor or skill upgrade at a trainer, every decision in a questline, and every single fight, is an event that needs to be very carefully considered and prepared for. The auto-save harsh, and feel punishing at times, but beyond making your failures meaningful they also make triumphs monumental.
