In the universe of video games, death is often just a constraint, a minor obstacle that can be overcome with extra lives or conveniently placed save points. However, some games like to make death more meaningful, forcing you to start over from the beginning every time you hit a “game over.” Worse yet, some games take it a step further by only letting you die once. In these games, death isn’t just an inconvenience; it’s a unique and irreversible experience. Discover the 10 video games where you only have one chance to survive.
10. Zombie U
ZombieU is one of those games that emerged in the early 2010s, during the madness of the zombie apocalypse. However, unlike its competitors, the game takes a unique approach to heightening the terror of surviving in the presence of the undead. Every death in Zombie U is permanent. Although the game has a save system, when you die, you do not resume the game as your previous character. You respawn in the world as another survivor, and your previous character is transformed into a zombie. Each death makes your experience unique. You must reacclimate to your surroundings and your new character, then venture out into the world to retrieve your belongings from the zombified body of your previous character. Sure, it can be frustrating to lose a character you have grown attached to, but it is precisely this emotion that Zombie U exploits to intensify the post-apocalyptic struggle.
9. You Only Live Once
At one time, Newgrounds was the home of the most eccentric and creative Flash games on the Internet. One of those games was " You Only Live Once", a platformer where, as the name suggests, you only get one chance to get through an obstacle course. Unlike Mario and other conventional platformers, "You Only Live Once" doesn't grant you extra lives. You have five hearts to survive a few hits, but when you lose them all, that's it. You have no options to continue, no going back to the menu, and no starting over. You're simply dead. However, the game doesn't actually end. Instead, it advances time to show you what happens after you die. For example, if you die at the hands of an enemy, you'll see them call an ambulance for you, then get arrested for your murder. You'll then see your humble grave in the very spot where you perished. It's a level of realism that even Red Dead Redemption 2 didn't offer.
8. Rogue Legacy
Rogue Legacy is not your average rogue-like game. Normally, the genre is all about starting over, choosing your character, entering a dungeon, trying to survive as long as possible, and when you inevitably die, you start all over again. But in Rogue Legacy, the game never lets you choose the same character again. The whole gimmick of Rogue Legacy is that you don't play as a single hero, but a whole lineage of them. So when your character dies, they don't come back, and instead you play as one of their descendants. Each hero in your family tree only has one life. Getting attached to them usually ends in great disappointment and inevitable frustration. On the other hand, the randomly generated list of descendants keeps the game interesting for much longer. Plus, if you manage to reach the end, you get to see how many descendants it took you to get there. Nothing is more powerful than knowing you had to sacrifice decades of your lineage to achieve this.
7. Project Zomboid
At the start of each game in Project Zomboid, the loading screen informs you that the story you're about to embark on is the story of "how you died." This may sound like a stretch, but in the reality of Project Zomboid's post-apocalyptic world, it is. Unlike other survival games, Project Zomboid doesn't have an easy mode that lets you reload your save file. Everything you do is recorded in real time, and if you happen to die at any point in your journey through zombie-infested Kentucky, your character is lost forever. The only way to continue playing in your world is to create a new character who will inevitably die as well. The death system in this game is truly unforgiving, as it doesn't take much to lose your character's precious life. Zombie bites, while guaranteed to kill you, are really the least of your worries. It's more likely that your character will die from food poisoning or stabbing themselves with a piece of broken glass. Anyone who's ever played Project Zomboid knows the pain of losing a veteran survivor with thousands of zombies under their belt to a fall down a flight of stairs.
6. Rimworld
Rimworld is an unpredictable and traumatic game set in the distant future where humanity has colonized planets near and far. Rimworld puts you in charge of a colony of survivors and tasks you with ensuring they safely escape their deadly and isolated planet. The game features several modes to customize your experience to your individual needs, including a "commitment" mode that ensures your playthrough will be a unique challenge. Given the game's multitude of randomly generated elements, from colonists to maps to events and even item descriptions, nothing is ever the same. Add to that the fact that your unique colonists are magnets for death, and the narrator can decide to rain down a toxic cloud on their heads at any time, and "commitment" mode becomes a truly unique experience. One fatal mistake can wipe your entire colony off the map and turn it into a distant memory, never to be recreated.
5. Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey
Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey is an open-world survival game in which you attempt to guide a tribe of primitive humans through their evolutionary journey. As expected from its prehistoric setting, your tribe's life is not easy, requiring them to overcome many dangers and trials to reach the final stage of their evolution. This is reflected in one of the game's key features: each member of your tribe only has one life to live. Each time you take control of a particular primate in your group, you are given complete responsibility for their existence. You must guide them safely to the point where they can pass on their DNA to the next generation of humans. If you fail along the way, they become a dead link in evolution. Ancestors features several merciless death animations for those who failed to properly care for their primates, including scenarios such as slowly bleeding to death and even being devoured by a gigantic centipede. And once you witness the tragic end of your previous protégé, you immediately get another one to take care of, or maybe he will meet the same fate. Evolution is truly a cruel mistress.
4. Reigns
Reigns is a card-based strategy game where you play as a king learning the ropes of ruling a kingdom on Tinder. Every decision in the game appears as a card that you must swipe left or right. If that doesn't sound intense at all, that's because you haven't yet discovered the consequences of each decision. Reigns features four stats for your kingdom that you must balance with each choice. If you fail to keep them all above zero or prevent one from becoming dominant, your kingdom will suffer a crisis, followed quickly by your king's gruesome end. Since the game has no save system, your king's death is permanent, and the only way to continue playing is through your heir, provided you have one. Since each king has a unique background and traits, you'll never be able to play the same game again. After all, it's hard to rule a kingdom after being burned at the stake and chopped into little pieces.
3. Wild Frost
Wild Frost is a 2023 roguelike deck-building game about a village of adventurers trying to save their world from eternal winter. Despite its cute art style, the game has become infamous for its high difficulty, partly due to the fact that the slightest mistake will cost you your adventurer's life forever. At the start of each game, you will be able to choose from three randomly generated heroes, each with a unique ability and appearance. This means two things: first, no matter how many times you play, you will never encounter the same character twice, and second, if your character dies at any point, you will never be able to play them again. Each hero only has one chance to save their frozen land, which can be especially brutal when you get an incredibly powerful character and they die because of a stupid, predictable mistake. Worst of all, Wild Frost keeps a record of every character that dies in a special book, so you can never forget all the poor souls you've doomed during your playthrough. A true survivor's guilt, everyone's favorite activity.
2. DayZ
With the rise of titles such as Rust and more recently Valheim and the new Sons of the Forest, the online survival genre has become a huge part of the gaming industry. However, the game that was there from the beginning and helped popularize the genre is certainly DayZ. While many critics criticize DayZ for its gameplay, which boils down to hiding in the bushes for hours only to die at the hands of a random player, the game popularized the concept of permanent survival. DayZ's core concept is that death isn't a gimmick, and its permanent survival servers remind players of this in a rather devastating way. Every time you die on a permanent survival server, your character is deleted from the game, and you can't respawn on that server. As you can imagine, this can be a pretty tough situation for someone who spent a week gathering supplies only to lose them all in a random encounter with an unfriendly stranger. At least you know they won't be having fun for long either.
1.OneShot
OneShot is a truly unique game where you play as yourself, guiding a little cat-child named Nico on his quest to save the world. What makes this title special is that you effectively only get one chance to play it. No matter what ending you get, the game won't let you continue or start over unless you do a little bit of data manipulation in your system's folders. Even death counts as an ending. In the original version of OneShot, quitting the game was tantamount to abandoning Nico and his world. You'd return to the game to find that Nico had disappeared, and starting a new game would instead take you to a dark and eerie room. There was no way to go back except by directly manipulating the game's data. You could say that quitting a game is tantamount to abandoning your world is a bit extreme, but on the other hand, it's an incredibly memorable experience.
