Back to Anti-Frustration Features.
- A great many platformers such as Crash Bandicoot (1996), Spyro the Dragon (1998), Rayman, and Celeste still allow you to jump a split second after your character has run off a ledge, to help with a slow button press or input lag. This feature is sometime called "Coyote Time".
- A Hat in Time:
- Time Rifts have to be found in the levels, with selecting them from the menu only showing you a picture of where they are. However, not only can you view this picture from the pause menu at any time but once you've beaten the rift you're free to just select it from the menu rather than re-finding it in the level again.
- The game often plays with time in "timed" missions. Murder on the Owl Express isn't even timed at all, with the clock instead advancing when you do specific things. The final battle of Battle Of The Birds does have a timed event but the timer steadily moves slower and slower as it depletes, turning that "80 seconds" into a solid two minutes.
- Like Super Mario 64, choosing one act but finding a different act's Time Piece will complete that other act instead. Even in Subcon Forest, if you manage to earn a Time Piece before being contracted into completing that job, the job will be counted as completed and you'll never even have to sign that contract.
- The Snatcher is the first truly difficult boss in game, and the first one you're likely to struggle with defeating owing to his quick attacks that are difficult to dodge until you learn their patterns. After dying the first time against him, none of the in-fight cinematics are replayed and he also becomes vulnerable much sooner, rather than taunting you for quite a while beforehand like he does in the first battle.
- Lose enough times at the brutal Death Wish challenges and you're given the option to pay to make the level much easier. Initially by paying yarn, but this has since been patched to cost mere Pons instead.
- Alpine Skyline has a brief introductory area with no enemies or items that you have to navigate to reach the main level. Once you've passed it and reached the main level, you will always start there as you have no reason to ever play the introductory area ever again. Also, as this level isn't broken into separate acts, when you reach one of the other peaks and the name of the area appears it will also tell you if you've found the time piece or any treasures there.
- The game features an "Assist Mode" which doubles Hat Kid's health and gives her HP Regen if she stands still for a few seconds. Coupled with Death Wish, this can make the game substantially more possible for a younger or unskilled player if they're struggling.
- The game also features a form of "predictive control", where the game can recognize an accidental double-click and ignore it, so Hat Kid doesn't accidentally eat up her air jump or air dash accidentally before the player intended to. This can be turned off in the options menu.
- Speaking of assistance, the game features a lot of minor physics tweaks to make transversal easier. Hat Kid will be subtly nudged toward ropes, if she makes a blind jump toward a ledge that's off-camera she'll be guided slightly toward it, and bouncy pads and balloons all nudge her toward their intended goal.
- IOS game Badland has liberal use of checkpoints and dying automatically reloads you back to the last checkpoint within a second. The death itself is also very relaxed: instead of showing gory splatter and playing "You Lose" tune, the game will simply Fade to Black with a quite rustle of the leaves.
- Binary Boy for PC. It's short, but has to be completed in one sitting. As such, there are checkpoints after virtually every obstacle in your path and when you die, your character simply drifts down from the screen like a falling leaf until he lands right before the current obstacle.
- Bread & Fred features several Assist Options, including the ability to set your own checkpoints by planting flags on practically any solid, safe surface. You can then have Charlie fly in and take you back to your latest checkpoint at any time, allowing you to quickly regain ground after falling.
- Enemy bullets are ordinarily white in the classic NES version of Contra. For the almost entirely-white Snow Field stage, enemy bullets are changed to red so the player can still see where they're coming from.
- In the first three Crash Bandicoot games, if you failed at a level a certain number of times, the game would give you a free Aku Aku mask (an extra hit point). Fail a few more times, and it would give you a golden one (two hit points). Fail a few more times after that and it would start you off with temporary invincibility. Continued failures also sometimes turned some of the '?' crates into checkpoints, or made new, steel checkpoint crates (so as to not mess with the 100%-boxes rewards).
- Distorted Travesty allows you to change the difficulty level whenever you die... unless you're playing on Distorted difficulty, which locks you into it for the rest of the game.
- If you run out of ammo in Earthworm Jim, the ammo will slowly refill, but only up to 100 shots, which translates to about a second or 2 of rapid fire, the only possible firing mode.
- In Donkey Kong games:
- The first three games will often place the hardest part or the trickiest obstacle of a level after the G letter. Since getting the four KONG letters yields an extra life, you keep the letters you got before the checkpoint, and the letters after the checkpoint respawn upon death, this in effect gives you unlimited attempts at that one difficult part provided you keep finding the KONG letters.
- Donkey Kong Country:
- The game puts an exclamation mark next to a level whose bonus areas have all been found, so that the player won't waste time backtracking to make sure they got every secret.
- On top of that, the game has an Instant-Win Condition when it comes to finding secrets; the player only has to find the rooms, not win their challenges or even finish the level for them to count for your percentage. This makes backtracking for the secret rooms much easier, since you can just find the missing secret and then start-select to exit the level to save time.
- Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze: As the number of figurines to collect increases each time you clear a world, and getting unique figurines is a Luck-Based Mission as they're only available through the Capsule Toy Machine in Funky Kong's shop (with no real way to manipulate the chances of getting a unique one), Funky will stop the player from using the machine if all the unique figurines currently available had been collected, preventing them from wasting their hard-earned Banana Coins on the machine.
- In Epic Mickey, Mickey's reserves of Paint or Thinner will slowly refill to one-third of their maximum if they ever fall below the amount.
- While Eversion has its challenging levels, it gives players a huge saving grace by keeping track of each gem they pick up even if they die or restart the level, meaning that once you get the trickier ones (such as in the levels with an Advancing Wall of Doom) you don't have to pick them up again if you die, and you can still achieve 100% Completion without clearing the levels in a perfect run.
- The last level of FreezeME is a lot more linear than the other levels, so it uses the game's Teleporters as checkpoints to prevent the player from having to redo large sections of the level before they gain the ability to fly.
- Grapple Dog:
- There are accessibility options for the player, including infinite jumping and invisibility much like Celeste before it.
- If you die enough times at a certain segment, the game gives you the option to skip to the next checkpoint.
- Finally, in the time trial mode, you can hold Y to immediately restart a level.
- Every room in Hargrave is like a miniature Death Course. You have to deal with spikes, conveyor belts, slippery tables, indstrial mashers, flamethrowers, turrets, killer robots, flamethrowers, laser hallways, and vanishing platforms, and you're a One-Hit-Point Wonder. The goal is to get through all of the obstacles and collect an energy cell at the other end of the room, and make it to an exit. But if you die along the way, you have to start all over again. To mitigate this, you're given unlimited retries, and you can warp to the game central hub if you want to skip needless backtracking.
- In I Wanna Be the Guy and its spinoffs, it is usually very easy to accidentally save in an Unwinnable situation. Unless you regularly backup your savefiles or use the savefile editor program a fan eventually created, you're out of luck. However, one fangame—Pickory—automatically backs up your old saves and lets you undo a bad save just by pressing backspace.
- While not actually a game feature, the creator of the original I Wanna Be the Guy will fix any unwinnable saves for you.
- I Wanna be the Boshy gives you an extra jump if you reload after saving in midair. This is actually needed to progress in some sections.
- Realizing that "Nintendo Hard Platformer" is a frustrating enough formula, the developers of Mirror's Edge added completely unnecessary and impractical (for the enemy) visible-to-naked-eye laser sights to all enemy-wielded sniper rifles, giving the player at least a vague idea where they should run without being one-hit-killed by an enemy they could neither reach, nor even see. The aesthetics of the game are also usually stark white with very noticeable splashes of color marking out the path the player should take through the level.
- Mega Man starts with three items and Rush Search in Rockman 4 Minus ∞. In addition, dying three times on the final Escape Sequence causes the spikes to turn green and only do one damage, in addition to giving you more time.
- Mega Man Legends often puts a save-point before bosses, where you can fully restore health, ammo, and repair your shield. During the Naval Battle after you've sank the smaller vessels and the Balcon Gelede appears you're instead given the option to retreat and restock before facing it as odds are your ammo is drained and your ship beat to near hell after facing the rather long naval battle that proceeds it.
- The Mega Man X series upgrades the Classic series' E-Tanks into Sub Tanks. While you can only have four of them, Sub Tanks are refillable by collecting health pickups when you're already at full health, compared to the one-time use E-Tanks. The PS1 games limit you to two Sub Tanks, but allow collecting health pickups to refill your tanks even if you're not at full health, while Mega Man X8 allows the player to pay Metal to refill their Sub Tanks in-between stages. To make up with the fewer Sub Tanks, starting with Mega Man X4, you start the game with more energy than the first three games.
- Beginning with the PS1 games, mid-stage checkpoints count as a continue point if the player ran out of lives during a level. X5 and X6 takes this a step further and the player can continue the game after a Game Over from any checkpoints that they passed mid-stage.
- While Mega Man X5 attempted this with Alia as your new navigator, most players just saw her as an Annoying Video Game Helper who killed the pacing of the levels with her constant Captain Obvious hints. While the system was never removed, Mega Man X6 made answering her calls completely optional, and Mega Man X8 added two more navigators to provide more specialized info while also giving the option to go into a stage without a navigator.
- Mega Man X DiVE has quite a few perks compared to previous games in the franchise as a whole:
- After you get a character or weapon from the gacha, each subsequent pull of the same earns you patches you can buy memories with to buff the star rank. The patches apply to all memories equally, so you can keep increasing the star ratings without having to wait for a new banner to roll around and trying to draw the same thing again.
- The armor, weapon and gallery-based boosts are universal, with the characters not having a strict 'levelling' system, only needing their rank and skill levels boosting, meaning that all characters have the same base stats.
- In most Mega Man games, touching spikes/needles results in instant death; here, you simply lose a chunk of HP instead, which is fixed no matter the difficulty level. If your character has access to a damage-reduction shield as well, even that can be negated.
- The Offline version completely removes the 'blind box' aspect of unlocking characters and weapons, allowing players to pick and choose characters to play with and their favourite weapon options, allowing every player to have their own personal customized experience. As a trade-off, only a selection of characters and weapons are available until you progress in the game.
- The Offline version also has a unique way of dealing with the rolling event schedule. Whichever event was running at that time on the original version gets automatically activated and has priority on the main menu music. Also, you can manually add or subtract additional (formerly) limited time events and use the event vouchers to unlock any Event content, not just that event's.
- Monster Party is not an easy game, even in spite of the character's vastly huge health bar, as the bosses are very unforgiving and your bat is a weak short-range weapon unless you manage to use it to deflect enemy attacks back at them. To make up for this every level has at least one enemy who will guaranteed drop a health power-up and at least one who will drop a pill, and it is always the same enemy each time. Because enemies respawn, a patient player who has memorized which enemies drop what (such as the first fish in Level 2 who always drops health) can keep their health topped up by memorizing these locations which takes a massive bite out of the game's difficulty.
- Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart included many of these to help modernize the then-19 year-old franchise and help make it more accessible:
- Notably, you have the ability to skip any puzzle in the game with no consequences.note Both the Clank and Glitch puzzles have stories, but aside from conversations and growing their confidence, they're entirely self-contained.
- The game also has the ability warp back to before the Point of No Return after you've passed it, helpful if you find it too difficult and need to level up your weapons.
- Speaking of which, it's possible to acquire enough Gold Bolts to unlock Infinite Ammo and Infinite Health before reaching the end of the game, and you are not punished in any way for turning them on, making it far more convenient to upgrade unconventional weapons like the Shield Repulsor. This is in stark contrast to Ratchet & Clank (2016), which locked the XP of Ratchet and his weapons for having either of them active.
- Rift Apart also features one of the largest suites of accessibility features for any video game at the time, and many of them benefit both disabled and abled players. For example, you can use the Contrast filter (which colours objects like Enemies, Collectibles and NPCs) to make Gold Bolts and CraiggerBears easier to find, and then map it to the D-Pad so you can turn it off when you don't need it. The ability to slow the game down has also been used by virtual photographers to help pause the action at the moment they want to far more easily. Certain multi-button moves like the Melee Throw can be mapped to the D-Pad too!
- Rockman 7 EP: To make it clear what Proto Man and Eddie's upgrades do, the first time you die to the Post-Final Boss, a cutscene plays of an E-Tank or a 1-Up restoring Mega Man's health to full. This cutscene is instantly skipped on subsequent deaths.
- Fail a mission in Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus enough times, and you'll start it with a 'lucky horseshoe', moving you from a One HP Wonder to a Two HP Wonder. Later games used a Life Meter, making it unneeded, although at times if you died in a mission with a 'Do Something X Times' theme, it would let you keep the ones you did already. Sometimes.
- Enemies can also occasionally drop lives and the game seems to show mercy by MASSIVELY increasing the chance of this happening if you're low on them and have been dying a lot. Notably it might throw you a bone and let 2-3 enemies in a row drop them if you're on your last.
- One case in particular: in the second game, there's a mission where you must steal blueprints from Raja by feeding him drugged melons and then picking his pocket. He has a really annoying habit of waking up just after you pick his pocket and catching you, making you fail the mission. However, the game always counts your successful attempt when it starts the mission over, which is probably the only reason anyone's finished the game. (That, and Bentley automatically escapes when he gets the last one.)
- The third and fourth games always give you a rather easy Fetch Quest as your first mission in a new world with your objectives clearly labelled and sprawled all across the area. This helps you get a lay of the land and see what kind of enemies and dangers are waiting for you so before throwing you into the more difficult missions.
- When you complete a level in the Something series, the game automatically brings up the save prompt. In the original game, the game only saves after a Ghost House, Castle or Fortess completion.
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- In the Game Gear/Sega Master System version of Sonic the Hedgehog, the labyrinth boss battle takes place completely underwater, but you cannot drown on the stage, because the drowning timer is turned off.
- One of Sonic the Hedgehog's signature abilities, the Spin Dash, came about because of one of these. In the original game, the only way for Sonic to gain speed was to run forward, which made some stages frustrating, as the player would have to backtrack through the level if they didn't have enough speed to clear an obstacle. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 fixed this by giving Sonic the Spin Dash, which allowed him to accelerate to full speed from a standstill. The Spin Dash has been used by almost every Sonic game since then, and some ports of the original Sonic give you the option to turn on Spin Dash for it.
- In Sonic CD, Act 3 of each Zone contains a 1-Up Monitor, often close to the start and easy to find, essentially giving you an unlimited number of tries at beating each boss. While most of the bosses are easy enough that you won't need them, they come in very handy for Stardust Speedway and especially Metallic Madness, where just reaching the boss can be difficult.
- For the first three Genesis games, the requirements for entering the Special Stages and getting the Chaos Emeralds became more lenient with each game. In the first, Sonic had to make it to the end of the Act with 50 rings and then jump into the giant ring just after the goal post (which could be easily missed if running at full speed, meaning there's not enough time to run back and jump into it) and you don't get a giant ring in Act 3 nor anywhere in Scrap Brain Zone, effectively giving players a maximum of 10 attempts to get 6 Emeralds. In Sonic the Hedgehog 2, touching a checkpoint with 50 rings activates a Special Stage warp, giving the player as many tries as there are checkpoints, and in Sonic 3 & Knuckles access to Special Stages is gained through finding giant rings hidden in each level, and the ring requirement is removed completely. Sonic the Hedgehog CD, while backsliding in making players get to the end of an Act with 50 rings and play a minigame to get a Time Stone, also made getting the Time Stones completely optional for getting the Good Ending, as you could also do it by traveling to the past in each Act and hunting down and destroying a certain machine that's producing Badniks.
- Sonic Adventure alleviates the potential frustration of getting lost in the fairly large hub areas with Tikal's hint orbs, which usually tell the player where to look for the next story beat. These orbs also show up in Knuckles' levels to guide the player to the nearest emerald shard, and in the boss fights to give tips if the player dies repeatedly.
- Sonic Heroes:
- During some boss fights, the characters will go up to Level 3 with only one orb container.
- Your AI-controlled partners are effectively invincible. They don't lose rings when hit and instantly respawn without any lives lost if they fall into pits.
- Sonic Unleashed and every Sonic game since then puts a sign over a Bottomless Pit, indicating which pits are bottomless and which aren't, avoiding players having to find out for themselves through trial and error.
- Sonic Mania:
- Most of the level layouts, enemies and obstacles taken from previous games have been toned down in difficulty, starting with the platforming sequence from Green Hill Act 2 that now has a bed of spikes instead of a bottomless pit. Mechanics that slowed the pace too much, such as the elevators from Flying Battery, have been left out as well.
- The boss of Chemical Plant Zone removes the stage timer for the duration of the fight, mainly because of the Unexpected Gameplay Change and the RNG involved with it. Furthermore, Eggman's A.I. for it is also pretty bad, so as to give the player a good chance to win since it's an early-game boss and players may not be familiar with the source material note and its strategies. Despite being based on original rules, the aforementioned boss includes Double Rotationnote , a function that was originally introduced in Puyo Puyo 2.
- The Final Boss area is considered separate from the atrociously long Marathon Level that precedes it, and resets the timer upon entering the area, as well as setting a checkpoint right before the boss.
- Though the Special Stages have a simulated low draw distance, the Chaos Emerald-carrying UFO always remains visible regardless of how far away it is, preventing the player from losing track of it.
- Stage elements can no longer be used up by the A.I.-controlled character in a Sonic and Tails game, an "& Knuckles" game, or in Encore Mode. This means the A.I. can't deprive the player character of an oxygen bubble, platforms won't fall before the player character stands on them, etc.
- In Oil Ocean Zone Act 2, entering a submarine and then exiting it will reset the ring-stealing toxic fumes. Additionally, the fumes mechanic is removed completely for the boss fight.
- At the start of the True Final Boss fight that is only playable after getting all seven Chaos Emeralds, just before your character turns Super, they are silently given a Lightning Shield to help collect the rings that fly across the stage.
- In Spongebob Squarepants Battle For Bikini Bottom, the pause menu offers a handy list of collectibles in each level that doubles as a fast-travel system, with each Golden Spatula task acting as a destination you can choose. This cuts down on backtracking immensely and effectively lets you warp to any important location in a matter of seconds, as long as you've been there once to unlock the tasks to begin with. Additionally, warping (Or "taking the taxi," as the game calls it) usually spawns you as whichever character is needed for the task you choose, letting you carry on without having to find somewhere to switch characters.
- There's also Teleport Boxes, which come in pairs you can freely teleport between. They're usually placed at the beginning and end of a level or tricky platforming section, so that you can quickly get back to where you were after finishing a challenge and have an easy way to bypass said challenge if you come back later.
- In Spyro: Year of the Dragon enemies won't react to you when they are off-camera, with the exception of Egg Thieves who don't attack but simply run away, ninjas since attacking from behind is kind of their thing, and any enemy that gets lucky enough to wander into frame from behind and immediately attack since it's now in frame. This saves you from a lot of cheap hits from enemies lurking around corners and also gives you a bit of breathing room when engaging an entire crowd. Abusing this makes the gun-toting dinosaurs a lot easier to contend with.
- Super Meat Boy, being the Nintendo Hard twitch-platformer it is, has very quick, automatic respawns after death. No more "PRESS R TO TRY AGAIN", yay! The levels themselves are short, from 15 seconds to 90 seconds, so that after you die, you don't have to go through too much again.
- Various little side-quests when you get too frustrated with the main game, like beating past levels in record time, collecting bandages to unlock new playable characters, or playing through retro-styled "warp zones".
- When you finally do beat a level, the game then shows you a replay of all your past lives doing the level simultaneously, which is good for showing you where the hardest parts of the level were. It's also kinda hilarious to see a ton of Meat Boys get shredded to half their number by a giant saw.
- In The Adventures of Lomax, the game is very generous in providing plenty of pots that pop out of the ground and contain either spare helmets (which work as a Single-Use Shield and enable you to use several of the abilities) or additional uses of an ability. It helps in situations where lacking a helmet or an ability would make the level Unwinnable, and in crucial moments, these pots will keep infinitely reappearing if you run out of either.
- In Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, if you already have 299 Opals in a level (leaving just one left) and grab an Opal Magnet, the last Opal will fly directly to you from wherever it is (unless it's in a crate).
- Yoshi's Woolly World has "Mellow Mode", which gives Yoshi wings so he can constantly float in mid-air by holding the jump button (rather than his usual, temporary flutter), provides more hearts from health sources, starts over the boss battles at the beginning rather than the last checkpoint, and if you die a certain number of times, you're given an egg which makes you invulnerable. There are also optional badges you can equip before starting a level which can show hidden items, bounce you out of bottomless pits, and make you invulnerable to lava and fire, all usable in regular and mellow mode. In the 3DS re-release, Mellow Mode also gives you the Poochy pups, who serve as infinite homing boomerang eggs.
- In King of Thieves, if you find yourself getting killed repeatedly by the same trap in an opposing player's dungeon, that trap will be removed for free until you either complete the dungeon or give up.
- Rabi-Ribi's "Dodge Master" achievement series requires defeating bosses with no damage taken. However, several particularly-long late-game bosses will allow you to take one to three hits depending on the boss and still get the achievement.
- Sonic Erazor has the Hard Part Skipper, a device that's placed before especially difficult parts that will skip them, though you lose all your rings and power-ups in the process.
- Even though Yooka-Laylee makes use of dynamic lighting to create an accurate shadow of the character based on ambient lighting, it still also renders a perfectly circular shadow directly beneath the character so you can easily line up your jumps.
