Basic Trope: A video game where death is simply treated as a very minor inconvenience.
- Straight: Bob dies, the only real punishment is that he's sent back to the last checkpoint.
- Exaggerated: Bob dies and respawns in the exact same spot, no loss of power-ups or anything else. It might possibly be beneficial at points.
- Downplayed:
- Death Is Cheap
- Bob is sent back to the last checkpoint, but the obstacles are still difficult enough that having to redo them is mildly punishing.
- Bob loses a few coins when he dies, but coins are so easy to get in the game that this hardly counts as a penalty.
- Justified:
- Bob can use a highly advanced cloning machine to not only reconstruct himself but to regain all of his power-ups that would have been lost.
- The Grim Reaper has a personal investment in ensuring Bob completes his quest, and pulls strings to put him back on his feet.
- Bob is a clairvoyant and any time he dies is contextualized as him having a vision of his future death with the checkpoints/save points serving as markers for when he'd have these visions. When he dies, he snaps back to that moment having seen his upcoming death and is able to continue as if nothing happened because it hasn't yet.
- Inverted: Continuing is Painful
- Subverted:
- The Game Over screen pops up and the power-ups float away from Bob's body.
- One of the last levels takes place in the afterlife, and he can't regenerate there; if he dies, he starts at the previous level.
- Double Subverted:
- Clicking continue causes the power-ups to float back to him, resulting in no loss in the first place.
- or only those collected at this level float away as an anti-cheat.
- A collectible powerup in the level removes this detriment.
- Parodied: Bob actually accepts death as a minor inconvenience and makes a game of how many times he dies in a single level.
- Zig Zagged: You can die and respawn at the same point until you run out of lives, in which you get a Game Over but selecting continue let's you start at the same point you got the Game Over in the first place.
- Averted: Bob dies, loses a life and has to start at the last checkpoint with a few powers lost.
- Enforced: The developers didn't want to make a controller-throwing difficult game in the first place.
- Lampshaded: "How do you keep bouncing back like that so easily after dying?"
- Invoked: Bob is cursed by the villain to be immortal, but not invulnerable.
- Exploited: The Genre Savvy Bob intentionally leaves himself in the line of fire, knowing that respawning brings him back to full health.
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed:
- Bob spends his entire adventure trying to figure out exactly why Death Is a Slap on the Wrist.
- Victory comes too easy to be meaningful the Hero's eyes.
- Bob remembers in-universe every death he goes through, meaning he's aware of every painful, Cruel and Unusual Death he has suffered.
- Reconstructed:
- Bob figures he might as well make the best use of his near-immortality, no matter what its source is. Or that a logical explanation for said phenomenon in a world with magical and unrealistic beings is meaningless. Or both.
- Bob is the kind of person who plays to win, regardless of the journey. If he does feel bored at first, he'll remind himself that at least, he has an advantage that greatly facilitates his tasks.
- Dying painfully several times eventually results in Bob becoming desensitized to the pain, so he starts experiencing his constant cruel deaths as just business as usual at best and a minor annoyance at worst.
- Played For Laughs: Bob respawns without any harm done, but his clothes don't.
- Played For Drama:
- He feels and remembers his every death in graphic detail.
- The opponent also has this advantage.
Back to Death Is a Slap on the Wrist. You may have to pay a small fee to be resurrected there but it's nothing punishing
