Unwinnable By Design / Video Games

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• AI War: Fleet Command:
  • If the player beats a max-difficulty AI without resorting to massive cheese (in the sequel, on a game mode which disables cheesy options outright), they're expected to file a bug report telling the developer how they did it and offering suggestions on how to improve the AI to fix the vulnerability. This AI arms race is behind quite a lot of the game's Artificial Brilliance even at lower difficulties.
  • A game with two opponents both at difficulty 10 is intended to be unwinnable. Anything that lets you win such a game without massive cheese or exploits is considered a bug or imbalance and to be patched; if the difficulty scaling bugs out and spawns a million ships, as long as it doesn't happen on lower difficulties it's a feature and will remain. The devs have stated that 10/10 is meant to only be honestly beatable by someone who sinks as much time into the game as pro StarCraft II players put in; since nobody does, the level should be unwinnable.
• Alex Kidd in Miracle World had a situation that counted as Unwinnable when the game was released. If you didn't pick up the letter your brother talked about, then you did not receive the stone slab with the combination on it to unlock the last part of the game. The stone slab is not required, however, if you know the combination of by heart. But if you don't know the code at all, then this renders the game Unwinnable. Guide Dang It! now, but the guides probably wouldn't give you the code without the slab then.
• Alone in the Dark:
  • In the original game, you need two small mirrors to defeat the Nightgaunts at the top of the stairs and proceed further into the game. If a monster attacks you just once while you are carrying the mirrors, they will shatter and are lost forever. There are only two mirrors in the entire game. Without both of them intact, the game is unwinnable. Other possible unwinnable situations are entering the caves beneath Derceto (it is a Point of No Return) without every required plot item^note including the key above the ballroom's chimney, which is required to open a chest that contains a gem unlocking the door to the final boss's room, and the star-shaped amulet of the library's secret room, which is required to beat the final boss (the library's secret room itself being very hard to discover), neglecting to unlock the passage back into the basement so you can get back after the bridge collapses (depending on what version you're playing), and running out of fuel for the oil lamp, which you need to reach and defeat the Final Boss.
  • Downplayed in second game. There is a bullet-proof vest which reduces damage and keeps Carnby from getting stun-locked. It has limited durability, and if you break it before an area where you must fight off multiple gun-wielding enemies at once, unless the player moves very quickly, all you'll be able to do is watch Carnby in a Santa suit repeatedly flinch and then fall down dead.
  • In the third game, advancing in the plot requires to shoot a villain with a golden bullet (one hit is enough to kill him). There are exactly 11 golden bullets in the game (a single Winchester round and a bag of gold coins kept by the enemy himself, that can be stolen from his hands with the whip). Naturally, using up those bullets will make the game unwinnable.
• A big one in Another World (also known as Out of This World), among other examples: If the player floods the cave with water but fail to shoot out the wall of the pit so the player can get back into the flooded caverns as well as cross the pit, then the player will be unable to progress. The player also get stuck if Buddy gets killed. Fortunately the game's checkpoint system is based on tasks, not on locations. The player can always die after screwing up and even if that's not possible, a password can still be used that takes the player to the last checkpoint. There are no passwords that takes the player to an unbeatable situation.
• The Atelier Series is a set of JRPGs that focus around not only levels and grinding, but the major objectives of these games is to craft specific items prior to a deadline. Often to complete these missions in the best way, you not only have to craft these items, but craft them in particular ways with particular bonus ingredients, and you often have to spend your time focusing on other aspects of the game to maximize certain aspects. You also likely have to get your side characters leveled and max their affections so you can complete their side objectives, and doing all of this takes varying amounts of time that subtract from your total until the mission has to be completed. Needless to say, it can be almost impossible to know this until it's too late, and spending too many days collecting resources can mean you have absolutely screwed yourself out of the golden ending or even winning at all if you accidentally bypassed a major aspect of the mechanics.
• The NES/Famicom Porting Disaster of SNK's Athena has a very nasty example. After beating the boss of the fourth stage, you get a seemingly useless inventory item and move on to the fifth stage, the World of Hell. This stage is very easy to die in, with constant Respawning Enemies and Bottomless Pits abound. After much strife, you may eventually reach the boss, only to notice that no matter how much damage you pump into it, it just won't go down, try after try. As it turns out, the item the boss of the fourth stage dropped is what prevents the fifth boss from being completely invincible. However, if you die, it's gone forever, and since you can't revisit previous stages, the only remedy is to restart the entire game.
• Baba is You:
  • In addition to the usual traps of Block Puzzle games, you can also lose control over a certain object by breaking apart the "[Object] is You" rule associated with it. If that was the only such object, the music stops as if to tell you you'll need to undo/restart.
  • Level Meta-15, "The Box" can be rendered unwinnable before you enter it, because its solution relies on you having turned Meta-14 into a flag. Thankfully, the game's level structure makes fixing this problem a matter of simply backtracking and doing the earlier level correctly.
• In Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning, whenever you find a notebook, you need to answer three math problems, but if you get one wrong, Baldi will come after you. It doesn't take long before the third problem in a notebook becomes a garbled mess that's impossible to solve, thus ensuring Baldi will be coming after you.
• In the Baldur's Gate series, you cannot talk with anyone who's hostile to you. To prevent the game from becoming Unwinnable by making a plot-critical (i.e. you need to talk to them to advance the plot) NPC hostile, the game will immediately kill you if you make them hostile. The methods differ from fire from the sky (Tethoril) to death by a game-breaking amount of magic missiles (Gorion) to spawning assassins that instantly kill you (Aran/Bodhi in their respective paths, Elthan). Most of these NPCs are almost impossible to kill on top of it.
• Getting the good ending in Batman: Dark Tomorrow requires disarming a signal device before going to the final Boss Rush. Save at any point during the boss rush without having disarmed the device and... better hope you have more than one save file or else you'll have to start over to get the good ending.
• Text adventure Battlestar in the BSDGames package has a few users that the author didn't like (specifically, wnj, root and ted). Playing with an account with those usernames causes the game puts a few enemies in the starting area and greatly reduces inventory capacity - and the only weapon you can find only chips away at their health.
• The Binding of Isaac:
  • Using the Bible while fighting Satan kills you, with no prior indication that this will happen. What's especially cruel is that the Bible instantly kills both Mom and Mom's Heart, the two previous "final" bosses. Players would naturally think that it'd do the same to Satan only to die with no warning and have to start again from the beginning. It's even worse if you suck up the Bible using Void, as it's very easy to forget what items you've voided and then accidentally kill yourself by using it on Satan.
  • Taking a Telepills has a small chance to teleport you to the I Am Error room, which can only be left by teleporting again or by going down to the next floor. If this happens on Depths II then you'll be forced to skip the Mom fight and not pick up the Polaroid or the Negative, preventing you from progressing past the Cathedral or Sheol. This can also happen on the Womb II, where the error room will either give you the option of going to the Cathedral or Sheol. If you intended on going to the other floor you won't have the right item to progress past the floor and your run will end prematurely. What's worse is that all pills are unidentified until you take them once, so you might not even know you have a Telepills until you take it and it ruins your run.
  • Getting to Mega Satan usually requires the two key pieces, which can only be gotten from angel rooms. It's entirely possible that the game will just screw you over and only give you devil rooms, as there's no way to guarantee an angel room. Afterbirth reworked this so you can also get the key pieces from sacrifice rooms. While it's still possible that the game won't give you enough angel rooms and sacrifice rooms combined, it's much less likely. Characters who can't get HP still have to rely on getting angel rooms though, as they can't use sacrifice rooms. "Repentance" further mitigated this by allowing you to force at least one Angel Room to spawn in a run by entirely refusing to enter the first Devil Room that spawns in a run.
  • The first step in unlocking The Forgotten in Afterbirth+ requires you to beat the first boss in under a minute, then use a bomb in the starting room. It's entirely possible for the game to give you no bombs on the first floor, meaning that some attempts are doomed to failure from the moment you start playing. The game attempts to alleviate this by making Sacrifice Rooms grant a bomb on the first life payment if the player has no bombs, but these rooms are not guaranteed to spawn. The player may not have the health to survive a payment either, especially if they chose to attempt this run with Judas, who has the attack power to meet the timer portion of the challenge more easily but only starts with a single heart.
  • Similarly, the alternate path introduced in Repentance requires a key, two bombs or two hearts to enter, depending on the floor. If the game doesn't give you these resources by a certain point then you can't enter the alternate path and you're locked out of getting to the Corpse. Thankfully this is unlikely, since you only need to enter the alt path at the end of the second floor and by that time you'll probably have the pickups you need.
  • Starting the Ascent requires you to fight Mom and then teleport out of the room. To ensure this is possible on every run, a marked skull that drops a Fool card will always appear on the floor. Initially, if you had Little Baggy then the card would change to a random pill and you wouldn't be able to teleport. This was patched so the skull dropped a Telepills instead when you had Little Baggy. Though there's always the chance that Telepills will put you in the Error room.
• In the BioShock games, the hacking mini-game can become unwinnable, especially further on, as a consequence of the increasing difficulty. This is especially true in the first game, where overload and alarm slots can appear in unavoidable patterns. The idea is to force you to use hacking tonics to dial them back down to a winnable state, or find other ways to deal with your problems.
• Blaster Master:
  • In the sixth stage, there's one point where you can shoot upwards through a set of blocks and enter a door, but when you return, the blocks will have respawned, and you can't shoot downwards, so you're stuck for good unless you commit suicide. In some other places like this, you can't do that either, so the only option is to reset.
  • There's a small gap to the right of the gate that leads to Area 2. Falling into it causes you to get trapped because there's not enough room to perform a precise jump through its small entrance and get out.
• BloodNet has two main ways to render it unwinnable. The first is that main character Ransom Stark has a Bloodlust meter (representing him losing control of his vampiric hunger), which must be reduced with either blood or by using his bite attack. The bite attack is instant death and can kill any NPC in the game - even ones you need alive to reach the ending. And Ransom will use it automatically on a random target if his Bloodlust maxes out. The other method is speaking to certain characters with Nimrod 7 in your party; Nimrod 7 is despised by many of the gangs in the city, and several of them will go permanently hostile if you speak to them without sending him away first, which can render the game impossible to finish if you didn't get key locations from them first.
• Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead's Revenge has a fairly dastardly example. The first level is spent collecting items to use through the rest of the game and it's entirely possible to leave the first level with only a small portion of the items. If you leave the first level without the Voodoo doll all of level 2's objectives are rendered impossible to complete and you can't go back to the first level for the voodoo doll. You also need either the newspaper or the dollar bill or you won't be able to finish level 2. You should also bring the crystal gun and plenty of ammo before finishing the first level as levels 2 and 3 have no ammo or spare weapons.
• Upon completing Bokosuka Wars, you get to play a more difficult loop of the game that places additional obstacles in the form of skull tiles that kill one of your units if they move into them. Once you reach the castle, you will encounter narrow hallways with these skulls blocking the way, and the only way to progress is to sacrifice your lesser units to them. If you don't have enough units, King Suren will be unable to progress.
• The freeware Windows version of the old Macintosh game Bolo comes with a number of maps prepackaged. One of these, called Better Best Map Ever, has all arrival points in the center of the board, which is deep sea and where all the pillboxes are. And even if you sacrifice a lot of tanks to get the pillboxes to hit each other, there will still be a few pillboxes left standing.
• In Bombuzal, since the bombs you have to detonate in order to clear each stage often cause the tiles they rest on to be destroyed when they explode, the number of options for moving around the stage gradually goes down as you blow them up. This can potentially leave you with no way to reach the remaining bombs or detonate them safely if you do things in the wrong order, at which point your only option is to lose a life and try again.
• A game simply known as Bow And Arrow had a level in which a white dove passes by the main character, followed by swarms of black birds. If the player failed to exterminate even one of the black birds, then a later level is impossible. The game's story between levels does say that the dove is carrying a message from you to a helpful wizard, and the later level does say, "I hope the message got to XYZ". The game did not explicitly say, however, that all the black birds had to be eliminated.
• In Brain Dead 13, if you run away from any of the "big three," then it's impossible to beat the game without restarting. You'll find out you've screwed up after you've crawled the castle a few times and start to suspect that it has no ending.
• In Bucky'O Hare, the Blue Planet is not possible to complete without completing the Green Planet and rescuing Blinky to break the ice blocks. Either use a password to revert back or get a game over to reselect planet.
• A few times near the end of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, which is especially unpredictable since in most of the game it's impossible to make a mistake during the riddles. But it isn't as frustrating as it seems, because at these moments it is impossible to reach a savepoint.
  • On the ship, starting the engine requires the player to find a blowtorch, turn a specific wheel, fix a pipe with the blowtorch, turn another specific wheel. Not turning the right wheel will cause the engine to explode and kill the player.
  • On the Devil's Reef, a door near the exit of the level must be reached within a timer. To trigger it, you have to put a jewel in a mechanism, run to the other door and put a red crystal in the opened claw in front of the door; when the timer expires, the claws close; if the red crystal is put in the claws the door opens, if not nothing happens. The first problem is that the timer can only be triggered once. The second is that near the triggering mechanism there are claws like the ones you have to reach; the ones near the triggering mechanism hold a green crystal and also open when you put the jewel in the timer's mechanism. The green crystal can be picked up by the player, but if it isn't in its claws when the timer expires the door won't open.
• Cannon Fodder: Most phases can become unwinnable if you use up all your grenades and missiles with targets still left to destroy. A couple of phases deliberately give you less explosives than you need to destroy all the targets: the winning tactic in these is to lure enemies to fire on the targets.
• In Castle Master, instead of Bottomless Pits, there are pits that drop you into a dungeon called an oubliette. You survive the fall just fine, and you can still move around down there, but there's nothing to see except the walls and a skull called Yorick, and there's no way to get out. You're just stuck there, trying to find the exit, until you eventually give up and start the game over.
• The Clock Tower series as a whole plays with this. It's possible on more than a few occasions to create unwinnable scenarios, depending on if you missed an item or failed to do something, and you won't know about it until much later when there's nothing you can do about it. However rather than just giving you the generic Game Over screen you instead get alternate (and worse) ending sequences, all of which you need for 100% Completion. There are also obtainable extras that give you warnings on how to avoid these fates (or trigger them if you're a completionist), such as advising you to find the flashlight or remember who you gave the Demon Idol to.
  • Clock Tower: The First Fear has two such possible states that get you stuck in a permanent loop of Game Overs, ironically triggered by the game's otherwise very merciful "continue in the room you died in" mechanic. Thankfully they both rely on fairly unlikely circumstances:
    • Meeting Ms. Mary in the telephone room without learning her true identity or picking up the ham will get you tossed in the cage with the starving-to-the-point-of-cannibalism Simon Barrows, trapping you in a permanent loop of waking up in the cage, getting killed and eaten, game over, continuing from the moment you woke up in the cage...
    • Fleeing from Scissorman by jumping the gap in the second story hallway, and then entering the storeroom and happening to be ambushed by Scissorman without first picking up the rope and using it to make an escape to the first floor, makes you unable to get away. You'll be unable to interact with the rope to create the escape when being pursued, be cornered and killed by Scissorman, and continue in the room where he immediately ambushes you again...
  • Clock Tower 2 features several unwinnable scenarios, most of which involve talking to a particular character in the wrong form. Two particularly cruel instances involve situations that the game doesn't properly warn you about:
    • Shortly after the protagonist survives an attack from the first enemy of the game, she leaves the room the enemy is lying in and stands in the hallway. You're supposed to turn around and lock the door with the key you used to open the room, but this is never made clear anywhere. If you don't lock the door and you leave the hallway, then the game becomes unwinnable and one of the worst endings will play shortly after reaching another section of the house.
    • The worst case is the samurai armor the player has to inspect. It can only be examined in the first section of the game. Failure to do so will result in the armor dropping out of a window during an unavoidable cutscene several hours later, killing the player character and securing a bad ending long after anything could be done to avoid it.
• A mini-game form of this happens in The ClueFinders. There's one mini-game in Search and Solve where you guess a few times, and then figure out which coordinates the spaces you have to hit are. The problem is, sometimes you can get unlucky and you either a) have all the spaces clustered into one spot (and your initial guesses are on the other parts of the map), or b) they're all spread out; and by the time you know which symbol and colour represents which row and column, you won't be able to win. It's going to take a lot more than just four.
• Colossal Cave Adventure:
  • The original Colossal Cave Adventure has a nasty one near the end — after you deposit the last treasure, you have a small number of moves to get back into the cave system before you're locked out of it (literally). If you're anywhere in the caves when the timer expires, then you're whisked to the last two locations; if you aren't, then you can't get back in — and thus can't end the game.
  • Several in the bridge:
    • If you give the troll a non-recoverable treasure to pass (as in, not the magic egg), then you'd have lost it forever and won't get it back.
    • If you return via the bridge with the bear still following you, the bridge breaks under the bear's weight, causing you to fall and die. You can then respawn back at the starting location, but once you make it back to the bridge room, the bridge will still be gone, and if you left something you need on the other side, you're doomed.
• The text adventure adaptation of The Colour of Magic gives you various opportunities to eat and drink, particularly in part 1. If you miss one, the game becomes unwinnable — but this only becomes apparent when you are in the Wyrmberg in part 3, after painstakingly transferring your saved position through loads and loads of cassette loading.
• One level in Commander Keen IV featured monsters who didn't harm you, but appeared in puffs of smoke to steal items before you could collect them. This included a key necessary to get to the end of the level. In fairness, however, if you were unable to kill all of these monsters before they got to the key, then you deserve to lose. Granted, you can reload a saved game or commit suicide in a tar pit to try again.
• Companions Of Xanth:
  • In the real world, before using the Xanth CD to begin the game proper, you must take the mustard from the refrigerator. You need it to defeat a hot dog half-way through the game.
  • If you drink from the lake filled with "hate water", there are no apparent ill effects at first, but then your character begins hating everything around himself until he can no longer continue with his quest. Almost mockingly, there's an option to "undo" your last move once the game over happens, but obviously it won't work since you've drank the water many turns ago. Especially annoying as drinking from the lake seems to be just harmless game flavor.
• In the SNES version of Cool World, you can be teleported to Las Vegas two times after you get the pen. But if you fail to ascend towards the Hotel, or waste your time after capturing the Doodles, you will be teleported back to Cool World. The second time will be the last time, and you will be stuck in Cool World forever.
• That arcade game Crossbow featured unarmed adventurers walking from left to right across a screen, whilst bats, birds, scorpions, monsters, stalactites and arrows moved in on them and had to be shot by the player to ensure safe passage. The arcade cabinet featured a light gun shaped as an actual crossbow, meaning you could aim as quickly as you could move the weapon. The home versions used a crosshair moved by the keyboard or joystick - and in the Commodore version it moved at the same speed as all of the enemies. Accidentally move your crosshair past any enemy, and you can watch it crawl back with no chance to stop a crow or rat chewing through five humans in one go.
• Crypt Of The Necrodancer
  • There is a trap that consists of four arrow pads pointing towards an item. If you grab the item without either destroying one of the pads or having boots that allow you to move over them, you get stuck with no way out. Normally, you could just wait for the stage's song to end, which would make you skip to the next stage, but if you play as Aria (who dies if the song ends) or Bard (who is unaffected by any music-related mechanics, including the song's time limit), you are completely stuck.
  • If you play as Monk, who dies if he so much as touches a single coin, you'd better always keep a spare bomb handy. If you kill an enemy that is standing over the exit, or kill a boss's minions in such a way that the gold they drop forms an impassable barrier, and you cannot blow up the coins, you have no hope of ever getting past them.
• Dark Seed, which featured art by H. R. Giger, thrives on this. The game has a rather specific solution, complete with many chances to screw up before the end. For example, you only have enough money to buy two items at the store, there are many items available, and you need to buy the right two to win... and you can't buy them at the same time. For another example, you need to set up an alternate way to enter your house before you ever learn that the main way will be blocked. Also, you're playing in "real time", and you need to be in the right place at the right time for certain events. Essentially, the game expects you to keep starting over from the beginning until you get it right. You also need to get put in jail at ONE point in this game with three specific items that you need to put in your cell for later to finish the game. The game hints at one of them if you listen to your car radio, but not the other two.
• Dark Seed II, the sequel to the above, has another mean example: in the Dark World, when you see an important character die, you get an extra life, which allows you to avoid getting a game over when you die. You get a freebie after the first cutscene in the Dark World...or so it seems. There's an item you need to escape the Dark World, and you have to see a specific scene (the privileged worker being sentenced to death) and then die to find it. If you die before you see that scene, or if you don't pick up the item afterwards, you waste the life and are now stuck in the Dark World forever.
• The Freescape game Dark Side included sensors which zapped you into a prison cell called Io Confinement (often misnamed "I/O Confinement" in maps and walkthroughs) containing an item needed to finish the game, which could only be exited by firing at energy-draining doodads by the door, causing the door to open once you'd sacrificed enough energy. Heaven help you if you ended up there with insufficient energy to do that, or to survive for long once out — or if you destroyed the sensors before they could imprison you.
• Driller, the prequel to Dark Side:
  • Both Driller and Dark Side have a game map in the shape of a rhombicuboctahedron (18 squares and 8 triangles, of which 3 squares and a triangle meet at every corner), the back-story in both cases being that this is an artificial world built around a natural moon by the erection of the square platforms over the moon's surface. In Dark Side, the triangular facets are simply inaccessible (blocked off by forcefields), but in Driller it's possible to drive off the edge of a platform and fall through the triangular hole onto the surface of the original moon... from which there is no way back, so it's quit-and-restart time.
  • There was also had an All There in the Manual moment which probably served as Copy Protection. The game involved erecting drilling rigs on each of the world's 18 square platforms, in order to tap gas pockets and blow off their contents into space, thereby rendering them harmless so the moon doesn't explode and destroy its world when struck by a meteor in a few hours' time. The gas pockets varied in size, the smaller ones being harder to locate, and one of them was so tiny as to be impossible to locate without being told exactly where it was — which one of the illustrations in the manual did, so those who got a pirate copy without also getting a copy of the manual (or who didn't bother to read the manual) stood no chance of winning.
• Dead In Vinland:
  • Because of the Unstable Equilibrium and steadily ramping difficulty, it's easy to get to a point where your party and your camp are so badly damaged that you can't gather enough resources to heal/fix them, so it's impossible to recover and the rest of the game is just a death spiral.
  • If you fail to pay one too many tributes and hit 100% on the Big Bad's Animosity meter, you also don't lose right away; there's still at least one checkpoint before the inevitable end.
  • Normally there are earlier checkpoints; the game autosaves on every in-game day, though it's hard to remember where you were on, say, day 42 or day 77 and the game deletes all subsequent checkpoints if you restore an earlier save. However, there's also True Viking mode, where you only have one save file. If you get to an unwinnable state there, you are well and truly screwed.
• Dead Rising and its sequel use this design trope well. The plot to find the root of the conspiracy has several key points where Frank/Chuck have to be at an appointed place at or before a certain time to get info/save someone/defeat someone. (Special emphasis is given to Chuck's daughter, who has to be given medication between 7 and 8 AM every day to prevent zombification.) If they don't perform these actions, a warning will come up on screen saying that "The Truth has disappeared into the darkness" - followed by an option to start over while keeping their previous experience - or letting them still keep playing and trying to just get out alive. And since many of the plot threads and additional survivor scoops overlap, in addition to some of the main characters succumbing to Plotline Death later in the story, letting the plot expire is actually the easiest way to get achievements for saving 50+ survivors. This is eased by the fact that the game is designed around multiple runs, all of the levels you have gained carry over between runs, so it isn't like you are starting from zero every single run.
• Kemco's NES version of Déjà Vu (1985):
  • The most notable frustrating unwinnable scenario was if you've used up your last 3 coins going somewhere other than Peoria, required to beat the game, and have already taken a free cab ride.
  • At the beginning of the game, you find pills in a bathroom that can be filled with various medicines, some necessary to complete the game. In the same room is an unlabeled medicine which turns out to be deadly poison. Presumably the designers meant for you to put the poison in the pills swallow them, die, and load your last save. However, if you put the poison in the pills and continue through the game, it becomes unwinnable because there is no way to put a different medicine in the pills without swallowing them first (or feeding them to an NPC, which will kill that person and also make the game unwinnable). It can take several hours to discover this.
• In Devil Survivor, there is one particular boss (Beldr) that only you, the main character, can damage (and thus kill). If you die, and no live character or demon has (Sama)Recarm on hand, then the battle keeps going... without a chance of winning. Also, while the plot makes this complication clear the first time you encounter him, he comes back during the Boss Rush that precedes the Final Boss, by which point you might have forgotten...
• The Dirty Harry game for the NES has a completely normal-looking room which you cannot exit after you enter it, forcing you to reset the system. It's not a bug — the door is replaced with graffiti saying "HA HA HA". Word of God says that this was done entirely deliberately to pull a prank on the player.
• Due to the story variations in the ending to the Dishonored DLC The Knife of Dunwall you can't complete certain challenges if you were aiming for a High Chaos game. On High Chaos, Billie Lurk doesn't pull a Heel–Face Turn and instead the final conversation leads into an immediate Boss Battle, but Billie begins the fight by being alerted as any other guard in the area. As a result, the Ghost Run and Stealth Run challenges for that level, and the entire game if you were trying, is instantly voided.
• The 1980s platform adventure game Dizzy had a nasty situation two screens from the starting position. A bridge over a deep crevasse needs to be crossed many times during the course of the game. Many, many times. If just once you tread in the middle of it rather than jump, then the bridge vanishes. It doesn't respawn.
• Doom:
  • Subverted in the final map of the first episode. The hero is teleported into an inescapable pitch black room surrounded by demons where he is torn to shreds. Many players repeatedly attempted to fight their way through the demons or find their way out of the darkness, wondering if there was a different ending. This is a subversion because the hero is SUPPOSED to die, and in fact that's the only way to complete the episode.
  • Some fanmade Doom WADS play this straight, especially the 'Terry WAD' genre, which usually involves what appears to be a normal map but then leads to an inescapable trap that freezes the player's controls, plays loud annoying sounds and flashing images and sometimes deliberately crashes the game. Some Terry WADS are actually beatable, though, but only if you know exactly how to avoid triggering the traps.
• Dracula Unleashed:
  • The game was a Full Motion Video game that was also part adventure. There are numerous times where you can make the game unwinnable. A few of them are Guide Dang It! moments. One requires you to go to a bookstore late at night so you know there is a secret passage there. If you didn't go there, then you don't know that there is a clue you can look for. And if you go into the Asylum unprepared, then Hellsing is strangled in front of you and you can do nothing more but wait for a Game Over.
  • The entire game more-or-less takes place in real time; every single event and travel to a destination uses up time and you're told at the start of the game that you have four in-game days to finish. Not going to a certain event at a certain time of a certain day or simply wasting too much time going to wrong locations is all it takes to make the game unwinnable. Beating the game requires extensive trial and error to find the correct order of events and then performing all of these events as quickly as possible in one near-flawless run.
    • What pushes this deeper into the cruelty scale is that there's a set of leads and plot thread about the "Bloofer Lady" which is a red herring; pursuing these leads does nothing except waste your time, since the Bloofer Lady plot ends in a dead end and gets you no closer to Dracula.
• Echo Night: At one point, you have to enter a sort of flashback and collect a fallen toy before escaping. Escape without the toy and you can't enter the flashback again, leaving you unable to proceed.
• Echo Night 2: Master of Dreams, the Japanese-exclusive sequel to the first game, is infuriatingly full of these (perhaps not quite, as you can still beat the game in most cases, but 100% completion, and the good ending, are permanently locked away without warning).
  • Very early in the game, a ghost is looking for a pepper grinder. There is one behind the ghost in the bar, but he asks for a partiture in exchange. Took the partiture from the music room and gave it to him? Oops, there goes 2 of the astral pieces, locking you out of the best ending. Instead of taking the partiture, you have to listen to the second song in the bar jukebox and replicate the first 8 notes in the music room's piano. The piano ghost will play the song and attract the bar ghost, making both disappear to the forever after, giving you two astral pieces and opening the path to get the pepper grinder yourself. The only vague hint you get of all this is that the piano ghost will complain rather desperately once you take the partiture, and the bar ghost will comment on the jukebox song once you listen to it.
  • A bit later, in the archaeological lab, you eventually come across a pen that clearly belongs to the manager. Give it to her and she runs off, never to be seen again, locking you out of hers AND two other ghost's Astral Pieces. You're supposed to talk to her while wearing three different jackets in a specific order (very barely alluded to, and which resets if you leave the room) and give her a microscopic lens that's hidden in one of the drawers. You'll be whisked away to a flashback, and THERE you're supposed to give her the pen to make her leave the room and allow you to get the jacket from the bed, said jacket being the only way to free two of the ghosts.
• Whether or not El Ajedrecista (Spanish for The Chess Player) counts as a video game is questionable as the game interface/controller was an actual chessboard^However...it is considered the first computer game, but it does provide the Ur-Example of this: it played a king vs. king+rook endgame (the human got the king, El Ajedrecista got the king+rook) and won every time. It's an unusual example that the player knew the game was unwinnable from the very beginning. Since El Ajedrecista was built in 1912, it makes this trope Older Than Television.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In Daggerfall, almost every quest is timed and gives you the option to reject it, including much of the main questline. Break the main quest chain in this fashion at any point - which is possible as soon as the very first step after leaving Privateer's Hold - and it becomes permanently unwinnable. The first step in the main quest will give you a second chance if you miss it, adding another month to the time limit, but only once.
  • In Morrowind, as all NPCs are mortal, it is entirely possible to kill someone critical to the main plot and thereby prevent you from completing it. The game is decent enough to tell you when you do this (see the message below) so that you can reload a saved game. There is also a "back door" method of defeating Dagoth Ur that requires only one living NPC, Yagrum Bagarn, the last Dwemer, but it skips the entire story and is pretty well hidden. However, this NPC can die as well. This is also true for other major plotlines, such as those for the Guilds and Factions you can join. (However, you will get no such message there.)
  "With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
  • The seven-minute Speed Run of Morrowind — watch it here, or watch an even shorter run here — demonstrates that Munchkin tricks can be used to bypass the plot routes altogether. This changes the problem: the only way to render Morrowind Unwinnable when those tricks are taken into consideration is to collect the two essential Plot Coupons and then plant them on a corpse, since loose items left anywhere in the world never despawn.
• The horror Role-Playing Game/adventure game Elvira 2 - Jaws of Cerberus can be easily made unwinnable - especially by destroying a vital item (step on a fireball trap? Good-bye spell book!), such as by using it up for a spell, or for the wrong spell (or by using up a spell at the wrong place and time). In addition, entering the wrong room without appropriate protection will result in your death (and you have no idea about the danger until after you die).
  • Elvira 2 is pretty much Made Of Unwin. One of the worst instances: at one point, you need to animate a Frankenstein's Monster so that it moves away from a door that it obstructs. However, if you click on the monster's head beforehand, then you'll automatically cut off the wires connected to its head, making it impossible to animate. The worst thing is, the game never tells you that you have cut the wires; there are no hints that clicking on the head would have any ill effect.
  • The game even makes jokes with its own unwin-ability. It is possible to get your hands amputated by springing a trap (or have the piranhas in the aquarium eat both your arms). The game allows you to keep playing... but you can't use any items since your hands are gone.
  • Some other situations seem unwinnable but have alternate solutions (though you can block them, too). For example, if you fail to get poison from the mad scientist (you only get one try, after which he'll throw you out of his lab and lock the door), you can instead get the key from the piranha aquarium using a telekinesis spell. But if your Intellect and Level are low enough, you will only get one use out of the spell, and spending it there you will have made the game unwinnable once again since you won't be able to retrieve certain keys from a trapped alcove later.
• Etrian Odyssey:
  • Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold: The Fafnir Knight has a floor in its second dungeon - Ginunngagap - that tells you beforehand that you can't leave, and any attempts to do so will do nothing. What it doesn't tell you, however, is that the area is also full of moving walls that are actually overpowered F.O.E.s. Considering that they're able to trap you between walls where your only way out is through them, and that F.O.E.s are already extremely overpowered to begin with, your only choice is death if you take a wrong turn. However, the game does place three treasure chests in the first room of this floor, each with an item that allows the player to escape from almost any battle - including F.O.E.s - to the entry point of the floor. There are also one-way shortcuts that can aid a player in escaping a situation before it becomes hopeless, and the F.O.E.s will walk back to their neutral positions when the player leaves the room, allowing the player to make a different attempt at passing through the rooms.
  • Etrian Odyssey Nexus features a Trick Boss segment: One boss is defeated (The Berserker King) only for another to show up with no chance for you to jump back to town and rest (Cernunnos). Between these fights, you're given a full-party heal (HP, TP, Force gauges) and a chance to save — one of the very few times in the series where you can save away from a town or geomagnetic pole, no less. If you choose to save, the game warns you to please save your game in a new slot (which in turn requires having an SD card), because if you can't defeat the second boss with everything you've got and you've got no other save to fall back on, it's time to start the entire game over!
• Everquest had the Sleeper. This fight was intended to be hopeless, but the designers didn't tell that to the players, so they would try anyway. They were careful to not make the boss actually invincible, so others would try it on other servers too. And there can be only one attempt on the entire server, ever. The quest to wake the sleeper can only be completed once and cannot be finished by any other players after completion. Once the raid inevitably wipes, this boss runs rampant through the entire continent of Velious and kills a major NPC. It was killed on ONE server many years later with Zerg Rush tactics in a raid force consisting of over 300 players.
• From Eye of the Beholder 2:
  • Temple Level 2 had two rooms with doors that permanently closed after you entered them, trapping your party. You had to reload a saved game to continue.
  • Silver Tower Level 2 had a room with a pile of magic items and a dying Darkmoon priest. You have to kill the priest to get the treasure — but if you do, then the pressure plate he's lying on releases and the door closes, trapping you forever.
• Many of the boss fights in Final Fantasy XIV are designed to instantly wipe out the whole party if certain mechanics are not done on time or if they are done incorrectly. Other bosses will get a massive buff in attack power or attack speed that make it impossible to weather out since the damage given and/or the rate of damage pumped out is simply too much for the healers to counteract. The bosses are obviously beatable, but they will become unbeatable if you screw up.
• The Fire Emblem series has this built right into the main gameplay, for most of the series. The general formula for a campaign is that you fight one battle, then the next, and you are expected to level up your army and manage your equipment as you go. Your weapons break over time, and units who die in battle are lost permanently. If you lose too many units, or run out of weapons, or rely too much on your Crutch Character and fail to level up your army properly, you may find yourself in an impossible situation.
  • The final boss of most of the games is only vulnerable to certain characters with certain equipment. Many of these characters can sometimes be missed, killed, or underleveled, and many of these items can be missed, lost, or broken. As an example, in the first game, you will have serious difficulty beating the final boss, Medeus, if you don't have Marth with his Falchion. Marth is the main character, so he cannot be missed and you get a game over if he dies, but getting the Falchion is a fairly involved process.
  • Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem:
    • There is a later mission where you are supposed to meet with an NPC to receive an item that allows its holder to negate the Plot Armor of the second story's penultimate boss and ultimately kill him, however, it is possible to complete that chapter without ever talking to this NPC, and the game will continue as if you had done so regardless. This will later bite you HARD when you finally get to the game's penultimate boss and you quickly realize that without that item in a unit's inventory, it is impossible to even attack the boss, let alone kill, and there's no way to replay a completed mission outside starting the entire campaign over.
    • That same chapter also has another item that is required to obtain in order to and get the final two missions and the good ending, that involves collecting all of the twelve Star Orb Fragments. Missing even one of the fragments denies you the chance to finish the whole story. And about half of them can easily be missed if you do not know exactly what to do beforehand.
  • In Fire Emblem: Thracia 776, there are several chapters that require you to use a key (or a lockpick owned by a thief) to progress in the mission. Should the thieves be too tired to participate in the mission (or too dead for that matter) and/or you do not have any keys/lockpicks, you will not be able to finish that chapter (and by consequence, the rest of the game). In fact, you can encounter this situation as early as the third chapter if you did not do the Chapter 2 Gaiden mission (to recruit a thief that comes with a Lockpick) and unwittingly kill the only enemy that has a Door Key in Chapter 3. Additionally, from chapter 8 onward in that same game, you are always required to select a minimum number of units in order to begin the chapter; should enough of your units either be exhausted, captured, and of course dead at that time, it is possible to actually lack the required numbers to start the chapter, let alone try to complete it.
  • In Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, you need to acquire and keep eight special, powerful weapons intact and keep a certain character alive in order to proceed to the final three missions and the good ending. Six of these eight weapons are acquired in extra chapters, but accessing them can be impossible unless you know what exactly needs to be done to get to them (for example, to access one of the extra chapters, you have to keep a fairly powerful enemy unit alive; he won't join you even if you talk to him, but he will deal considerable damage if he gets close.). And, like all the other games, you cannot replay a completed chapter.
  • Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade puts you into a Forced Tutorial on your first playthrough. In Chapter 4, Lyn is forced to talk to Dorcas in order to introduce the recruitment mechanic. It's possible to have all your party members except Lyn killed before this point (Lyn dying ends the game). Chapter 4 is an Escort Mission based around defending Dorcas's wife Natalie, who is in a central room and cannot be moved. If no one is blocking that room when Lyn goes to speak to Dorcas, an enemy will charge into the room and kill Natalie in a single hit. Getting to this point with no one except Lyn means you can't move on. (On a second playthrough or later, Lyn is not railroaded into recruiting Dorcas and can protect the room herself.) Admittedly, you have to be either very bad or very foolish to play Chapter 4 with just Lyn.
• The creator of Five Nights at Freddy's stated that he was pretty sure that 4/20 Mode (playing the custom night with all four AIs set to the max difficulty of 20) was impossible to beat... and then gamers began beating it. So many people beat it that he added a Cosmetic Award for beating the mode.^note However — no matter how good you are at the game — the mode is still a Luck-Based Mission without very specific and counter-intuitive strategies. 4/20 mode cannot be beaten without running out of power. Winning the mode is a total matter of luck — if Freddy decides not to play his longest song at the end of the night you cannot win, and if Foxy attacks too many times he will drain your power prematurely.
• The US Army's version of Full Spectrum Warrior (used for NCO tactical training) includes a mission that is unwinnable, teaching noncoms that yes, you will lose battles and people will die. Defied in the commercial release.
• Garfield: Big Fat Hairy Deal is a Cruel variant. You play as Garfield, who has a constantly depleting hunger meter. When it runs out, Garfield eats whatever he has on hand. If the meter depletes and Garfield doesn't have any items, it's Game Over. The game is full of Moon Logic Puzzles and Red Herrings, so it's hard to figure out what you actually need and what's just there to refill the hunger meter. There's no indication when Garfield eats something important, so you're doomed to wander around until you run out of items to eat.
• The Gateway series of adventure games by Legend could be made unwinnable, but it was usually obvious when you did.
  • For instance, breaking the PV commset in the beginning of Gateway 1 makes it impossible to receive a crucial message later on, but that's obvious because the screen cracks. Wearing the ring while in the mirror room in Hell in Gateway 1 also eventually makes the portals close, so you'll be stuck. But if that happens, then you can simply type "die" and restart.
  • You can also miss a particular meeting, where certain items are handed out, and be stuck.
• The NES version of Gauntlet is laden with these.
  • You must complete all of the "?" rooms to acquire the password to Room 00 at the end. The password is randomized within a certain pattern, and while it's possible to guess if you know the patterns, not knowing them or missing all the "?" rooms (which is entirely possible) traps you right before the last level.
  • Room 96 is a trap - it has no exits. There are two exits in Room 94 - one goes to Room 95, the other to Room 99. As Room 95 only exits to Room 96, taking the Room 95 exit screws you out of finishing the game.
• The first sequel to Ghosts 'n Goblins, titled Ghouls 'n Ghosts is the only game in the series to give Arthur an actual melee weapon, the Sword, and its range is as awful as you might expect. It also plays host to a boss whose strategy involves Arthur running along its back and firing down at its exposed hearts. Naturally, the Sword can only reach a few of the targets, so your only choice is to waste a life to try grabbing a new weapon from a chest or as a random drop.
  • The Megadrive port takes this to the literal extremes - bosses now come with checkpoints inside the boss arenas - meaning bringing the Sword into the Ohme fight results in a softlocked game state that neither dying or even game over and continuing at this point can get you out of. Your only choice is to reset the entire game.
• While you're trying to save somebody in the past in Ghost Trick, you can only use a telephone when it's in use, and can only travel to the other phone's location. This creates many scenarios where you'll get stuck in a place that doesn't have anything useful to prevent the token person from being killed, forcing you to start the segment over and not take the bait again. Played with even further when you discover that sometimes the same phone will ring twice, with the former call being the misleading trap and the latter being the key to prevent the killing.
• Originally, the Level Editor in Glider PRO allowed a switch to be linked to a star. When triggered, the switch would destroy the star permanently without excluding it from the number required to win (or turning off its animation). Later versions ostensibly disabled this, but it could still be done with a bit of trickery. (Not that one really needed it to make houses unwinnable...)
• GoldenEye (1997) was one of the first games ever to include objectives you could actually mess up, to the point where the manual has an entire page warning the player that just destroying everything won't get them far. As a general rule, many levels give you things to do (like placing a bug), to find (like the golden gun), or to avoid (like killing scientists) and if you fail, the levels will be unwinnable and the player has to restart. Other well-known instances are:
  • In Facility destroying the computer that operated the remote door leaves the player completely stuck in this room. Killing Dr. Doak will prevent Bond from entering the bottling room (00Agent only) and damaging the tanks in the bottling room will lock the exit doors and Bond will be killed by poisonous gas.
  • In Surface 1 destroying the console instead of powering it down will fail the mission (however you have to destroy it in Surface 2).
  • In Bunker 1 if you kill Boris, you can't steal the data with your data thief and fail (00Agent).
  • In Statue failing to meet Valentin or killing him beforehand fails the mission. Also encountering Janus with your gun equipped will get you nowhere.
  • In Control if you destroy the computer in the elevator hall or kill Boris, Natalya will refuse to help you and abort the mission. However players get around the 2nd one with a glitch.
  • In Caverns if you destroy the radio (and this is very easy to do) you won't be able to contact Jack Wade, thus fail (00Agent)
  • In Aztec destroying the computers that are needed to open doors will get you stuck with no way around it. Also, if you fail to reprogram the shuttle you still can launch it, but the mission will be a failure.
• Grand Theft Auto III:
  • Conflicting missions can make 100% completion impossible if taken out of order. For instance, one mission will have you betray a crime boss's trust and kill him — a bad idea if you haven't finished his missions for you yet. Some players were surprised.
  • Certain missions in the Portland area, such as the ambulance missions, can become unwinnable after you kill the Mafia boss because the Mafia will be all over you like flies on a carcass.
• The ZX Spectrum port of Great Gurianos used up so much memory that there was no room to include the ending. Dave Perry was forced to make the final boss undefeatable.
• In the Green-Sky Trilogy video game, Below the Root, your character is able to pick up a "wand of Befal" (a machete). Use it on an animal or human being, and your spirit strength goes poof, rendering the game unwinnable. Mind you, this is "tough" level at worst, and "Polite" if you actually read the books and knew that you were dealing with a society of pacifists and a book series where the major theme is the futility of violence.
• Hack Net is a Cruel example of this, if you complete the Aggression Must Be Punished mission before completing Naix's 'gg wp' mission, the latter mission becomes impossible to complete, and the only way to find out this, is to try submitting the mission, and get the error 'Mission Incomplete'. For the icing on the cake, this is the same error you get whenever you finish a mission early, which means you are likely to spend even more time on it.
• Halo: Reach: The story ends with most of the cast dead and the player character Noble Six stranded on Reach, having only managed to Fling a Light into the Future. Consequently, the final level "Lone Wolf" pits the player against wave after wave of infinite enemies, and the only way the level ends is when Six dies.
• The two playable characters in Head over Heels have separate life counters, so it's possible to kill one of them off completely. The game is impossible to beat with only one character though.
• In the Amstrad CPC game Heroes Of Karn, if you wander too far south, a guard comes by and puts you in prison. The way out requires bribing the guard with money taken from a barrow-wight beforehand. If you don't have the money, you have to restart the game.
• Hidden Expedition: The Altar of Lies has a Game Within a Game on the mechanic's computer at the airport. Clicking on the stylized letter E on the screen brings up a Match-Three Game which is completely unrelated to the plot; it's just a little extra for the player. But it can't be beaten and will simply go on indefinitely until the player gives up and goes back to the plot. Once that happens, the game becomes unavailable.
• In The Hobbit, it was essential to read the accompanying book first to pick up a few hints. In particular, if you reached the Black River without having read the corresponding part of the book, you wouldn't know that attempting to swim across is a dumb idea, hence might try this... only to fall asleep and drown.
• In Hugo's House of Horrors 2, if you bump into the side of the bridge (a ludicrously easy thing to do), then you'll drop your matches and get them wet. You need to cross the bridge with these matches to progress. There is no way to dry the matches, nor is there any other way to set fire to the things you need to burn. And the game tells you that you got them wet, but doesn't tell you that it's now unwinnable. The recommended solution is to drop the matches so that they don't get wet, then pick them back up, then drop them again...
• In Super Hydlide, you have to manage the weight of your inventory, which will see you often throwing out items to make room for food and healing potions. The game does not prevent you from accidentally throwing away quest items.
  • The sequel Virtual Hydlide is far more forgiving, with one notable exception: if you make it to the end of the game and the fight with Varalys without getting the Sword of Light, he's invincible. The game never bothers to tell you this, never tells you where the sword is, or that it even exists. On top of that, because of the multiple dungeon layouts the location of the sword varies, it's in an otherwise insignificant chest, and if you miss it before beating the boss of the Lost Castle you can't go back to grab it because the dungeon collapses.^note The game does try to make it at least slightly apparent you've missed something: the boss of the Lost Castle is extremely hard to beat without the Sword of Light...but not impossible.
• The Impossible Quiz: As you progress through the game, you're given skips, which you can use to skip most questions. But the last question is introduced as either the easiest question or the hardest. It turns out that you have to use all your skips to pass it. If you used even one before this, then the game is impossible to win and you have to start over from the beginning. Not only that, but Question 84 has two hidden skips that you must grab before collecting the star that advances you to the next question. Failure to get both will leave you unable to beat the final question.
• Isle of the Dead, an FPS/Adventure Game mix, faceplants squarely into the Cruel type. If you decide to use the flare gun at the beginning of the game (sensible given you're on a desert island), you won't find out until the end of the game that you need it. Whoops! Time to start over!
• Supposedly, I Wanna Be the Guy enters this trope in the Impossible option. It's the same game as before, but without Save Points. But still, gamers found a way to beat the game.
• In Jigsaw (here), you must collect all sixteen jigsaw pieces to restore history in each time period. While there's a device that tells you if there are jigsaw pieces in your current time period that you haven't found yet, it's sometimes easy to make collecting them impossible, especially when you don't realize that a piece is in an area that later becomes inaccessible. For instance, there are the jigsaw pieces you're supposed to pick up during the mission in "Siberia": fail to press the right button in the missile before it flies out or fail to retrieve the cable you used to get down to the missile so you can use it again on the goose's nest, and at least one of these pieces will be lost for good. But the most egregious Unwinnable situation involves the drawing competition at the end of the game. If you haven't drawn at least four animals in the sketchbook over the course of the game, then you can't get the competition prize you need to complete the game. Oh, you didn't get the sketchbook from inside the stool or the pencil under the stool before all the historical intrigue began? Then you had better restart.
• In The Journeyman Project, you are a time traveler. At one point, you have to get a computer chip from a robot you disable in one era so that you can fool a retinal scanner in another. The problem is that there are a handful of chips you can take from the robot after you disable it, you can take them in any order, and taking a certain chip (which isn't the one you need to get past the scanner) will cause the robot to explode. There's no indication which chip does what, the game doesn't give any hints about how to solve the scanner puzzle, and there's no way to access the robot again after it's been destroyed. Good luck figuring out where you went wrong and pulling the chips out in the correct order after you restart!
  • In the sequel, Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time, you can go back to any of your time zones and re-obtain any item you missed, or even obtained and later lost again (the Grappling Hook, notoriously, had to be used, lost, and retrieved multiple times) at any time, except once you reach the Krynn embassy in the present day. Even then, the two items required in this area are impossible to progress through the game without obtaining^note The Explosive Charge, which is automatically added to your inventory after Arthur disengages it from the door where it's found, and the Spent Power Core, which you have to remove in order to replace it. However, there's one problem: the explosive charge is used to open a pod to find certain items. You get one charge, which can open one pod. There are seven pods, four of which contain items you need^note Two are empty, and one contains a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment.. One of those items can be used to open the other pods. Use the charge on the wrong pod, and you're done.
• Jumpman: One of the levels can be made completely unwinnable, to the point where you must lose all of your lives and start over if you pick up certain bombs near that starting place too early, which then traps you on the starting platform, unable to jump to anywhere else. There is no way to find this out in advance.
• The adventure game adaptation of the Polish Kajko i Kokosz comic has numerous opportunities to get stuck. For example: picked up the flower at the beginning with your bare hands? It withers immediately, and you will need it later. There are also two Points of no Return in the game; if you leave any necessary items behind (you have limited space in your inventory) before moving to the next part, you're screwed—and there's no way to tell ahead of time which items will be useful and which won't.
• Keineged an nor: Missing any crucial item will get you screwed. For instance, if you don't get the sword in room 2, you won't be able to open the right lock in room 3, and there's no way to return to a previous room.
• KGB, aka Conspiracy, was a hugely involved espionage adventure game in which it was recommended and nearly required to take notes in order to make any progress. It was VERY easy to make the game unwinnable:
  • At one point, the main character investigates a butcher shop. Under the desk is a small button. Push it, and nothing seems to happen. Push it again, or don't push it at all, and you die to a trap 10 minutes later. The game never informs you of this button, and it can't be found without pixel hunting.
  • When checking into a hotel room, you get a mysterious phone call saying only "check the lights." Then you needed to switch the lights on 3 times. Switch them on only once? You die. Twice? You die. Turn them off totally? Dead. And you have to break a cypher, or remember the character who can break it for you, to know what to do if you want to live.
  • The ENTIRE GAME is timed. It's easy to render it unwinnable by dawdling too long.
  • At one point, you have to confront the butcher about what you found in his shop. But if you talked to him even once before, he will never open his door to you again. Especially annoying since just a little while before, it looks like you are supposed to interview everyone in the building for clues.
  • Yet another example: a mad scientist you are questioning can escape, and he has a nervous breakdown before you can ask every possible question. You did not ask the only important one? You cannot leave the location.
• Kingdom: New Lands has a finite number of resources, which may make it impossible to complete the task of getting off that island and moving onto the next one. Sometime around the 25th day, the forests will wither up and die, and water will run out. This means that you can no longer collect gold by hunting rabbits and deer, or from farming (the farmers themselves eventually throw away their tools and become jobless peasants again.) At this point, there's only one way you can collect gold, which is to pay a single gold coin to the Merchant and have him send off for supplies, which will give you gold upon the start of the next day that he's returned to your camp. However, if you clear out the trees next to the merchant's camp, it'll disappear along with the cleared out woods surrounding it, making it impossible to earn any more coin at that point.
• In King's Knight, you can access the final level as long as at least one character survives their specific level. However, unless all four characters survive and collect specific magic spell glyphs, completing that final level is impossible. The game is merciful enough to allow you to return to the training stages and try to improve your characters' stats and find any items you missed... if you enter a cheat code, anyway. What makes this stand out is that the game simply proceeds to the next level if you lose a character.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords gives you an option to destroy a Door Control Panel on Telos. If you actually destroy it, you will be unable to enter the room later and thus you won't be able to progress.
• Kronolog The Nazi Paradox (Localized and released as Red Hell in Europe for obvious reasons) is just RIFE with these, mostly from failing to realize you need to acquire and keep certain items to solve later puzzles. Most notable is the zeppelin condom, hinted at in the elevator immediately after the second room in the game (which has the coin required to get the condom) and used to solve the second-to-last puzzle in the entire game. The 12-item limit in your inventory only makes this worse, as some items are not automatically discarded after their usefulness is gone, and unless you write down and remember EVERYTHING, you'll probably discard the condom to make space for other things, rendering the game completely unwinnable from that point on.
• A short flash game called Labyrinth X has this with the final opponent. You have three choices as to attack her; Low Punch, Kick, or High Punch, but no matter which one you choose, she kills you and it's game over. In order to defeat her, you need to find the katana that a warrior lady you free from a spider web tells you about, and when you reach the boss, you'll have the Katana option, which is how you defeat her. The thing is, the warrior is found on a path past the point you can get the katana, so learning about it the first time means you won't be able to win.
• In The Legend of Kyrandia, you can find two apples. Click one and Brandon will take a bite of it. Click the second, and you have nothing to trade the faun to get the royal chalice back and you might as well restart.
• In the Facebook app Little Cave Hero there are various levels with underground springs which endlessly produces water. If tiles of water block a path and you can't destroy the source, or if for some reason you can't get the water to hit important water-switches, the level becomes unwinnable. What's worse is that you either have to pay real money or get an item from a Level 20 Facebook friend to be able to restart levels. Also troublesome is that (this being a Facebook game and all) you need to invite friends to get the tools necessary to clear many levels.
• Rainbird's text adventure Legend Of The Sword took this to the limit and beyond. Your character's Hyperactive Metabolism meant you burned through your life force at a tremendous rate, so you had to do things in a very specific order for you to avoid dying of lost energy. On top of this, there were numerous ways to leave something behind when irreversibly entering a new area. The combination of these two factors meant that the situation at any given time would almost always be unwinnable.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • There's a boss in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link that can only be damaged by using the Reflect spell to bounce his magic spells back at him. If you reached him without obtaining Reflect, you cannot win. Luckily, dying puts you in the room before the boss room so you're free to leave the temple and find the spell. Likewise, you can't beat Thunderbird (second to last boss in the game) if you missed obtaining the Thunder spell.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past the fire head of Trinex can only be stunned by the ice rod, an up to then optional item. Like with the Zelda 2 boss, dying puts you at the dungeon entrance so you can get it.
• In The Longest Journey, there is a risk you'll end up stuck if you don't pick up a certain item inside an archive. There is no early indication you need this item - it's pretty much impossible to know you need it until the very moment you're supposed to use it. What is this item? A can of soda. Which you buy from an inconspicuous vending machine standing inside a building you can't get back into once you've left. Chances are you never even saw the machine.
• Lost in Blue and its spiritual predecessor Survival Kids can often create situations where you're doomed. Did the RNG decide to give you three straight days of typhoons, preventing you from going out to gather food and wood? Unless you have enough stockpiled you won't have anything to eat or light a fire with so you can rest. Saved the game when low on health, poisoned and with a stomach ache (you don't feel the effect of poisoned or spoiled food until after a while you ate it)? Won't be able to rest. Finished building the raft in the Game Boy game, and then dawdled around too much? A volcano will erupt, and unless you have a specific set of items (which you may not have enough time left to gather) fleeing on the raft will net you a Nonstandard Game Over where you starve to death in the middle of the ocean.
• Several levels in The Lost Vikings and its sequel require hitting switches that can only be reached by one of the three controlled characters. The problem is, two of the Vikings can't jump at all - if they walk to an area that doesn't have a way back to where they need to hit a switch, the level can't be cleared. Luckily, there's a "level restart" option that can be taken at any time from the pause menu.
• Defied by much every LucasArts adventure game after Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders; these games always allow the player to go back and collect items that they need or refuse to let them continue without the required item. This was often viewed as "dumbing down adventure games for the masses" by hardcore Sierra enthusiasts. LucasArts believed that players should not be punished for experimenting in their games, and criticised Sierra's combination of this trope and Trial-and-Error Gameplay as "sadistic". All their adventure game manuals explicitly stated their design philosophy as being "We believe that you buy games to be entertained, not to be whacked over the head every time you make a mistake. [...] We think you'd prefer to solve the game's mysteries by exploring and discovering, not by dying a thousand deaths." (Interestingly, one of the factors that helped create this design philosophy was Ron Gilbert and David Fox's exasperation with Sierra's blatantly ridiculous game design while working on Maniac Mansion. Fox cited a moment in a Sierra game where he attempted to pick up a broken mirror but had his player character die as a result, saying "I know that in the real world I can successfully pick up a broken piece of mirror without dying.")
  • Of course, the manual for Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders might be the least appropriate place to state the LucasArts Design Philosophy since it was like a Sierra game. Missed something in Maniac Mansion? No problem... you can beat the game with your other partner. But in "Zak McKracken," there was only one way to beat the game. Washed the bread crumbs down the drain? Spent your money and got stuck at a place where you can't win the lottery to gain more money? Accidentally killed someone by removing their helmet on Mars? Got Zak and Annie stuck in jail? Then you can't beat the game. While Zak McKracken is more merciful than Sierra (by virtue of not murdering you every five minutes), it was still crueller than typical LucasArts games.
  • In The Secret of Monkey Island, if you stay underwater for more than ten minutes after the sheriff throws you off the pier, then the game not only kills you but also continues, giving you the commands float, bloat, bob, and order hint book. The last option gives you the LucasArts helpline phone number.
  • Maniac Mansion can still throw a few. Have a party with Jeff and Dave (no special skills), and get the third kid (the only one with the special game-winning skill) killed. Expose the film if you're playing Michael. Tear the envelope with Wendy, Syd, and Razor (so you can't send anything to Three Guys). Forget to intercept the package to Ed so you get stamps. Forget to open the lab door and radio the Meteor Police three times. Granted, some ways of making your game a walking dead state took more effort than others.
• The NES billiards game Lunar Ball allows the friction of the pool table to be altered. It goes as far down as 0 — no friction. At 0, balls will move at a constant speed, making it possible for the balls to be caught in an infinite loop if none of them are pocketed.
• The games of Magnetic Scrolls tended to be hideously prone to Unwinnable situations, requiring precise courses of action to win, and they invoked a lot of tropes: Trial-and-Error Gameplay, Timed Missions, Guide Dang It!, Permanently Missable Content, Point of No Return, Moon Logic Puzzle, and then some. Examples:
  • Fish required that you follow one path through the game almost exactly, and that required more guesswork than skill. Even if you worked it out, it's possible to lose because of a time limit that no one told you existed!
  • In Corruption, you must be in several right places at several right times, a series of events must be completed in a specific order, and you must avoid a set of pitfalls that you don't know exist even after you lose. Failure to work things out properly can result in anything from long-term imprisonment to your sudden inexplicable death. And then there's The Hospital, where over fifty moves must be done in perfect and precise order without a single indication of what they are.
  • The Guild Of Thieves had puzzles so mind-breaking and deliriously insane that even walkthroughs won't always help. It is possible to destroy your ability to complete the game with one wrong command, and there are hundreds of wrong commands. Famously, opening a bag you've just found instantly destroys the ancient sheet music that you didn't know was in there.
• Mega Man:
  • In the original Mega Man game, the first Wily Stage is unwinnable if you don't pick up the Magnet Beam item from Elec Man's stage, as otherwise you'll have no way of traversing a room right before Yellow Devil, forcing you to kill yourself multiple times in order to game over and go back to the stage select. Obtaining said item also requires either Super Arm (by beating Guts Man beforehand) or Elec Beam (which requires you to replay the stage) ^note it is possible to pick it up straight away by using an exploit, but it requires the ability to press both up and down inputs at the same time and even then it carries a softlock risk.
  • Certain fortress bosses in Mega Man 2, 3 and 4 are only vulnerable to certain weapons; which run on limited ammo that cannot be replenished during the fight. The most notorious example includes the Boobeam Trap from 2; a series of five turrets and breakable walls interspread throughout a small maze, and each turret and wall can only be destroyed with the Crash Bomb weapon which only has seven uses.
  • It's very hard to get the good ending in Megaman Sprite Game on the first try for one particular reason: if you walk off the path, you'll be arrested. The only time this is foreshadowed is a sign in the beginning of the game... which requires you to step off the path to read, naturally.
• The final game in the Mental Series, Murder Most Foul has a chemistry lab that a character can go into after triggering a door, but there's only one trigger, and it's outside the door. Another character will need to come and get them out. It's possible to trap all three characters in the lab, making it impossible to progress, with the game have to be started over. Though you need to be actively trying to do this, thankfully.
• In Monster Hunter, slaying a monster is simple: Just beat the crap out of it until it dies. Capturing a monster, on the other hand, requires traps and Tranquilizer Bombs and/or Tranq Shots. If you use them all up without capturing the monster, or have them stolen (especially by a Gypceros), you may as well abort or fail the quest. It's possible to make more Tranq Bombs and Shots by combining gathered materials^note Sap Plant and a Stone or Iron Ore makes a Bomb Casing, Sleep Herb and a Parashroom makes a Traquilizer, a Bomb Casing and Tranquilizer makes a Tranq Bomb, and Tranquilizer and a Bone Husk makes a Tranq Shot, but traps require Trap Tools, which can only be bought at stores in towns and cannot be made with any item combination, let alone combos that use only gatherables.
• In Monty on the Run, you had to choose five items at the beginning of the game for Monty's freedom kit, and the game would be unwinnable unless you chose the right ones. This is often claimed to be Copy Protection, but the manual actually didn't tell the player which items to use; it was just Trial-and-Error Gameplay.
• If you run out of nitro in Motocross Maniacs you might as well restart the game, because not only are the vast majority of nitro pick-ups only reachable with a nitro boost, but some later courses literally cannot be beaten without it (as in, even with unlimited time you can't even finish the lap due to mandatory obstacles with no alternate routes.)
• In Muse Dash, playing as Little Devil Marija gives you a 25% score boost every time you hit an enemy, but she makes easier, less dense charts literally impossible to complete simply because there aren't enough hearts to offset her 10 HP per second depletion; at 200 HP, she will fail in 20 seconds and no track in the game is anywhere near that short. Even if she also equips her Lilith companion to restore 2 HP per Perfect and hits every enemy perfectly, she will still lose if the chart isn't dense enough.
• The Myst games are typically Merciful for 99% of the game, then Polite at the end, with a mistake quickly killing you or otherwise telling you that it's Game Over. However, the ending of Myst III: Exile has a dash of Cruel, when it doesn't tell you that the Releeshahn book, if dropped onto the surface of Narayan (which, you're told, is an inhabited world), is unrecoverable. It's entirely possible to save after that happens, limiting you to a sad ending.
• Ninja Gaiden II (2008) is a tricky little devil. While not exactly a sandbox-type game, there are plenty of places you can explore - and you'll have to if you want to have any hope whatsoever of beating the bosses, since you'll have to search high and low for ammo, health upgrades, new weapons, and cash. And make damn sure you're thorough, as you will likely not be able to backtrack. You can get stuck as early as the boss fight of Chapter 3 which is impossible if you didn't equip yourself properly. If you play it right, you can upgrade a weapon all the way to the third and highest level in the same chapter you found it, which you will desperately need since the game is stupid hard, befitting the series' notorious legacy. This is not a game you should approach with the mentality of merely getting to the end of each level; each level holds secrets you must unlock to have any hope of finishing the game, or even beating the current boss - which can actually be fairly easy to beat if you have the right equipment. This is definitely one for the save scummers among us, and the game's files enable save scumming quite easily.
• In Nitemare 3D, there are a handful of block- or tombstone-pushing puzzles. Because of the simplicity of the game engine, there is no way to "pull" these items back toward you. Yes, there are places where you can push some of them that permanently block critical paths. It's usually clear immediately when you've messed up.
• Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee has the Hub Level Scrabanian Temple, where, in several areas, you need to light a lamp, then leave. It's possible in at least one area to take the lift up to the exit without lighting the lamp (which is on the bottom level). If you do so, the game is unwinnable, as the next time you enter this area to fix your mistake, you cannot access the lift anymore — it's still up there and you cannot call it down, and thus the exit is unreachable. Time to reload!
• If you don't throw the seed out the window in day 1 of Oedipus in my Inventory, it becomes impossible to complete day 3, leaving death your only option.
• Ōkamiden for DS had the player stuck in the middle of the tutorial if using a pirate copy.
• In Omikron: The Nomad Soul, a robotic character will make an offhand mention of his aching joints amid a wall of dialogue. If you don't then go out and find some oil for said robot, then the door locks, the game becomes unwinnable, and you won't find out until much later.
• In OMORI, the main quest of the game, "Basil" is purposely unwinnable as by the final day, it's replaced by a different quest. This is because Basil is slowly being forgotten by everyone.
• Operation: Stealth (a.k.a. James Bond 007: The Stealth Affair) is Cruel at its highest level; the penultimate puzzle becomes impossible unless you examined a nondescript part of seaweed to collect an elastic band, several hours earlier.
• Paper Chase: There are some ways to get the game into an unwinnable state.
  • Losing any of the items you need to proceed.
  • Drinking before you take the physical education exam.
• Pathologic is cruel — you don't realize how deeply you've failed until up to 12 hours later. Some players have had breakdowns when they realized that they're going to have to start over because they didn't pick up something from an unmarked house.
• Perfect Dark, the Spiritual Successor to GoldenEye (1997), has a lot of these, as well. Some prominent examples:
  • You can actually (and on higher difficulties, have to) encounter the Disc-One Final Boss in the very first mission. You can freely gun her down, but it will fail the mission and prevent you from progressing. (The In-Universe justification is that she has a key you need to get into the secret lab, but it will stop working if she dies - and the mission's intro cutscene even tells you as much!)
  • Rarely, mission objectives will have (non-obvious) timers; two big examples in the same mission are the taxi and the limo on the Chicago stage. You need to bug both of them, but the taxi will leave permanently only a short time into the mission, and the limo will depart a short time after (they'll also both leave if you make too much of a ruckus.) Didn't bug them before they depart? Mission failed, abort and try again.
    • Also in the Chicago mission, you need to create an opening to sneak into the secret base. If you just casually waltz into the guards' line of sight, they'll permanently lock the door; mission failed.
  • Obviously, any mission where you need to keep plot-critical NPCs alive will fail if they die.
  • You need a disguise to infiltrate Area 51 in the second self-named mission. If you get the disguise, but then botch it by raising the alarm anyway, you can't get into the room you need to to complete the mission. Time to restart!
    • Likewise, in the start of that same mission, you need to escort a hovercrate to a weakened wall to blast an opening into the base itself. You have to move it through a warehouse full of enemies. The crate is fragile, and there is only one. You do the math. However, you can still pull it off if you lose the crate, by throwing the assault rifle in proximity mine mode next to the marked wall, then shooting it with another gun to detonate it.
  • In the Airbase missions, raise the alarm in the airbase before you've infiltrated it, or on Air Force One before you've proven the conspiracy to the President (or don't have the evidence when you do, or leave before you present it, etc.) will turn the level hostile and prevent you from finishing.
• Phantasy Star I has two bosses, Medusa and Lassic, who have attacks that can one-shot your party unless you have a specific item (the Mirror Shield and the Crystal, respectively). Without them, you have no chance of prevailing against them. ^note It technically is possible to defeat Medusa without the Mirror Shield, but this requires spamming Alis's Rope spell to keep Medusa from attacking and hoping her MP holds out.
• Phantasy Star III can become unwinnable if you engage in a little Script Breaking in the beginning by using an Escapipe (which lets you escape dungeons instantly) after being arrested. Apparently, you don't just break the script, you break the whole game. It's a logical place to use an Escapipe if you don't know you shouldn't have it yet, so the game designers provide messages telling you that you made the game unwinnable after the fact. The only way to afford an Escapipe at this point is by selling all of your character's starting equipment.
• Planescape: Torment:
  • If you anger the Lady of Pain twice, the game becomes unwinnable; in this situation, she will always show up and kill you as soon as you leave whatever area you're in. However, the programmers were kind; the game will not let you save if you have done this, and will give you an error message stating that you have incurred the Lady's wrath and saving now would imperil your quest.
  • You can skip a part at the very beginning of the game that gives you the ability to resurrect your companions. If you remove a dead companion from your party, they're lost for good, and so is any (even essential) game content you need them to get to. Also, the Modron Maze is a procedurally generated dungeon, and all items (and companions) inside will be gone forever if you let it reset.
    • As a fun bit of Developer's Foresight, you can leave the companion that, depending on your alignment, will betray and attack you at the end of the game to die in the maze. If you do that, you will encounter them anyway and they will call you out on that. Their return is even justified by one of them being literally Hell-bent on killing you and the other being linked to the virtually limitless energy of another plane.
• Pokémon Stadium 2 has the nefarious Challenge Cup, where you must win a tournament using a team of Pokémon that the game selects at random. The problem is that—and the game's strategy guide admits this—the game will often give you a team that makes completion of the tournament impossible, either because you don't have a good mixture of types, your Pokémon's stats are too low, or some members of your party know useless attacks (all of these problems being depressingly common among Pokémon Stadium 2's rental Pokémon). What's worse is that you need to complete the Challenge Cup on four difficulty levels... then on four more in R2 mode.
  • Similarly, in some online Pokémon battle simulators like Pokemon Showdown! you can select a Random Battle, which, as above, gives you a random team and sends you up against a player with their own random team. It's slightly better than the Stadium version in that you can be at least certain that every Pokémon will be EV-trained and have competitively viable movesets. The levels are also tweaked to try and make it more fair—most Legendaries will be around level 70, while under-evolved Pokémon are generally in the 80s or 90s. This is very little comfort when the Random Number God hands you a team filled with useless Pokémon like Caterpie, or ones that have strategies that rely on other Pokémon you don't have (e.g. a sun sweeper like Venusaur always relies on someone else to set up the sun) or a team that shares a weakness. Meanwhile, your opponent may have three Uber-Legendaries that'll destroy you faster than you can forfeit. For extra punishment, you can choose to be ranked for this.
    • As of Generation VI, the random battle system has improved. You will never receive a not-fully-evolved Pokémon, with the exception of Chansey, Scyther, Magneton or Porygon2, all of which see usage in Smogon's official tiers due to increased bulk from holding an Eviolite. Still, the game can hand you an Unown, which will always have STAB HP Psychic and is generally the worst thing you can get. Even freaking Delibird can have a viable set or two!
• Pony Island: Not the actual game, but the in-universe Pony Island games are frequently unwinnable either because they're unfinished — or by design because someone doesn't want you to complete them and free yourself. A lot of the time, the only way to proceed is to take by taking advantage of glitches.
• Prince of Persia features an in-game timer that gave the player one hour to reach the top of the castle and save the princess. However, the SNES version gives two hours, and if the clock runs out, the players are allowed to keep going, lulling them into thinking that the quest is still doable they didn't get the Game Over... only for them to arrive and see her missing, necessitating a restart.
• In The Prince of Tennis dating sim Dokidoki Survival, your success getting a character to be your boyfriend usually depends on the number of "heart points" you have earned for interacting with him throughout the game. For Ooishi, however, whether he accepts your feelings also hinges on answering a single question correctly. If you answer wrong, then no matter how full your heart meter is, he won't accept your feelings. What's more, you earn heart points for giving the wrong answer. In fact, you earn the exact same amount as for giving the right answer, and so it's nearly impossible to figure out where you've gone wrong.
• Project Zomboid has no actual win condition. The only objective is to survive for as long as you can. This is cemented by the game's Tag Line: This is how you died.
• After beating the main game and Title Defense of the Wii Punch-Out!! game, you can partake in Mac's Last Stand, an Endless Game where you will face the boxers and Donkey Kong until you eventually lose three times and retire. Permanently. This is justified, as Little Mac wants to cement his place in boxing history with one last show.
• Radiant Historia uses a Nasty level of this In-Universe. Stocke, either under the guidance of the player or not, will frequently find his decisions or actions (many of which seem sensible at the time) send events spiraling out of control and ultimately doom the entire world. The White Chronicle allows him to combat this with an also In-Universe version of Save Scumming, traveling back in time to various key events and experimenting with different permutations to try and get things back on track.
• The demo of Ratropolis is unwinnable from the beginning. After beating wave 15, you are told to "prepare the last defense". Shortly afterwards, a horde of mooks buffed to 99 attack and 999 health spawns and reduces your city to smouldering ruins. Since this is a demo version, this was to be expected. The full game is 30 waves long and so is the demo if you somehow find a way to defeat these enemies.
• Ravenskull features such jollities as floor squares that make gates trap you in or objects disappear from your inventory when stood on. Many of these contain treasures and thus have to be stood on; the puzzle is working out the correct order to perform certain tasks so as to prevent an Unwinnable outcome occurring.
• Invoked In-Universe with Lucas Baker's final Death Trap in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. The "quest" appears easy; you need to place a lit candle on a birthday cake to earn your freedom. But, a pressure-plate in the floor of the doorway triggers a roof-mounted sprinkler that douses your candle when you get near. There's a window outside to another room that you can see a wheel-crank in, which can be used to deactivate the sprinkler. So, you set off on what seems like a typical Resident Evil-style puzzle. You pull out a big key from a wooden cask near the birthday cake and stick it in a creepy animatronic clown-scribe to unblock a nearby toilet. Recovering a dirty polarized telescope from the toilet, you wash it off under the sprinkler and then look at a nearby family portrait to reveal the three symbols you need to open a safe containing a straw doll. Burning the doll on a lit stove reveals a dummy finger, which you use to repair the clown-scribe's missing hand. Lighting the candle, you burn off the rope holding a third door closed, which takes you to the room with the door to the crank-room. But it's protected by a code-word tumbler. Looking around, you find an uninflated balloon nearby and take it back to the main room to a gas vent. Here's your first warning that things aren't what they seem: the balloon is full of sharp objects, so you wind up with a nail through your hand and a feather pen driven quill-first into your gut. When you give the clown-scribe the quill, it carves the code into your arm with it. And then, finally, when you solve the puzzle... you die a horribly flaming death. See, that cask with the key in it? Was full of oil, which has been seeping all over the room since you pulled it out and so promptly ignites when the firecrackers in the cake go off. With the room sealing itself and locking the sprinkler system when it does. This comes with a unique solution: you have to watch a VHS of some poor bastard solving it the intended way, so that instead you can skip the deadly parts and just burn the rope, enter the password, turn off the water and light the cake, as an invoked/meta example of Save Scumming.
• Resident Evil – Code: Veronica not only has the most limited ammo supply in the series, but in many areas, zombies respawn. Don't blow away your ammo so that you can't get past an unavoidable ambush later in the game. Also, don't take any of the big guns as Claire near the end, especially the Grenade Launcher, or they will be lost and you will find yourself up the creek without a paddle in the Final Boss fight.
• RoboCop on Commodore 64 has a Game-Breaking Bug that turns level 4 into a big glitchy mess, so the programmers put a time limit on level 3 that's too narrow to beat legitimately so no-one could get that far. Though it is possible to complete level 3 within the time limit by glitching through a wall.
• The Interactive Fiction game Savoir-Faire gives you several opportunities to screw yourself out of victory. One occurs when you have to retrieve a bauble from a high shelf; you not only have to make sure it doesn't shatter, you also need to throw one of your inventory items up there for it to fall down - and the inventory item you use for that purpose can't be retrieved, so you'd better hope that said item isn't one you'll need later on.
• In SCP – Containment Breach if you make the fatal error of looking at SCP-096's face (which is entirely avoidable as he is docile and curled up in a ball until provoked) he will go into a fit for 30 seconds and then pursue and kill you. Regardless of how many doors you put between him and you, nothing can impede his progress and, as he moves incredibly quickly, this is essentially a game over. A later update changed things so SCP-096 walks around in front of a room containing a pivotal switch, making avoiding him significantly more difficult.
• In the Accolade adventure game Search For The King, there are two places (Las Vegas and Graceland) that, once you go there, you can't go back. The game will let you go to those areas before you have everything you need, making the game unwinnable. Fortunately, the game informs you that you don't have everything you need as soon as you get there, so you can go back to a previous save and hunt around some more.
• The online game September 12th, by Gonzalo Frasca, was written as a social commentary on The War on Terror. The player has to shoot terrorists with missiles who are openly marching around a city full of civilians, but if the missiles kill any of the civilians, other civilians may come around, see the bodies, and suddenly decide to become terrorists themselves. This will happen without fail, and is pretty damning, since it suggests that if one is to end terrorism by shooting missiles at all terrorists, then the only way to end terrorism is to kill everyone in the city.
• In the indie platformer game Seven Minutes (not the similarly named RPGMaker horror game 7 Minutes), the entire game is a trap. The only way to win is to do nothing for seven minutes. Leaving the first room makes the game unwinnable and leads to a Nightmare Fuel ending: "You were too eager to know what was out there; but sometimes, there is nothing out there. There is nothing. NOTHING."
• In Seymour Goes To Hollywood, by the same developers as Dizzy, if you try using the teleporter in the Flash Gordon parody, you will be teleported above a spike pit, and you automatically respawn above the spike pit each time you die. You need to teleport the towel item first.
• In the SNES version of Shadowrun, there's a chain of this, with the first one due to Give Me Your Inventory Item with a consumable with only one use at the time. At the beginning of the game, if you used up the Slap Patch to heal yourself (perhaps after finding your first weapon, which is followed by enemies opening fire on you)? You have nothing to heal the shaman with, which is needed to unlock a topic^note You can get more slap patches, but not until a little bit later in the game, and it requires talking to an otherwise unremarkable NPC and asking him about something that he wouldn't otherwise seem to have any knowledge of: A kid in the Caryards will sell you Slap Patches for 100 nuyen, but only if you ask him about Healing. But even if you heal the shaman, the required topic is only gotten by "Talk"-ing to them, which is impossible if you don't do it at the first opportunity, as it's possible to end the interaction before that, and the shaman disappears once the interaction ends. The topic is only used two-thirds into the game, it's needed to enter an important location.
• The coin-op game Shanghai 3 (an arcade version of Shanghai by Sunsoft, licensed from Activision) uses fair shuffles, so every deal can be beaten — but not if you don't pay close attention to how the tiles lie, as deals usually include at least one situation (such as a tile being laid on top of another of the same type) which is unwinnable if you remove the wrong pair of that tile — indeed, often four or more of that type of situation.
• The demo version of Shapez2 concludes with a production goal composed of pins and quarters colored yellow and white arranged into a smiley face. Shapes of non-base colors do not spawn naturally and machines enabling paint mixing or even painting itself are not part of the demo, neither are machines responsible for pins.
• The first two Shenmue games have a time limit that automatically locks the player into the Bad Ending if they haven't reached the final mission by a certain date. However, the time limit is so generous that most players would have to deliberately fail just to see it.
• The Shift series:
  • On one level in the original game, if you press a particular button, you are trapped in an inescapable little area with spikes above you, and it reveals a message 'suicide time!' that describes the only way to get out of there. Death Is a Slap on the Wrist, though - it simply restarts the level.
  • On one screen of Shift 4, if you take a certain key before you use a certain arrow, that arrow will get covered, and you will be trapped in a black rectangular area with no way out and no spikes to impale yourself on. Time for the R key!
• In Shining Force: The Sword of Hajya, Prince Nick, whose right arm is turned to stone and rendered unusable for the majority of the game, shows up in the confrontation with the Final Boss, Iom. The only thing that can break the invincibility seal on the boss is the Sword of Hajya, and he is the only one who can use it. And if Iom happens to kill Nick before he gets a chance to use his sword, which in this battle can easily happen because of how absurdly over-powered the boss is, you'll have to start all over again because it becomes unwinnable.
• As a Polite example, in Skynet Simulator, If you delete a file required to progress, the game informs you of such, and restarts.
• Smash Remix: One character is only selectable via an Easter Egg: final boss Master Hand, unlocked by entering anything into the final player tag slot. In the original game, hacking the game to play as him resulted in frequent crashes and odd behavior due to missing files and mechanics that are unstable outside of his intended encounter. Most of these issues are inherent to the character and not possible to fix, so Remix doesn't attempt to. Even in ideal circumstances, clearing 1P Game as him is impossible; he has no bonus stages, and a quirk with the final battle leaves him unable to attack then. It is possible to clear All-Star mode, but the game will crash after that because he has no animation for the game's outro. The purpose of hiding him behind an Easter Egg difficult to trigger by accident is so that only people who do understand the risks, but still want to experiment with him despite the issues anyway, can select him.
• So Far, by Andrew Plotkin, has this in some places:
  • Play around too much with the hatch on the west pillar on the abandoned road? Now you can't get past the gate and into the castle.
  • Waste too much time in the alley with the granite statue during the rodeo world? Now you can't get back in at all, and have no way of jumping to the next world.
  • Fail to get the knife on the hillside before the locals are alerted? Now you can't jump the river in the rodeo world.
  • Went through the castle without inhaling the vapor? Better not save anytime soon.
  • Get rid of the blanket after leaving the ice world for the first time? Good luck making it out alive the next go around.
  • Of course the worst cases are failing to get objects located near the beginning of the game. Failing to get the square from the rodeo makes the second-to-last puzzle unwinnable, while leaving the box at the theatre (the very first part of the game), will make it impossible to traverse the dark world in safety.
• Solar Winds can be unwinnable by poor design if you step off the intended story track, either by killing someone you shouldn't have or by picking a wrong dialog option. Once you go Off the Rails, the storyline comes apart at the seams: people tell you to do things you've already done, or you can't find anything to do, or you're stuck taking the two-hour route from Point A to Point B, or...
• In Sonic the Hedgehog 4, the Steelions in White Park Act 3 start creating large chunks of ice the moment they spot Sonic. Towards the end of the Act, they're deliberately placed to completely obstruct Sonic's path, making it impossible to proceed further (even with the powerful Rolling Combo or using Super Sonic) and your only option to let Sonic drown and try again. Since these Steelions are located in a narrow (relative to Sonic) corridor and are already facing the direction where Sonic would emerge, the only way to get through this area is to run past the Steelions' range of ice before they finish (or defeat them before the ice starts forming, which is much harder), easier said than done as there are so many of them. And it's underwater.
• In Soul Sacrifice, if you sacrifice Magusar at any point during the "Seven Years Later" chapters, you won't be able to continue the game since he's the Big Bad of the single-player campaign, and he needs to be kept alive so that you can fight him later. However, it is possible to spend Lacrima to undo the sacrifice and continue the game normally.
• The Spellcasting X01 series of games was phenomenally restrictive about what you had to do and when you had to do it; if a day passed by without one tiny thing being taken care of, the game became unwinnable.
• Star Control 2 is a very sneaky one. It looks like an open-world sandbox, and your first quest giver actually encourages you to take your time to explore, gather resources and spend time leveling up. Unbeknown to a first-time player, and unlike all other similar games, the main plot unfolds itself even without any input from the player. Even when you learn that there is a world-ending menace looming over the galaxy, it's not obvious that the game has a time limit and it already started counting at the very beginning! Sandbox Role Playing Games almost always feature stopping a world-threatening evil as the main plot, but even if in-story you are urged to hurry, the evil advances only at instances when you accept and complete quests, so no matter if you were as fast as possible or spent an eternity dawdling around, the last scene always features you stopping the menace at the last moment. Not in Star Control 2! Here if you spend your time building up, being proud of your uber-advanced starship, you arrive to a plot-critical location, discover that it was already destroyed by the Big Bad, and after playing countless hours you are greeted with a "Game Over", and only then do you realize that you lost. However, as plot progresses, and Kohr-Ah exterminate various races one-by-one, you can easily pick up various plot-crucial artifacts from their planets, bypassing their quests entirely. As villains proceed with their evil plan, they make your work easier.
• Starflight: If you are in the red when you visit the starport, you are stuck there until you pay it off. If you don't have enough assets to sell off to pay it off, then you're stuck there forever.
• Star Wars: In the movie tie-in game The Phantom Menace, if you kill anyone in the city on Tatooine before helping Anakin fix his podracer, he will peg you as a murderer and refuse to talk to you—regardless of whether you have started his mandatory quest or not. Where this falls on the scale depends on how readily you slice NPCs with lightsabers, but there are numerous required battles before this point in the game, including just outside the city.
• Strife: Quest for the Sigil has many Cruel dead ends. One quest giver, Harris, gives you a quest to steal a chalice from the villainous Order's interrogation complex. If you do so the game becomes unwinnable, as he sends you to report to Governor Mourel (who normally is an NPC who gives out an essential quest a bit later). Mourel tells you that you are under arrest and waves of Acolytes spawn in all over the city to kill you. There is no way of knowing this will happen and no turning back once you have the chalice. And that's just one dead end. Killing any NPC could potentially make the game unwinnable as that character would not be able to give out important quests or items.
  • Strife: Veteran Edition fixes the dead end involving Harris. If you complete that quest, Governor Mourel will still put you under arrest, but this time, he'll have you knocked out and dragged back to the interrogation room from the start of the game with new personnel. Escape it again and you can proceed through the game normally. There will still be extra guards in town, but they won't bother you unless you fire a shot. For good measure, you can go back to Harris and kill him for his treachery, unlocking access to his secret stash.
• In Submachine Extended, the second version of the original Submachine game, a puzzle was added where one of the four pieces you needed appeared in a teleporter once you pulled certain switches and the power was on. However, it also retained the puzzle where you had to burn out the power in order to get another piece. Blow the fuses before you've found the former piece and it disappears again, so you're screwed. Mateusz Skutnik later decided this was a mistake, and in the current version the teleporter does not require power.
• System Shock requires that you be trying to lose, but does allow you to mess things up irrevocably. If you destroy the X-22 Isotope, you can't activate the station shields and blow up the mining laser. If you destroy all the Plastique, then you can't destroy the antennas and stop SHODAN's third plot. If you destroy the isolinear chipset, you can't hack SHODAN to win the game. These require that you do things that are counterintuitive, and the items in question are all resistant to damage, but they are notably not immune. The only real time that the game is completely unwinnable, however, is if you try to blow up the antennas without resetting the cyborg conversion chamber on the Engineering deck: one of the antenna rooms is a trap: you'll blow up the antenna and also yourself, because SHODAN traps you with the explosion. Failing to reset the chamber means you die.
• Takeshi's Challenge, having been designed by someone who wanted players to break their controllers, sits squarely on the Cruel end of the spectrum and refuses to budge an inch.
  • Money is a very finite resource; if you lose too much of it, you won't be able to buy everything you need. The things that you need to buy to win (or are very useful to have) are mixed with items made purely to waste your time. Even if you know what you have to buy, there's another pitfall; when you divorce your wife, you have to pay her alimony, which means you give her a good amount of what you have. If you have too much on hand, even if you've bought everything in the first area, you probably won't have enough to buy what you need after flying off to the South Pacific. For the record, if you don't divorce your wife, your plane explodes, for no discernible reason, on the way to the South Pacific.
  • Talking to your boss gives you plenty of options. If you select any option other than quitting your job, your boss will get angry, and will refuse to pay you when you do quit (which, if done too early, is wasted on alimony). Similarly, on the island with the treasure, you can enter a house and be put into a cooking pot without any warning. There's two options that get you out of that situation; "Play Shamisen" (you need a shamisen and lessons for it) and "Lunge" (no requirements). Choosing to lunge gets you out of the pot, but the chief who put you there will never talk to you again. If you didn't give him a specific gift before this happens, you can't get into the caves.
  • Since you can't get back once you leave an area, you need to have all required items beforehand; the game won't stop you from leaving the first area without hang-gliding lessons, and the second will allow you to leave without a gun and canteen.
  • The cruelest of them all: in the first area, you must go through a process to get a map from an old man. After you decode the map, he'll stay on the screen for a while. If you don't punch him dead before leaving the screen, no worries; you'll be allowed to progress. But at the very end, with the treasure in you grasp, the old man will appear, thank you for leading him to the treasure, and kill you. Either have fun starting all over, or assume it was just trying to protect you from seeing the "ending" and move on.
• Technician Ted had a very tight time limit — one has to complete the game in 8½ hours of game time (just over 40 minutes of real time). It's just barely possible, but only by not hanging around. Take too long over any task, and it's no longer possible to win. This game also exploits the Endless Death problem of its spiritual predecessor, Jet Set Willy, by deliberately designing some jumps so that if missed, all your remaining lives are burned up; the game even detects this, and after the second fall-to-death cycle, cuts the cycle down to just the death part.
• The 2023 mobile version of Tetris has a level mode, where the player has to clear a certain number of lines in each stage. An update in late 2023 added "hard levels", where "hard" apparently means that there's not enough pieces to clear the required number of lines, forcing the player to use powerups. The game was already well into Allegedly Free Game territory, but this is plain ridiculous.
• Tex Murphy:
  • The second game, Martian Memorandum. Aside from all the unfair scenarios, such as preparing to survive for several days in a fridge, you can get screwed bad at the casino on Mars: if, while in the mob boss's office, you fail to do and get everything necessary before you leave, then you're boned. Trying to go back there ever again gets you murdered instantly. But you do have to go there the first time to move the plot.
  • The fourth game, Pandora Directive is very fair but it does have a single very cruel example. If you enter Dag Horton's office on your first visit to Autotech you'll be free to ransack the place and pick up several useful items. Except you should wonder why the "Travel" button just become unavailable. As soon as you exit the office you're caught and killed. If you saved inside the office you've no choice but to reload an earlier save or restart the game.
    • On the other hand, trying to get the Good Ending of said game is firmly on the Cruel end of the scale all the way through. Unless you use the "jky" cheat code to see your exact karma points and event flags, you have no way of knowing where, how or if you went wrong.
• In The Theater, an RPG Maker VX game, the final boss battle can be made unwinnable. An imp just before the battle offers you passage to a final save point after a difficult puzzle; in return, you need to give him one of your items. All but one of your items are needed to defeat the boss. Oh, well, that's not so bad; you can just load your sa- OH, WAIT, YOU JUST SAVED! There is no hint beforehand that this will make it impossible to win. The creator, when questioned, claimed that he added this feature because no other game had done it.
• In Titanic An Adventure Out Of Time, you have three options to escape from the ship after it hits the iceberg: find Henry and Ribeena Gorse-Jones and get on a lifeboat with them (you have to do this early), win the boat pass from Buick Riviera and use it before the two crewmen run out of lifeboats, or rescue Shailagh Hacker, then wait until almost the time the last lifeboat leaves and talk to Morrow. If you miss all three, the game continues for a few minutes (where you can get some unique lines of dialogue with the other doomed passengers) before the ship sinks and you die. This tosses you to the options screen, the same as dying at any previous point, meaning that if you save after the last lifeboat is gone, you're sunk. Polite level, because who'd do such a thing (unless it's an extra save to get all the dialogues).
• The Tower of Druaga features a hero going through a 60 level tower. Each level has a hidden treasure. Some treasures are bad and make the game unwinnable. This fact might not be discovered until many levels later; nor can the item's properties be discerned until it is obtained. A rare case of Guide Dang It! in an arcade game.
• Tower Of The Sorcerer includes an altar where you can give money to raise your stats. The price goes up on a quadratic scale with each use. The catch? Later levels have additional altars that give you a greater stat increase; but each time you use one, the price goes up for all of them. Using the first one too much can make it impossible to progress.
• Trauma Center's Final Bosses are often prone to this, requiring that you postpone using the Healing Touch (which can only be manually invoked once per operation) until the very last moment. Prematurely deploying the Healing Touch may as well result in instant failure. To elaborate:
  • Under the Knife / Second Opinion: Right before you can deal the finishing dose of serum to Savato, Derek automatically activates a Healing Touch. Even with slowed time, Savato still moves too fast for him to inject the serum. You use your manual Healing Touch to freeze time so you can finish off Savato; if you've already used it, the Medical Board will be notified.
  • New Blood: Cardia drops a ring of tumors, which it will when detonate with a ripple attack for hundreds of vitals of damage. You must use Markus's Healing Touch (to slow time down so you can pick up the tumors before they explode) or Valerie's (so that the patient doesn't lose vitals from the explosions) at this point or a mere few seconds before; if you have used the Healing Touch previously in this operation, you're screwed.
• Turgor, by Pathologic developer Ice-pick, is worse in this regard despite being the better translated game. Much of the game centers around the allocation of a resource that slowly kills the entire game world every time you use it, meaning you have to think wisely about what you're doing. You would think that the cleaner translation would mean that the game would actually instruct you on how to not lock yourself into an unwinnable state, but no such luck.
• Twisted Wonderland: The tutorial and both Malleus battles in the 7th arc are designed to be unbeatable, but the story still moves forward in spite of the defeat.
• Ultima VII: The Black Gate:
  • In the expansion Forge of Virtue, you can forge a weapon known as the Obsidian Sword, which is capable of drinking the souls of your enemies, killing them instantly. In a combination of Unwinnable By Design and Unintentionally Unwinnable, you can use this to instantly kill Lord British, the Big Good of the Ultima games, rendering Ultima 7 essentially unwinnable. Spoony lampshades how ridiculous this is, because while you can do this and make the game unwinnable, you cannot use the touch of death on the final bosses of the game or the villain who you see earlier in the game for some reason.
  "So I can kill Lord British and make the game unwinnable, but not to take out the villains, which would be logical."
  • You can also kill Lord British by having a loose brick fall and hit him in the head as he's passing under it. Same result.
    • Lord British was killable through player ingenuity and/or persistence in the earlier games. Instead of trying to counter the Lord British Postulate, devs started including ways to kill him as Easter Eggs, naturally rendering the game unwinnable.
  • Use of the Armageddon in any game that it's included as a spell (not the ritual version in IX) will wipe out everyone in Britannia except the Avatar and Lord British, who informs the Avatar of this trope.
• In Undertale, killing even one monster locks you out of the True Pacifist ending because you can't make friends with Undyne. Even nastier is what happens if you get the No Mercy ending - which requires you to specifically hunt down and murder everything - and then reset to do a Pacifist run. Even if you don't kill a single monster the entire time and befriend everyone, you cannot get the True Pacifist ending, because you gave your soul to the Fallen Child. What you get instead is the "Soulless Pacifist" ending. And unless you play the game on a different Steam account or know how to edit Steam's files, you can never get True Pacifist. That's right - this game can make itself permanently unwinnable!
• The NES port of ICOM's Uninvited has a Ruby in one of the bedrooms in the game. You are warned not to take it the first time you try. If you choose again to take it, then the game will let you continue and even save until you die after a certain number of moves. There's one location where you can put the ruby down and live. Fortunately enough, upon entering a message explicitly says you can use it to throw away items you don't need anymore.
  • The original computer versions of Uninvited are far more cruel. At the very beginning of the game, you need to retrieve an envelope from the mailbox and open it for the talisman inside. Once you enter the house you can't leave, and without the talisman, winning is impossible. The NES version requires the talisman to actually open the door in the first place, saving gamers from a no-win situation at the start.
• Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat had a stage with so many Orcs it was deemed "impossible" by the makers themselves, and for good reason: there was no stage beyond it. One wily player managed to get through only to have the game lock up as it tried to load a stage that didn't exist.
• Wing Commander:
  • If you fail too many campaigns, you will be sent to the "Hell's Kitchen" campaign where victory is impossible. Even if you successfully complete every mission in Hell's Kitchen, the Confederation will still lose. On the other hand, winning enough campaigns will send you to the final "Venice" campaign, in which the Confederation will win even if you fail every mission.
  • If both your ejector seat and communications systems are inoperable, there's no way to complete a mission because you can neither hail the Tiger Claw to request landing clearance, nor eject to get picked up. You have to start the whole mission over.
  • In both Wing Commander: Privateer games, failing a mission in the main questline will result in the player being unable to progress the story any further and will not reach the ending.
  • Wing Commander III: Heart Of The Tiger has a losing campaign path depending on your performance on previous missions where you fight against an endless wave of Kilrathi until you either quit the game or die. It is possible to outlast the "endless" wave of Kilrathi and destroy all the guns on the dreadnought, at which point you can shoot the dreadnought until it explodes, but then the game leaves you floating in space until you eject and then you see the losing cutscene anyway. The only option to avoid this is either play the game again from the beginning or load a previous savestate prior to you failing that mission which caused you to be placed upon the failing endpath.
  • Wing Commander IV has a point where the plot wants you to defect to the Union of Border Worlds. If you decline the second of two chances and choose to stay with Confed, then infinite waves of Border World bombers spawn until your carrier is destroyed, ending the game. If you cheat and remove all the enemy craft from the mission, then your carrier explodes on its own. What made this infuriating is that Wing Commander IV billed itself as giving the player the choice of defecting or staying loyal to Confed. Technically, it did; but it punished that second choice hard!
• Done in-universe in The World Ends with You. At the beginning of week 3, Kitanji takes all of the other Players as Neku's entry fee for the Reaper's Game. No Players means no partners means no way to fight the Noise (in gameplay, it translates to your pins being disabled). As part of Gameplay and Story Integration, Neku at first considers just running from every fight, since you're always given the option to escape a battle, and while there is a Partner Sync penalty for repeatedly running, Neku doesn't have a partner whose trust he can lose at the moment, so he's literally got nothing to lose for escaping battle...then he realizes that won't work if he has to fight a mandatory battle. Then cue Beat.
  • Another in-universe example in the sequel, NEO: The World Ends with You. Under the new rules of the Reapers' Game, Players now participate in larger Teams. The winning Team at the end of the week gets whatever they wish for, including resurrection, the team in last gets last place gets Erased, while everyone else has to play for another week. However, the game blatantly favors the Ruinbringers, a team of Reapers headed by the Game Master and Conductor Shiba. Thus, the Ruinbringers maintain the top spot, even if they don't lift a finger, until the end of the week, and if someone manages to get close, then Shiba just makes up a technicality to give the Ruinbringers the win anyways. And if push comes to shove, Shiba can always just threaten the winners with his dangerous Plague Noise into forfeiting. The only way to "win" is to become powerful enough to take down Shiba.
• In one of the story modes in the WWE Smackdown vs. Raw games, if you advance the story by NEVER LOSING A MATCH, and retaining your championship title for many seasons, eventually you will be proposed a special referee match, with Vince McMahon as the referee. The game sets the match rules so that you can't defeat your enemy by doing enough damage to a certain body part, knocking them out with a wrestler's signature move, 10 count ring-out, or anything else other than a 3 count pin. The match is intentionally designed that the referee will NOT count to 3 unless your character is being pinned. The reason being that McMahon had enough of you being the champion for years on end, and decided to take it away whether you liked it or not.
• According to the devs from XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the game in "Ironman Impossible was only theoretically winnable". Players still found a way to succeed. Also according to the developers, XCOM 2 is based on your first attempt at Ironman Impossible; its setting is a Bad Future where XCOM failed and the aliens conquered Earth.
• X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse warns you before leaving the level if you are about to miss one of the weapon components. If you do anyway, you cannot power the superweapon required to defeat Apocalypse's first form, as that is the only weapon that can bypass the target's invulnerability.
• While still polite compared to others (you just have to die, rather than restart the game), Yoshi's Island DS makes nearly every secret level potentially Unwinnable By Design. The last secret level, for example — Yoshi's Island Easter Eggs — has a room in which there's a platform powered by shooting eggs at it. You can and often will run out long before reaching the end, there's no backtracking, and your only hope is the instakill spikes surrounding you. On occasion, your platform just goes straight past a spike covered obstacle that needs to be raised and gets stuck on the other side.
• Zork: Grand Inquisitor requires the player to retrieve a magical coconut from the lair of a dragon. Although it's stated numerous times to be important to your quest, you can instead choose to give it to a man who wants to make a piña colada. There's no way of getting it back, and the player character will comment that he doesn't think that was the best use for it.
• The ZZT world Mission: Enigma is a short but Nintendo Hard adventure game notable for a variety of ways that the player can render their game unwinnable by accident. By far the most Cruel and infamous example of this is the castle's Booby Trap flying knife, which will always shatter on the opposite wall (as opposed to just sticking in it) and thus render further progress impossible, unless it occurs to you to try grabbing the knife out of the air so that you can use it to dispatch an otherwise invincible guard holding the security key you need.

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