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One more thing about Tunic. Picking up your corpse releases a shockwave that damages enemies. So it actually gives you an edge that you didn’t have before on your first time.

for those who want to, in silksong you can grab your coccoon and save/quit to end up back at the bench

I think the problem with corpse runs is that it seems like they should be a way of softening lost progress, but they often end up having the opposite effect. If the game ends up being designed around the assumption that you usually complete the corpse run, a failure ends up being disastrous. The result is that instead of feeling like you got a chance at redemption, you feel like you're forced to risk a super-death.

One thing you surprisingly skipped over is what I thought of as one of the main reasons FromSoft implemented it: It's an anti-hording mechanic. It forces you to spend your Souls/Bloodechoes/Runes as much as possible. This also serves pacing purposes. Whenever you arrive at a new checkpoint, you have the opportunity to take a little break. Level up, Upgrade your Weapons, buy new gear or consumables, spend as many souls as you can, or until the remainder isn't worth bothering with. Which is, in my opinion, the best part of FromSoft's Corps runs.

But generally, I'm not a fan either. I don't need punishment after I die. Dying and having to walk back to where I died is punishment enough, especially if I have to refight the enemies on the way.

the thing with some corpse runs, especially shovel knight's, is that it creates this weird "rich get richer" situation, where if you're good enough to not die, you're rewarded with enough money to make the game easier; if you're struggling, then you have less money than what's required to buy health or magic upgrades, or useful tools, so you either grind the levels you're already struggling to have the money for it (and risk losing more than you get) or you press on with a more challenging game than those that are already doing better than you.

Zombie U had the best twist, as your corpse now turns into a zombie with all your previous items. Combined with the real time inventory management it makes recovering your stuff extremely stressful, but perfect for the experience

It's wild how Minecraft could be regarded as significantly easier than most of the games here, but the corpse run is by far the most punishing. Unless you have a chest full of gear specifically for retrieving your main gear, you're running to where your items last were butt naked. But coming prepared introduces an issue if your previous inventory was full of valuables because now you have to throw stuff away. And the insanely large spread when you die means that if you died anywhere near lava, there's a chance that some unknowable portion of your inventory got dumped right in there and got lost forever. And even outside of that, dying in water, or difficult terrain like mountains or next to a ravine, all mean your items get scattered extremely far. The timer also REALLY doesn't help, it's a big blessing that it only ticks down once the chunks where your items were get loaded, but it can still be pretty tight.

Not to mention, the most difficult areas in the game, the Nether and The End, both have a main hazard where if you die to it, there isn't even a corpse to run back to, all your items are lost. I honestly can't imagine playing Minecraft without keepInventory turned on

I am expecting this video to talk about the worst corpse runs out of Everquest, where you'd have to get a necromancer to agree to go to the zone where you died with a really expensive material, and then convince a cleric to resurrect you to get your experience back, all while not having any equipment and respawning at a location that might literally be impossible to return from.

Here's another type of death run: rescues.

In Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, if you fall, your penalty is all the money you were carrying and half of all your carried items. You also have to restart the dungeon from the beginning.

However, you can get a friend to rescue you by visiting the same dungeon just as far as your corpse and revive you. If rescued, you could decide to leave with your items, or press forward. The corpse run is shifted to your friends. In later entries, you can send a second team to rescue your first team.

The problem with this system is the losing player cannot play until they're rescued.

For a moment i swore you were going to talk about some kind of zombie racing gimmick lmao

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon has a different take on a corpse run.  You can send SOS mail to a friend and they can take a crack at reviving your team.

For those struggling with Hollow knight and Silksong, they save when you quit, grab your cacoon or shade then quit and youll keep whatever you had in them as you tp back to your last bench

Something nice Lies of P does is that for boss fights, the ergo (the souls equivalent) you drop on death shows up in front of the boss arena, saving a lot of time.

14:40 Oh. Oh I never knew it was that bad. You weren't kidding when you said that the guilt fragment placements can be silly at times.

You know, despite the whole "having to fight your shade before retrieving your money" thing, Hollow Knight was (most of the time) pretty good about leaving your corpse RIGHT OUTSIDE the boss chamber instead of inside it. That means you can recover your corpse and then choose if you still want to bash your head against the boss that killed you previously or try exploring some other area.

It's kind of surprising that Silksong chose to abandon this choice. Sure, it still let's you pay with an item to retrieve your corpse from afar, but it's not guaranteed you're gonna be close to the retrival NPC (in Hollow Knight she was only in the starting town), nor that you'll have the required item or an easy way to aquire more (again, in HK, they were limited items thrown around the overworld, with one out of the way shop you can buy them from).

I think the main issue with corpse run is that it does not factor in player skill.

Less skilled players will be left destitute, making the game even harder for a player who demonstrably cannot handle this level of challenge.
Normal skilled (the level of skills the developers built the game around) players will feel its intended effects.
Highly skilled players will barely feel any effect at all.

There are ways around this, like giving players something that makes things easier that can only be acquired through dying, but I rarely see things like that implemented.

the minecraft item despawn timer isn't actually as punishing as it sounds, since the timer only ticks down when the items are in loaded chunks, which means that if you're far enough away, you have as much time to re-gear before committing to getting your stuff back as you need

not even done with the video yet, but as someone with hearing issues, huge appreciation for the closed captions. so few videos have proper subtitles these days

I find it kind of ironic that MMOs are essentially the originators of the corpse run mechanic, because in my opinion I think that one of the greatest updates made to RuneScape, and specifically Old School RuneScape, was the update that removed (or rather "nerfed") the corpse run.

To summarize, for people unfamiliar with the game: when you died in RuneScape in the past, your full inventory and equipped items dropped in a stack on the tile where you died and were given a timer. After that timer expired, your items became visible to other players and could be picked up and taken by them. And after a while, if nobody picked up the items, they would eventually despawn and be lost forever. You had to rush to get your stuff back asap, because once it was gone, it was gone. In the current version of the game this has been changed: now when you die a gravestone is placed on the spot that protects your items from being stolen by other players, and instead of despawning once the timer runs out they are instead placed into "purgatory" and can be reclaimed from Death's Office, which is a place that can be accessed through various entrances found in several of the graveyards scattered around the game's world. Depending on the value of the item, you can either reclaim them for free or you pay a fee to get them back, and in Death's Office there is a coffer where you can, at any time, store some of your gold for the explicit purpose of paying back the fee. So if you die and lose a set of bronze armor as a brand new player, you won't be punished for failing to reach your gravestone in time, whereas if you're a high-level player and you drop a ton of expensive end-game gear and have to go to Death's Office to get it back, you'll be forking out a hefty fine.

Do you want to know why I never did any sort of combat-related challenges like bossing or fought high-level enemies that could potentially 1- or 2-shot you if you didn't pray correctly against their attacks? It was because of this old system. The threat of losing gear that I potentially spent hours of my life working for was enough stress to turn me away from engaging with any of the most popular content that was widely considered to be the most fun stuff you could do in the game. It's one thing to die in Elden Ring and lose 50K runes, or have a diamond pickaxe fall into lava in Minecraft; those are resources that you can get back with relative ease once you've learned where to farm for runes and how to branch mine for diamonds. But in an MMO, the equipment you have carries a far greater weight. People can spend days, weeks, and sometimes even months of real-world time grinding to obtain the strongest items in Old School RuneScape, and the idea of having that effort wiped away completely by making one mistake during a difficult combat challenge and losing it all is just an unreasonable degree of punishment, in my eyes. And I know what the response would be: "Don't take items that you aren't willing to lose into a fight." To which my answer would be, "What is the point of having good gear if I'm too afraid to use it?"

In general I am fine with the corpse run mechanic for most games. I agree with the sentiment that it adds tension and weight to the experience that makes overcoming challenges more memorable. I'm probably in the minority that feels that Silksong's cocoon is actually a great system that actively rewards the player for improving at combat and platforming by giving them a full base silk bar to retry a challenge or boss fight, while also making the run back less punishing by giving your a free heal when you get there. But there are definitely times where the risk is not worth taking, and results in players choosing to quit rather than to try again or even try at all. It's a system that can benefit some games, but compromise others.