Mastodawn

Played a bit of #JumpKing earlier and I'm not sure I've played another game where the penalty for failure is not just loss of progress, but a higher risk of losing even more progress.

Like not a roguelike, not the Gradius effect, etc. where they're either designed for repeatedly starting anew or have a hard checkpoint that you can get stuck at - but actually moving increasingly further backwards. Usually there's a point midway where the difficulty is locked or the loss of progress is capped.

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Jerp Mar 7

It also seems to loop two specific major potentials for failure - right before some generally-inconsequential midpoint where there is a short-term cap on how much progress you can lose, or right before you reach a new area. In either case, difficulty is suddenly ramped up right at a point where failure sends you back to the previous area (and generally right at the point where failure _there_ will cost you an entire additional area worth of progress).

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Jerp

I played through ~most of Getting Over It and have watched the rest multiple times, and I can't remember if even that game has a situation where they set up difficulty in such a way to where successive failures not only increase the difficulty but also increase how much progress you can potentially lose with each additional failure.

Am I misremembering it? I feel like you were more or less hitting checkpoints where the worst you could do is flounder at resuming from where you fell.

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Jerp Mar 7

Part of what makes Jump King kind of insidious is that they structure the pattern of jumps in each area in such a way that when you inevitably lose a ton of progress to a major fall and need to complete a series of tricky jumps in a prior area to avoid losing more progress, the layout and structure of the area is different enough to second-guess jumps and grinding the latter area skews your muscle memory - meaning you're more likely to lose another large amount of progress.