Check Point Starvation/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Egregious lack of checkpoints or save points.

  • Straight: The game has a long level, and it contains no checkpoints.
  • Exaggerated: You have to beat the entire game with one life.
  • Downplayed: The level contains no checkpoints, but it's fairly short anyway.
  • Justified/Enforced: The hardware that runs the game is really primitive and does not support checkpoints.
  • Inverted: There is a checkpoint on every single screen of the level, which effectively means that Death Is a Slap on The Wrist.
  • Subverted: There appear to be no checkpoints, but they do exist, they're just hidden far off the beaten path.
  • Double Subverted: The final levels have no checkpoints at all.
  • Deconstructed: Bob, a retro-gamer, buys a copy of the game on the Internet and plays it. He becomes sick and frustrated of the game's lack of checkpoints, and quits.
  • Reconstructed: Bob downloads a remake of the game for the Xbox 360. The remake has checkpoints added.
  • Averted: Checkpoints are common.
  • Lampshaded: "Uggggh... will this game just give me a checkpoint already?"
  • Invoked: The Big Bad purposely destroys all the checkpoint flags in the level.
  • Exploited: The developers purposely do this to add Fake Difficulty to the game.
  • Defied: You play the game on an emulator and use save states.

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