It’s happened to all of us: We gear up with our best equipment and step into the room filled with enemies; prepared to engage in a battle where decimate our opponents and look super cool while doing so. Except as we enter, we’re immediately outnumbered, killed, and must restart at the last checkpoint.
Death is an integral part of video games. It determines our progress, skill, readiness. It helps us learn and measures multiple other factors. Get killed by that level 45 loader? It’s probably because you were only a level 16 using a basic pistol with no corrosive elements. Roll off a cliff to dodge a wolf? You should probably use your shield next time.
But perhaps less known than the art of death is the art of the respawn.
I’ve found that respawning takes three different forms usually: Random respawn, current respawn, and checkpoints.
Random Respawn
A random respawn can usually be found in online multiplayer games. When you die, you respawn at one of the spawn points on the map randomly (unless you play a game that lets you choose where you respawn, such as classic Battlefront as shown below).
Current Respawn
A current respawn is more often found in beat em ups: think Castle Crashers or Scott Pilgrim. If you have a life when you die in these games, you will respawn at the same point you died. If you run out of lives you restart the level.
Checkpoints
A checkpoint is the most common form of respawning, found in everything from platformers to shooters. Once you reach a certain point in progression through a level, you’ll often come across something in the environment that saves your progress and places you back there upon your death. Some games, such as Shovel Knight (pictured above) have checkpoints that can be avoided or destroyed entirely, so that the level must be accomplished in one run.
Games can also have “unique death reactions”. This means that the game will respond to your demise either in general or in certain points. This is seen in the New U respawn stations throughout the Borderlands series, as well as certain moments in the Portal franchise (think of the achievement you get for trusting Glad0s in Portal 2’s chase scene), and other games going for a humorous tone. These respawns help alleviate the frustrations a player can feel when they’ve just died to the same enemy 4 times in a row. Reaction respawns also add to a game’s memorability (partially why the two games I used as examples are iconic).
What are your favorite video game respawns? Are there any types I missed? Let me know in the comments below, and thank you for reading.