Tag: tension

This is a mushy sort of question that maybe gets too into the game design weeds, but what comes to mind when you think of a game with the tension of loss or failure always looming?

Like you’re playing, but you’re always checking health and stats and inventory because you’re barely getting by, just on the edge, and every successful battle or encounter feels like it’s a hard-fought victory?

Because to me, it feels like a very difficult thing for a game to achieve that kind of tension. Tension is the key feeling, not like a discouraging sort of friction, but just this sense that you’ve threaded the needle as the game intended. You’re always on the edge of your seat, thinking you’ve prepared but barely coming out of the next sequence alive.

I know perma-death games really lean into this, the scenarios where you can permanently lose a comrade or skill during the course of the encounter. The games that come to mind for me are Hogs of War and Valkyria Chronicles, both turn-based combat games which do involve losing soldiers along the way, resulting in some tense battles and narrowly won (sometimes pyrrhic) victories.

Well anyway, that’s a lot to say there’s a certain kind of game I’d like to play, and I’m hoping others know that feeling of tension I’m chasing down.