Blog: "Why Trial and Error will Doom Games"

[naturon]

The game Prey had an excellent compromise in regard to mini-games instead of flat out death problem. Since the game is heavily based upon spirituality, whenever you would die you would be sent to this "mental realm" where you would shoot arrows at these winged beasts and however many you would hit you would slowly build up your health. Once the time was up you would be transported back into the game world with the amount of health you managed to accumulate. This sounds really silly and distracting in theory, but the developers managed to work this tedious target practice mini-game into the general concept and feel of the game, and it really did work. If you died often then yes you would realize you were playing a game, but because death is not really frequent this was actually sort of refreshing in a sense. Not saying this will work with any game, but trial and error is not impossible to get rid of (even though Prey had some elements of it).