Square One

A lot of games like to put the player back at square one. In sequels, this often happens right up front because if you started with all the weapons and abilities you finished the last game with, no one could stand against you. But many games will even reset you to zero in the middle of the game.

In the best case scenario, this is because the designer wants the player to focus on the basics, to realize that he didn't really need all that fancy stuff.

In No One Lives Forever (a campy sixties spy game) I had nothing but a coin left in my inventory, a narrow corridor to traverse, and a guard coming around a tiny U-turn in the corridor to kill me. The first time I ran into him, I died. But the second time, knowing he was there, I bounced the coin off two walls so it landed behind him, then karate chopped him when he turned to see what the noise was. I felt very clever. And it was good.

In the less good scenario, it's basically like starting the game over because the developer didn't have time to make more weapons / bigger monsters / better inventory management. This can still be good design if it's done well. Maybe the player gets the weapons back in a different order and faces the monsters in a different progression, learning new tactics along the way.

In the worst case, it's just a way to repeat the game over to inflate it's overall length. Even my beloved DooM is guilty of this design sin. And it does it twice! :O

So there you have it, the three basic varieties of mid-game Square One's. It's not a huge revelation or anything, just something I thought worth setting down in words so that when the next game does it to me, I'll have a handy metric to apply. Is this a good square one or a bad square one?