1y ago

What games had easy soft locks that prevented you from either progressing or getting a true ending?

The thought came to mind after reading a recent post about Baldurs Gate 3 here but it reminded me of the Japense only PSX game Mizzurna Falls where if you don't perform a certain action early in the game you are prevented from getting a true ending. While this might not be a traditional soft lock because you can still progress to a point it made me wonder none the less.

I understand BG3 might be a hard lock because the game abruptly comes to a close I am not going to get into the semantics. The only other soft locks I can think of are with Pokemon.

Shout out to the fan translation of Mizzurna Falls. An article on the ROMHacking.net website can be found here.

138 comments

Tes 3: Morrowind, every NPCs can be killed and of course if you kill some of them before they got usefull to progress the main quest you are locked.
At their death there is a notification message like "you fucked up, you can reload or continue to play in this world forever doomed". BUT, in my first playthrough some broken mod I installed was hiding this message ...
Also, in the same game you could lose quest item and be unable to finish the main quest. But that kind of require you to be stupid on purpose, because it's obvious what item are important.
EDIT: found the in game message: " With this character's death, the thread of prophecy is severed. Restore a saved game to restore the weave of fate, or persist in the doomed world you have created."
- I think that's the best way to handle it. Let me kill whoever I want as long as I know the consequences.
- Good news. You can still beat the game if the "thread of prophecy is severed", but it is fairly challenging and generally requires stumble-luck or at LEAST knowledge of how to normally beat the game. It helps to know the identity of another character you have to kill in cold blood to get "almost back on track". And then the location that serves no real purpose except to get back on track from that situation.
  
  Yes indeed, I know what you are talking about. But I would not really consider that the "normal" ending as described by OP. Even if the ending scene itself is exactly the same, it's a very different path and clearly a much harder one.
- What kind of monster uses mods on a first playthru
  
  It was some small QoL changes in the UI and menus, recommended by my friend who recommended me the game. I don't remember exactly the changes but there was nothing big added or changed in the gameplay
  
  Me, more and more these days. Especially if the game has been out for a while.
- First time I played I had to load a save back in Seyda Neen because I killed some poor half naked dude in his shack in Balmora. Fuckin Caius Cosades.
  
  Isn't it like the first quest you get? 🫠
  
  😰 You killed Daddy Caius
- Marvelous morrowind I should've put some "morrowind joke" but I don't remember any

I managed to soft lock the new Pokemon Snap game in the tutorial where they had you take a picture of a Butterfree (I think is the right Pokemon). Somehow when I took a picture, it flapped its wings and turned enough that it was flat in the picture and couldn't be selected when you were at the next phase of the tutorial selecting the shot to show the Professor Oak stand in. You couldn't go back to take another picture, so I was effectively unable to continue the game from there. I was pretty proud of my bad picture taking skills.
- Damn, Professor Oak fired your ass.
  "No, you can't go back, this is fucking awful, give me that camera back."
- Lol I guess it never “snapped” out of it?

Sierra adventure games, like King's Quest and Space Quest, were notorious for this kind of thing. Like there could be an item you have 1 chance to get, and you didn't know, so you don't get it and then several hours later when you're at the end of the game, you realize you need that thing to solve the puzzle and actually move on. But you can't. Because you didn't get it when you had the chance and you can not go back.
- I like the Unstable Ordinance from Space Quest IV that you can pick up near the start of the game. It's entirely useless, you can't ditch it, and if you have in your inventory near the end of the game, it blows up and kills you. Everytime. You have to restart nearly the whole game and resist the adventure game urge to grab everything that isn't nailed down.
  
  Those games didn’t give a fuck about your feelings. I remember some of those point and clicks had zero chill. I played one where all I wanted to do was cross the street. My character was immediately run over by a car and I had to start over. The typing games could be even worse. Oh sorry this bees nest is attacking you, here’s hoping you grabbed the bug spray under the carpet on the 3rd floor and are quick enough on your feet to type out the exact sequence of words necessary to get your character to use it. ‘Use bug spray’ sorry can you please be more specific. Oh never mind your character is dead, no saves, heres the worst 8 bit death audio anyone has ever created.
  
  I thought it blew up when you went into the sewers which isn't long after you pick it up. But still, it's a trap you don't realize is a problem right away and really sucked :)
- In the same vein: the games in the Hugo trilogy had several fail states... each. Trying to cross a bridge? Oop, you've bumped against the wonky hitbox and dropped the matches you need near the river. They're wet now and completely unusable.
  
  Maniac Mansion was the first that came to mind for me. You select a party from a number of characters at the beginning, but unless you pick the exact right party, you'll never be able to finish the game.

I'm going to be honest, I find things that can permanently mess up your save (in the sense that you'll get a lesser experience or not reach the ending) is extremely bad game design. It's something I'd expect out of a 2 hour arcade game, not a modern release.
There are a lot of horror games in the PS1 that are "if you didn't do this extremely specific thing, in the right order, with the right coloured t-shirt, on a Tuesday, without any hints whatsoever... Too bad! When you reach the end of the game in another 60 hours of gameplay we will tell you you've failed"
Baldur's Gate might be a great game, but sometimes it's "dice rolls makes things spicy and each run its own thing!" mechanic gets unbalanced and by a little bad luck you can have a significantly degraded experience, sometimes without even knowing it.
This is bad game design, even if ultimately the game can be good in the end.
- I'd like to expand on this and say, as a 37 year old parent with a house that barely has time to play a game ONCE it's complete and utter bullshit. I'm doing good just to finish a game, there is pretty much zero chance I'm going to play it again.
  I'll shamelessly say I do reference walkthroughs if I expect there to be choices the impact the game in big ways.
  
  I'm impressed your house has time to play games at all.
- I get what you mean occasionally games like that can feel like they force the replayability aspect rather than encourage it.

Kind of the flip of the question but far cry 5 was particularly infuriating when it came to bullshit plot devices that override the players choices/skills. The boss fights were rigged with fixed outcomes regardless of what you hit the boss with. The fact that you could hit an unarmored human in the head with a rpg and see the explosion but the game was just like "yeah but the story says he's alive so he's alive. Also he is about to wreck your shit for... reasons..." drove me crazy...
- This kind of stuff was what turned me off the Armored Core "Spiritual Successor" game Daemon X Machina. So many fights involved scripted foes where it wasn't obvious they were scripted as undefeatable until I'd burned out half my ammunition.
- Exactly this, Far Cry 5 did "ludonarrative dissonance" in a big way. Also, fake open world. 3 and 4 just had a bunch of annoyingly stupid story developments: you going into some Obviously Bad Idea or Diabolus-ex-machina shit - which is still really grating if you're otherwise playing methodically and cautiously, but they happened during missions and didn't intrude on the rest of the game. 5's stupid unwinnable kidnapping parties and stupid mandatory "drug trips" sure did, though.
  Modding that shit away, it's still a reasonable game, but ye gods the story was terribly executed.
  
  That is part of why I liked New Vegas so much, they were just like "yeah you can kill Caesar in camp, go ahead, the story is now differerent and you don't get these quests but oh well, your choice"
  
  I wish I disagreed with you, the only thing I can push back on is saying the open world is fake.
  It's a damn shame, because far cry 5 has by far my favorite setting of the series. I'd love for someone to take a second stab of that kind of setting.
  
  I was under the impression that ludonarrative dissonance was when you purposely try to subvert the way the game "wants" to be played, rather than you trying to do what the game wants and the game failing to interpret your actions in a realistic or satisfying way. Like the people who try to be law-abiding pacifists in GTA V or people using armor stands to turn Minecraft into multiplayer chess.
- That's kind of normal, isn't it? There are often immortal characters, that simply can't be killed or lost or whatever. Like the dog companion in fallout 4.
  
  It's not uncommon, but can be very grating depending on the circumstances. Dogmeat and the other companions are immortal because Rule of Fun - losing them would suck, which is why it's limited to the more masochistic (not that there's anything wrong with that) difficulty settings. Far Cry games generally try to seem realistic apart from some trademark trippiness, so when you blast someone with a rocket and they just ignore it, it's a bit jarring.
  In-universe I think the idea is that you're tripping balls, it's a go-to excuse for "why is this boss fight behaving weird" in the Far Cry series.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If you don't give the sandwich to the small dog you can't finish the game.
- I got bit by this one. Went over to a friend's house to spend the day playing HHGTTG. Several hours later we discovered we couldn't win the game because I had neglected to feed the dog 15 minutes in while he was up getting a drink or something.
- It really shows that Douglas Adams was an author and not a game designer with how easy it is to soft-lock that game if you visit rooms in the wrong order or spend too long or short a time exploring one. Most of the possible mistakes become reasonably apparent reasonably quickly, but not always.

It's not quite what you're getting at, but in Bubble Bobble Revolution you can't pass level 30 because the boss doesn't spawn. It's a soft lock but there's nothing you can do to avoid it, and the game is on the DS so there's no updates to fix it :D

Fallout 1. During the term to the Master there is a 200 second countdown.
If you fooled up the speech check or want to do it differently and reload a save that was made after the countdown started then the countdown drops to 50 seconds. Making the fight impossible to do in time.
- I think you just helped me solve why I never finished it when I was 8 lol.
  I was at the ending but was never able to finish it before the countdown ended. Now I need to install the game again!

In every game in Suikoden series, you'd have to recruit 108 characters in total to get the true ending.
Around half of these are part of the story, so you'd get them whatever you do, but the rest you'd have to do some sidequest to get them, a lot of them are missable.
Also, you can get some characters killed, dooming you from ever getting that true ending.
- Suikoden 1 and 2 in particular have very precise soft-locks.
  In Suikoden 1, Pahn has to win a battle that seems to be a scripted loss.
  Suikoden 2 (my favorite RPG of all time) is actually beyond brutal. There's a 3-5 second timed input that doesn't even make much sense and if you get it wrong, nothing predictable changes except you don't get the 108th star (just one person having a private word with the strategist that only makes sense later)
  
  And I thought 4 & 5 was brutal...

FF12 had some bullshit chest near the beginning of the game.. If you opened it you lost the ability to 100% the game and get the Zodiac spear ( reportedly some ability to get one in a very tedious grunts fashion but it's been ages)
Basically the straw that broke the camel's back for me with ff.. The games story and combat was already a let down after they dropped the turn based combat like all of them ff1-ff10
But yeah generally I dislike many soft lock mechanics or illogical things that punish you for just playing the game.. Oftentimes these were put in games just to sell strategy guides.
- I haven't played 2 or 3, but at the very least FF4 isn't turn based. Its pseudo-realtime.
  
  I remember ff4 being turn based or at least the same menu maybe active time where if your too slow npcs will act but it's been awhile

King's Quest was the king of soft locks.
- Any of the Sierra "X Quest" games. Space Quest, Police Quest... so many soft locks. I remember Police Quest had a soft lock that would trigger on the first day but wouldn't become apparent until day 3 or 4.
- Fuck Sierra games, it's why I gave up on them and played only Lucasarts point-and-click adventure games.
  
  Friends don't let friends play Sierra games without walkthroughs
  
  Same although I didnt get into the lucasarts games until the 2000s. I played every Sierra game and love/hated them all not realizing there was a better way to live.
- Yeah? How so? While I've numerous clips of that game I don't think I've seen what you are referring to
  
  There's like 7 king's quests.
  
  https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UnintentionallyUnwinnable/Sierra this is but a small sample of the pain that was old school Sierra

Xmen on Sega genesis. At one point you have to literally reset the console. I was 10 and didn't understand that's what it was telling me to do. No game had ever done that, and prof x was breaking the 4th wall telling the player to do that. The game never broke the 4th wall otherwise. I didn't understand until a decade later when I read it on some listicle.

I'm pretty sure I soft locked my New Vegas save a good few years ago, or at least locked myself out of the ending I wanted. I was going for the Yes-Man ending, but I wanted to let House upgrade the robots first. I let him do it and then killed him to get the platinum chip back, but turns out he didn't have it on him. Without any way to give the chip to Yes-Man, I was SoL. I think you can still complete the game with a couple other factions, but I know for sure that I already pissed The Legion off so I don't know how many options are left. Maybe I'll dig up that save somehow and try again.
Also, In the original Thief games (Thief: The Dark Project, Thief: Gold, and Thief 2), there was a brief fadeout period between dying and getting kicked to the game over screen. This death state didn't lock the controls, so you could still move around, interact with objects, and, critically, quicksave. If you happened to quicksave at the moment of your death, there was nothing you could do to get out of dying. There was only one quicksave slot and no autosaves, so if you weren't manually saving every now and then, you had to start the entire game over. Learned to make occasional checkpoint saves the hard way.
The death mechanic did lead to at least one hilarious fan mission where you had to get through a door and complete the mission after falling to your death.
- Yes Man is the failsafe ending, so you should always be able to do it I'm pretty sure. Killing Yes Man should work like killing Victor and he just jumps to a new body if I remember correctly.
- Link to the fan mission? I've been getting my annual itch to go back to The City

Oh the joys of King's Quest V. The most notorius soft lock is one that happens so fast that you would never suspect it to be a soft lock. Early in the game, the player will come across a scene where a cat is chasing a mouse. Now, this should make the player go "OH NO, THE POOR MOUSE!" and help the mouse. However, the scene is tied to your CPU speed so you have a total of 2-4 seconds to go into your inventory, select the item to yeet at the cat, and save the mouse. Many players will blink and just go, "Alright well that happened." So, the player goes on and finally gets to a point in the game where Graham gets knocked out and tied up in a basement. Yeah your game just ends here if you didn't save the mouse because the mouse chews through the ropes. THERE IS NO INDICATOR, AT ALL, THAT THE MOUSE IS THE KEY TO SOLVING THE PUZZLE. NONE.
There is also another soft lock into the end game that involves you having decided to pick up a fishhook earlier so you can use it on a mousehole for a piece of cheese. Yeah, if you don't do that, you can't power a wand to use to beat the game's villain. And you'd probably think; "Oh I can just go back and get it." Yeah, you can, but if you do you'll also be trapped in there and your game is over again. So you HAVE to know to get it the first time.
And people wonder why LucasArts titles are more fondly beloved over the earlier Sierra titles.
- King's Quest VI, if you wait a few minutes on the strting beach, there's a 5-pixel momentary glint that turns out to be a coin. If you leave the beach beforehand, it's gone forever and the game is in an unwinnable state.
  That game was horseshit and I really want to give it another go
  
  I always forget about the coin because I learned my lesson from all the bullshit one screen items from Space Quest IV as well. Also, I'd like to mention the game that was programmed to never let you get the true ending due to legal issues. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream could never be truly beaten for the best ending in the French and German releases. Mainly due to the character Nimdok's storyline being entirely centered around Nazis and the surgical "experiments" that happened. I'm not here to dwell on that, but what I am here to dwell on is that when the game was released, French and German players could not get the true ending due to CyberDreams forgetting to check off the trigger for Nimdok succeeding in his game. So, the game was always in its fail state up until 2013 or so when it was finally released on Steam and GOG. The game was in an unwinnable state for those releases for almost 20 years. No revised version with a fix was ever issued until the worldwide release.

Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. If you were too lazy to trek back to Cordon after deactivating the miracle machine (I think), you couldn't get the true ending without abusing glitches and bugs.

Not exactly the same but sort of related: the first time I played the New Vegas DLC Honest Hearts, I accidentally shot a character that is meant to be a companion, turned him and essentially all quest characters hostile and basically forced the game to direct me from the opening of the DLC to the final mission because I couldn't do anything to side with anyone. I thought it was the shortest most bullshit DLC with not nearly enough to do for at least a few years before I played it again and realized how much I missed.
- Dog/God?
  
  No that's Dead Money, this was Follows-Chalk.
  
  But that is one of my favorite characters in the whole game.

The original Neverwinter Nights, you could kill main story NPCs and lock yourself from progressing. If you saved after this without realizing your mistake because you're dumb, you have to restart.
Also, the original pre-order Ocarina of Time, if you did the keys on the water temple in the wrong order, it made the temple nearly impossible. Data sleuths have found a way to progress, but 14 year old me spent 20 hours trying to figure it out and quit the game.

Which no one mentioned the classic
come to tye first town + hit a chicken + get in an infinite fight with Delphine + don't talk to blades + never fight alduin = Skyrim
Thus was my first playthrough of Skyrim
- Isn't Skyrim one of those games where you can mess around for a bit and eventually come back and proceed like nothing ever happened?
  In Fallout 4 you can use the Nuka World DLC to push the Minutemen to whatever settlement you left Preston in or the Castle but I think there's always the option for redemption because they are the fail safe faction. I figured Skyrim would have something similar.
  
  Yeah you need to be imprisoned by the guard of whiterun and it's all gucci with delphine
  
  I stole a book for a quest with a shitton of witnesses, ran away, got out of town because of the guards having patching issues, stopped at my home and dumped my mostly-stolen inventory and returned and turned myself into the guards paying 40 gold to redeem myself for stealing a priceless book. Skyrim is a masterpiece of realism I tell you!
  
  In Skyrim there's a ton of ways you can hardlock yourself I believe in fallout 4 should be some too, it's more flexible though

It only kind of counts but dead rising 1 fits. You have to follow an exact sequence of events, be at exact spots at exact times, or the main story ends and you can only get bad endings.
It’s actually really hard because you end up having to run from one boss to another and if you’re late there isn’t enough time to resupply. I eventually got to a boss fight where I didn’t have enough time to do anything else and I just couldn’t get past him. It isn’t that the game ends, but it just completely scaps the main story progression and says something like ‘the truth is lost forever’ .
- I almost give that game a pass purely because of how much you're meant to start over again anyway. It's not like you spent the entire time on one perfect go through with no do overs, you'd probably already restarted a bunch of times by then, it's just another crazy mistake you couldn't have known you could make in that game.
  Not that that really makes it better, but it's not on par with doing the same thing in a giant RPG, unless you only got one shot or something, but knowing that game I would doubt it. I never got that far, though, that game is... weird and particular
  
  Definitely a weird game but it worked.

Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If you don't grab the newspaper at the beginning of the game, you get totally softlocked near the end.

Disco Elysium has a number of potential soft locks, though you kind of have to go out of your way to actually get into one. The easiest one is probably paying for your hostel room the second night. Usually a combination of decisions and unlucky dice rolls are necessary to actually get locked, and/or poor use of skill points (meaning you can't spend one to re-try the crucial roll).
There is also a seemingly minor decision in a side quest that can make a certain check during the ending unwinnable and thus lock you out of one of the most impactful moments in the game.

Undertale is an indie game that promotes and encourages kindness toward others. You can play the game however you want, and there are a multitude of endings depending on how nice/mean you are in your playthrough.
But if you're not 100% kind to everyone you meet; if you take even one unkind action toward someone, you're locked out of the perfect good ending. And it remembers your playthrough, so you can't ever earn it by replaying the game. I dunno if that's been patched; I haven't played it since about 2015, but that was the rule when I started it.
And there was no indication starting out that you had this choice. Most people default to fighting bad guys in games. There wasn't even a hint that you could play the game as a passive, kind person and never harm anyone, despite their aggressive and harmful actions toward you.
So most gamers got locked out of that perfect good ending. Which I guess is kind of the message of the game. Every small act, whether good or bad, can affect people around you permanently. But it's still annoying as a completionist, knowing that I could never perfectly complete a game because of a rule I wasn't informed of when I started.
- The game remembered a lot of things but you very much could do a pacifist run by starting a new game. I read about the pacifist run after about an hour into the game, decided I wanted to try it, and restarted and was able to achieve the best ending.
  
  Yeah, you're only locked out of pacifist if you previously did a genocide run
  Edit: looking at the wiki, this isn't true, there are minor differences in the soulless pacifist run tho

I actually managed to soft lock a side quest in The Witcher 3 recently. If you loot a container right as a cutscene begins, the item will be removed from the container but not put into your inventory.
I managed to do this with a key (by mistake) and almost lost around 25 hours of gameplay lol.
- What container is this?
  
  Avoiding spoilers, one of the major quests has you approach and help someone fight some monsters. In that same place there is a skeleton with a key in it for a different side quest.
  After you finish fighting the monsters, a dialog cutscene triggers with the person you just helped, but there is a small window of time between the combat ending and the dialog cutscene starting when you actually loot.

Don't know if anyone has said it yet, but Fallout 3. There is a story quest where you have to ask a radio host named Three Dog information about your father and it's a percentage based skill check that if you fail it, I don't think you can progress (unless I am completely mistaken since it's been more than a half decade since I last played).
To make matters even worse, even at a maximum 100 in speech, the skill check can still be failed. Again, not 100% sure whether or not the Three Dog skill check is even required or if you can just run to the right place to progress the main story, but if you are a first time player you could absolutely screw yourself over not knowing about this.
- IIRC failing the speech check is the "normal" outcome. If you convince him he gives you info you would have come across later, allowing you to bypass the next main story quest.
  
  Yeah, that was always a weird one to me. It's one thing for speech checks to give you advantages and shortcuts, but that straight up cut 30 minutes off the game.

While playing Final Fantasy X the first time, I got to Old Zanarkand and inside the dome, I saved behind a sealed door in the Cloister of Trials. I wasn't savvy to good saving practices and after solving the puzzle, got into a battle I was completely hopeless to defeat. There was no way to walk back out the door from which I entered, the only way out was through; and with my existing inventory, spells, charged up aeons, etc. I absolutely could not defeat the boss.
It was pretty crushing because this moment is so close to the end of the game, but I gave up and had to come back months (years?) later to fully start the game over. I think maybe I played 99+ hours of Final Fantasy VII and then decided to give X another try. The second time, I was much smarter with maintaining multiple save games for safety. Not to be bested again, I grinded up all of my limit breaks and aeons for safety and completely obliterated the boss in one go the next time around.
- That Zanarkand Cloister of Trial is nowhere near the end
  
  Oh I vaguely remembered it being beyond the ¾ point, but also I wouldn't have known and it certainly FELT like that was the case when I got soft locked.

In cave story, there is a decision around the middle of the game. If you make the wrong decision you can’t upgrade to the best weapon in the game.
I forget all the details, but i was annoyed when I found out about it.
- there's several decisions like this, it's just the way the game is

I almost softlocked myself in The Evil Within (the first one). I've used up most of my ammo before walking into a boss fight and I just barely managed to beat him by using everything I had. It does give you ammo before the fight but it isn't enough to win, I imagine it would be easy to softlock there. I remember spending a huge time making sure all my shots land so I don't restart.

There are a LOT of these, especially from the 8/16/32 bit era.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnintentionallyUnwinnable

Takeshi’s challenge I think it was called. Notoriously bullshit game on the famicon

I'm sure others have mentioned it here, but..
Chrono Trigger.

I played Earthbound as a kid and got stuck in a golem without the item needed to get out. Since I got it used I didn't have the game guide. No idea how much stuff I missed but I never picked it up again.
- I remember that, and I remember finding a way out too. I just don't remember what it was.
  I'm pretty sure that's not a full-on softlock. Just so bad it feels like one if you miss something.

XCOM: Terror from the Deep had some notorious research tree issues

Ys 8 has a soft lock toward the end where if you didn't do enough side quests to build up enough affinity with your castaway group and party members you would get treated to a bad/neutral ending. Fortunately at that soft lock point there are enough ways to build up those points so you can progress past that point.

King Kong for the PS2 had a fire puzzle, where if you dropped the torch in the last section, you couldn't get a new source of fire. So you were stuck at a section where you had to burn away wood in the path forwards, but couldn't go backwards to get the fire.

Final Fantasy Legend for the og Gameboy. I remember getting pretty far in the tower and there was some weapon or item you had to have to pass or beat something and I missed getting it and couldn't progress and never played it again.

this one reminds me of Farcry 4. The one with Pagan Min.
if you just stay and be a good boy, you get a free trip to where you really wanted to go.
It's easy to not do this because maybe the welcoming committee is not around anybody's standards.

Metro.
All 3 games require you do/don't kill certain people at different levels in order to get the 'true ending'. When I first played I just killed anything that moved, but then found out the consequences of doing so. Honestly it improved my game experience so much more when I had to carefully consider each action.
- At least Exodus good ending is way easier to get imo, just don't kill non bandits humans. (and don't act like an ass around your crew)

Little Big Adventure 2. Just before the last boss I managed to save myself on the last island without a way to leave it. But I needed to leave and get another Ball or w/e it was to unluck a door. It was my first real pc game experience ever. Dunno why I stuck with this hobby after that tbh :)

I can't remember the exact method, and I may even be remembering the wrong game, but I think in Breath of Fire 1 there was an item that you needed that could be sold, or maybe not picked up, and if you didn't have it, you'd get locked out of a puzzle much later in the game. It was hard to fuck up, but if you did, it was 30 hours of game down the drain.

Elder Scrolls Daggerfall was surely the peek of this, you get a letter at the start telling you to meet a woman in a bar on a set date - turn up too early and she won't be there, but if you mess around on sidequests and don't have enough time to travel there so are late then she'll leave and the main quest never really happens.
There were a million other ways to lock your ability to progress but I always remember that, I don't know if it was possible to get back on track but I don't think so, I probably played a thousand hours before I did a run where I even started the main quest
- Is there anyway to know that you missed her? Like a letter left behind or an NPC telling you?
  
  I think it comes up with a little note on the screen telling you that it's no longer possible to compete the game, you'd get that randomly in a dungeon too because two miles away a bad guy randomly died -- belive it out not Todd Howard has got much better since 1996

The Ooze. My memory on this is fuzzy but on genetics lab part 2, there is a room you can enter that has a checkpoint. If you enter the room then you're locked inside and if you collect the checkpoint and die, you will respawn back into the room and your only option is to lose all your lives or reset the game. I remember getting really pissed off finding this when I was a kid because I spent days trying to beat the game and I had a really good run up until that moment.

I guess this is tangentially related. RDR2 had the full ending for Author and then kept going. I didn't care what happened beyond that so I never finished the epilogue.
- That's not a soft lock and your clearly never played the first game lol.
- Aw you missed out on some fun parts of the game. If you were just playing for Arthur's story then I can understand why you'd stop there though. I'll spoiler tag the stuff below but it's why I think the epilogue is worth it if you wanted closure on something dealing with Arthur.
  !Micah is a totally removed. Epilogue dealt with John dealing with him and that shit was great !<
  Won't say more about it than that.
  
  I heard later that >!Micah finally gets his in the epilogue!< and meant to go back to finish it, but never did. I still may some day!

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