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Guess who's been playing the original Hollow Knight and immediately broke his Fragile Greed charm twice
(hexbear.net)
Both times I managed to equip it right before getting ambushed by a difficult boss 
Don't think I'll bother with the fragile charms anymore. The busywork they punish you with for dying isn't worth it.
Yyyyyep.
For real how did "Hey let's waste the player's time if they die" ever catch on. Starting in the 80s we spent like 3 decades moving away from that.
Not just "let's waste the player's time if they die" but "let's make a game where the player is supposed to die a lot figuring things out then waste the player's time when they die"
And then when you say this some Soulslike fan will jump in and say "No, you don't get it, that's the point" and probably imply you suck at video games
Literally this but replace "capitalism" with "Soulslikes"
Imply? Soulslike fans will say it to your face, then suggest that sucking at video games also makes you a bad person.
The major innovation of soulslikes is, counterintuitively, that they provide a safety net to let players fail forwards instead of just resetting. Just like the conceit of their enemy design is about creating consistent rhythms, clear telegraphs, and ways to actually avoid taking damage. For all that people meme about the genre being hard or unfair or whatever, its core is the exact opposite: giving the player enough QoL features and fair design that the rest of it can be dialed in tighter without it becoming just annoying the way jankier games are.
That's why every game that's actually improved on the formula has moved more in that direction, with more "consumables" that just refresh to full on death or rest instead of being farmable or limited.
Although Hollow Knight is also a metroidvania, which are usually kind of the opposite of that design philosophy, hinging a lot more on farming bullshit and resetting to savepoints. I understand Hollow Knight leaned more towards the soulslike QoL stuff, though? I've never played it though; I don't like metroidvanias in general and every time I've seen someone playing Hollow Knight it has not looked particularly appealing.
Failing forward can work in tabletop with a living dm. Failing foward in video games just means fucking up saves on purpose.
What do you mean when you say this?
In order for a failing forward system to work as designed, the game has to not include a fully functional save system, otherwise players would just revert to a save before the failure that the game wants them to fail forward from.
See my other question, I guess
If soulslike fail forward were actually more forgiving than saving, soulslike games wouldn't have to remove the save feature to force people to engage with it.
Your wording has a lot of weird question-begging in it: "not include a fully functional save system," "remove the save feature," etc. This isn't an accurate representation of what it's doing and makes it harder to talk about unless I just ignore what you actually say. The games do save, and typically they save constantly, though HK and Silksong don't save your location in an up-to-date way, they tie that to designated save points (like almost all games with save points do). Dark Souls though actually saves your approximate location anywhere in the world so long as you're not in the air or something, which is more than most games do. Regardless, both series do save lots of other information about the world, like gates opened, items retrieved or spent, non-respawning enemies and bosses defeated, NPC quests (but typically not if they died in a fight alongside you, which again is generous), and the currency isn't "not saved," the information isn't lost, you just get a penalty that you don't like. It's fine to not like that penalty, but it makes things difficult when you describe it incorrectly.
Trying to address what you're saying here particularly: I don't think that makes sense as a criticism. Games usually aren't made with a bunch of modular parts in the core mechanics to switch out, and they are designed based on the systems that they use. Dark Souls would mostly become harder if you had conventional saves instead, because you would need to make it back alive to a save point for your progress to be saved and otherwise it's just dust in the wind if you open a shortcut but you get killed right after. If you could toggle systems, that would be confusing and harebrained for basically a trivial benefit if you understood the system, because as DS is designed it usually wouldn't even be a good idea to use normal saves for boss runs, because you still might die after you beat the boss and then you need to fight the boss again.
The bare minimum for a fully functional save system is a way to fully record a previous game state and then later return to it.
This is not present in soulslikes.
So you don't like that you can't have a selection of multiple save slots like in, for example, Skyrim? I think I probably have, by coincidence, a bias toward older and more primitive games that functionally couldn't do that on the fly, but that doesn't mean that they don't have save systems. Not having a save system means that when you turn the game on, there isn't save data there and you need to start from the beginning or use a code or something. Certainly, to say that not having multiple save slots is "removing the save feature" is silly. They do save.
I suppose it wouldn't be the end of the world to have a "Continue" or "Reload" option when you die, but given the auto-saving that means there would need to be a separate save for the last time you were at a bonfire unless you want to reload to .3 seconds before the death blow, and then you'd be motivated to return to the bonfire for every little thing in case you want to reload (like in any game with freely-accessible save points) or else you need to just eat the reset because again, reloading the save is usually disadvantageous and otherwise is usually trivial. That means there would probably need to be manual saves to avoid that issue, and then that gives the game a perverse incentive for constantly saving and immediately redoing every encounter until you get a perfect take. idk, it just seems like a less interesting game to me, but it's fine that we like different things.
The bare minimum I described as fully functional is present in Super Metroid. There is only one save slot for each playthrough, loading that one save brings you back to exactly the same game state you last saved. This is perfectly fine.
It's even better to have manual saving to unlimited files accessible through the host machine's filesystem as well as dedicated hardware buttons for an additional quicksave/quickload slot but that all goes well beyond bare minimum fully functional. Autosaves can sometimes be okay as long as they don't overwrite anything.
Soulslikes don't even have the bare minimum save system that Super Metroid has.
To answer seriously, a major part of the reason it started off that way was because video games were for a while mostly the purview of arcades and that sort of time-wasting death mechanic was the most obvious way to get kids to keep pumping in quarters. Make sure the game was hard enough that death was likely and frequent but if you wanted to keep going from where you died instead of starting over, just pop in some more money. Even for home consoles though, that sort of death mechanic was a way of padding out the game, making what was actually very little content seem longer because you have to keep redoing the same stuff.
As with the majority of shitty things in this world, when you trace them back far enough, you discover the profit motive (therefore capitalism) at their root.
I would say though that with the way games are played now in a very different set of circumstances compared to the 80s, the time punishment for player character death is used mostly just as a way to make the stakes feel high. I know I'm not saying anything that everyone here doesn't already know, but if there are no negative consequences for dying, then there is much less incentive to avoid death and the tension the game relies on to feel meaningful would just be sucked out. The soulslike solution to making death consequential actually works pretty well imo in a lot of cases, but still can be very annoying (and sometimes detrimental to a game) depending on a lot of other factors, ranging from how well it fits with the rest of the game's mechanics to individual player skill.
Well, that and technical limitations. On the console side of things, at least, password systems and then save batteries proliferated fairly quickly once they became viable.
I never really bought this as an argument in favor of Soulslikes because a negative consequence for death was codified long before they emerged as a genre: you fail whatever challenge killed you and have to try again if you want to progress.
Well sure, that's one of the more obvious consequences and it works great for some games (someone mentioned Super Meat Boy, and another example is Celeste though those aren't soulslikes) and works great even in some scenarios within soulslike, such as losing a health pip when you hit spikes but start back immediately where you were before hitting the spikes to try again. But that doesn't mean other penalties can't further improve the kind of tension that a creator of a game wants to evoke or the kind of risk vs reward that a player is meant to consider. With games where longer term exploration is a big part of what is meant to drive the player, a mechanic that penalizes multiple or continued health losses with being set back a ways in exploration is often a good way to maintain that tension. It's not some evil thing that developers are trying to do to make players mad, it's a balance they're trying to find to varying degrees of success. For example, I love metroidvanias, and I love it when they are difficult in terms of putting high demands on a player practicing a platforming sequence to get it right, because when as a player you do get it right, it feels really good, but in my opinion, as I said in a different thread, Silksong has gone too far in towards heavily punishing players by giving them too little health, making enemy damage too high, and payer-character damage too low, with the runbacks are usually too long. But I can still understand why it is that way and what the game's creators were trying to do, I just think they missed the mark by overshooting too far on the penalties. It's not an either/or kind of thing. The soulslike death mechanic works better in some games than in others, though I'd agree that it's probably being overused at this point and often put in games where it's a lot harder to justify its presence.
I might just not have the right psychology for this, because the only tension Soulslike mechanics have invoked in me is a kind of weary "Ugh, if I lose this fight I'm going to have to do so much shit before I can try again." My brain just processes the whole thing as an unwelcome interruption of my attempt to beat the challenge in front of me. It doesn't matter how fun I normally find the core gameplay loop, in that context it feels like having to fill out and submit paperwork to get the approval to retry the challenge I just failed.
I know this was a typo, but I'm going to pretend it was a pun about how Silksong constantly makes you spend ingame money to do routine tasks.
@BeanisBrain@hexbear.net you called it lmao
What did I say that he "called"?
He said elsewhere in this thread
But I didn't do that.
"no you don't get it that's the point"
"probably imply you suck at video games"