Death and Experimentation in Games: Handling player failure

I just got done playing a short bit of Kingdoms of Amular, a game that I haven't really played enough to have a chance to get engrossed in it. I tried opening some sort of warded chest, I failed, and it killed me. That is how I learned how Kingdoms of Amular handles death: Reload the last save. The game autosaves; it autosaved right before the chest killed me, meaning that when I loaded the autosave, it would load it to kill me again.

I write that introductory paragraph, because how games handle death and failure matter. Kingdoms of Amular handles death in a very traditional way, but I think it's a terrible one. Death is not a part of the game, and dying breaks immersion. At least it has autosaves, though perhaps some more care could have been put into ensuring what just happened to me can't happen.

But let's contrast this to Dark Souls. What happens when you die in Dark Souls? You go back to the last bonfire you rested at. Death is a mechanic in that game. It's a mechanic in other games as well, for example, Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 both have ways of handling death via in-game systems.

Death should usually be punishing in games, but it needs to be the right type of punishing. It needs to not pull the player out of the game, and it needs to not feel like time was lost, progress was erased. That is the biggest problem with the "load the last save" method of handling death.

Here is the point I'm getting at: It is important to let the player know that they messed up in a friendly way. Game systems need to be designed to make the player feel comfortable with failure, with trial and error, and with learning via experimentation. I shouldn't feel paranoid that, if I mess up, I might potentially lose hours of play time. That pushes me away from games.

Dark Souls handles death extremely well. It is an important part of the game, and From Software put in great efforts to polish how that system works. The game makes death a natural part of playing it. It makes failure accepted. More games need to follow in this path. I'm not talking about difficulty here, but rather that there ought to be other mechanisms to handle player failure than simply reloading the last save. That's a design cop-out, and in the end, games are much worse for it.

In conclusion, I personally feel that making the player reload the last save is archaic and inelegant, and a poor way of handling player failure in games. There are better ways of going about it. Whenever I have to pull up a load menu involuntarily, the game has failed, not me.