I don't mind a little bit of death in context. For thriller or horror games, the thought that you might die adds to the atmosphere. Even in games where I know I can't die, I always save before I go down the dark stair case or push the big red button, sort of a talisman against my own fear. As long as the death isn't too time consuming or inconvenient, i.e, it puts you back to where you were to try again, it wont put me off exploring or enjoying the game. Sometimes, however, I question the developers idea of a good recovery point. While playing Next Life, there is a timed action sequence where you can die. If you fail, you go back not to the beginning of the playable sequence, but all the way back to the beginning of an unskippable cut scene. Your character automatically hides at the beginning of the cut scene so for every retry you have to watch the long boring cut scene of a hovercraft landing then only after your character slowly ambles back into position and repeats his inane comments do you have three seconds to find and click on the appropriate hotspot before it sends you back to do it all over again.
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