Death in an adventure game is tricky. It's something that usually carries more weight than something as trivial as dying in a shooter, but it can also break immersion. In particular, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers had an engrossing atmosphere that felt dangerous and exciting but until I got to Day 9, I didn't know that you could die in the game. Then in Day 10, there is such a ludicrous barrage of deaths that will happen to (I'm assuming) almost everyone that it becomes a die, click reload, try again, fail, repeat process that significantly impacted my impressions of the final gameplay portions. Until that point the game felt like a true, interactive movie, and once the death screens started popping up, the fourth wall was broken. The game remains one of my favorite to date, but that is the one area where I thought it could have been improved.
I guess my point is that I don't have a problem with death in an adventure game when it is a possibility, but when it's an inevitability (such as having a deadly series of unclear, timed puzzles back-to-back), it doesn't help with the immersion factor.
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