12 Games With Awful Save/Checkpoint Systems

Sonic the Hedgehog (2006)

It’s bad enough that Sonic 06 has a terrible story, questionable mechanics, awful controls, poor level design, annoying exploration, and so on. On top of all that are the annoying checkpoint placements in some stages. They crop up minutes into the stage – sometimes, there wouldn’t even be a second checkpoint. Die – and you will die, given the controls in some sequences – and you’ll have to redo a lot.

But perhaps the worst example is End of the World, the final stage which sees Sonic’s friends working together to gather the Chaos Emeralds. Seven stages must be consecutively completed with no checkpoints at all and some of the more annoying instadeath mechanics in the game are present.