Sekiro/From Software thought
Normal game: you have a limited number of consumable items to help with dangerous situations. If you die, you load your save and any items you used in your failed attempt are restored.
Sekiro: If you die, buff items you use stay gone. Also you're gonna die. So if you wanna experiment, it sucks.
re: Sekiro/From Software thought
@coda I only like failure = progress loss if the game is pretty short start-to-finish or a turn-based strategy kind of game (where you don't always need to act out some option to understand what it does)