Ah, I didn't sense the snark; I was making a point about Obra Dinn.
My apologies.

meh. Unless the game world is all repetitive and everything is the same, anyone can find their way in there, particularly when the game provides all kinds of clues (markers, POIs etc). Take subnautica - the game doesn't have a map, it's huge and yet I have little trouble orienting myself with all the markers you can obtain. I don't bother to build my own markers or even a compass, I can easily find my way to anything I need by using game-supplied pointers.

A rare exception of a particularly well designed instanced world. For comparison, the types of dungeons I was speaking of: There are no landmarks, the walls all look the same, you can't tell if there's an element unless you're directly facing it, and the encounter rate is a bit maddening. Oh, and some of the dungeons are dark so you have to either waste MP or an item slot.

Making a player watch cutscenes repeatedly. I don't dislike cutscenes, and to a certain degree I could even understand when developers want you to watch them at least once, but why repeatedly? Not offering an option to skip them is just stubborn or lazy, it serves no purpose. Especially annoying: Not even allowing players to abort and go back to the main menu during the opening sequence, so that, if they have to fiddle with the options, they have to watch the whole starting sequence x times.

Offering no save mechanic at all. Permadeath is a matter of preference, but you shouldn't be forced to repeat the whole game, if something comes up and you need to interrupt your gaming session. "But it's not that long anyway" is not a good excuse.

In general I don't see any good reason for making players repeat sections that pose no challenge and don't really change a lot from one try to the next. I don't know if it's due to some technical issues, but sometimes checkpoints are placed in such a way that you have to repeat a bunch of trivial things before you get to the the challenging part. E.g. in Sleeping Dogs right now, there was a mission with challenging fights, then you grab a guy and drag him out of the club, put him in your car, drive a a while, then you get ambushed by other cars with armed opponents. If you fail to beat that last section, you get thrown back to having to drag out the guy again, putting him in the car, driving the same roads, listening to the same conversation, and it takes up 30-60 seconds, I'd guess, without anything relevant happening in that time that you didn't already experience the first time. Nothing of it is connected with any kind of danger or risk to fail. Why not set the checkpoint before the ambush instead, or do two checkpoints, one after the fights, one before the ambush, so that your progress is safe in any case, but you only have to go through the "cinematic"/storytelling part once? This is just an example, but things like that are not rare in modern games, and they should not exist at all.

Is it OK if the limit is huge? (I'm thinking something like 256 or higher.)

Even if the game is just some quick game jam submission that can be completed in a half hour or considerably less?

(For example, is it really a problem that Celeste Classic lacks a save feature? For that matter, most PICO-8 games lack saves; is that really an issue for those games?)

From my POV, yes. I can understand that a simple beta or browser game or whatever has no saving function because it's so primitive and the dev had no time to implement it, but that's not a game I would want to pay for then. And I would probably just ignore it, unless I'm bored out of my skull and have too much time on my hands.

Of course, it also depends on the type of game. But with most games like that, replaying the same sections doesn't offer anything new. I don't want to spend 25 minutes playing something, then get stuck or called away from the keyboard or whatever, so that I have to quit, only to have to repeat all 25 minutes the next time, to be able to also play the last 5. Half an hour is definitely too long, in any case. And not even because it's such a long time, but because the repetition is super tedious and pointless in most cases, not fun.

that's has not realy anything to do with 'lives', though. There are games with lives where you have re-start the level each time you die, and games without lives where you continue from where you 'died' or 'failed'. not sure what you mean.... you are advocating potraying humans as being capable of smashing rocks with their heads? turn into wheels? can block a sword slash with a bikini armour? able to hit a moving target 100 feet away while running? never need to go to the toilet? that can mend open wounds and broken bones by eating an apple? or fix them in 5 secs with ah bandage?

There are almost no games that portrait humans correctly.... because that would generaly make a very boring game.

as to the bit in Sleeping Dogs, those kinds of things (even now) are sometimes handled that way due to autosaves crashing / corrupting if enemies spawn in at the same time.

hmm well of course armored genmod suits can make up for something such as we see in the sci fi branch, crysis for example or mass effect though even in mass effect it will make up to max half of your health bar, personally i do enjoy the health bar as a means of concretizing health, i mean in the same way that all those japanese developers actually agreed upon that after a battle there is a mending period before the game continues, battle brothers is another game that does a great job with implementing a wound/injury system with your health bar.... but yea a health bar but properly applied is what you are looking for in the end in many sort of games. so my point was not to advocate humans portrait proper but with sense :)

what makes sense or not is in the eye of the beholder

Not if the death also deletes the save-file, which is how X-Com games do it. Obviously, it's something the player should get to opt into.

hah yea, true.... another question, would you happen to have an example lying around of a game that either tries or is accomplished in what you see as the next step in health bars

i don't think there really are any, as the game need to convey this information to the player. what we do have is different ways of doing it, some more innovative then others. For esample Dead Space, which have no HUD elements, instead the health is shown on the character, or Resident Evil where the healt is represented as a heart beat. Or even the classic doom guys face in Doom. There are also games that have body damage instead of health meters. (and not to forget the boob tatoo in Trespasser: Jurasic Park).

But ultimatly, the game need to have a health bar by ant other name to let the player know if they are... well... dying.... all there is then is different ways od showing it, but at the end they all do the same thing.

I suspected that was the reason, but even then they could have set the checkpoints closer to the event. At the very least when you get into your car, skipping the bit where you have to drag the guy out of the club, slowly.

I really dislike when a game doesn't allow to save at any time or, at least, to quit whenever you need to and continue later from that point.