I’m probably going to make a thread about this later, but non-Merciful IF greatly suffers from almost every “Game Over” situation being permanent. There’s no concept of the game resetting you to a last safe scenario after failure like in other games. The closest that most IF comes to this concept is Polite games that allow you to undo moves, so you are basically never one move away from being out of the game-ending situation. However, I feel like the ante could be upped a bit - giving the player deadly or time-sensitive situations that they are guaranteed to be able to solve, and resetting them back to the start of the sequence if they fail it. While reading the walkthrough for Finding Martin, there was a sequence where I dearly wished I could have puzzled it out coordinating the movement of the fuzzy cube as your first self in such a way as to let your future self exit from it, but in a Cruel game such as that I simply will never have the time or patience required to realize I’m stuck, reload, do the tweaks, play over 200 moves to check my work, it didn’t work, reload, tweak it again… The last game that I played back in August that was anything over Polite was such a bewildering experience, requiring around 40 backup saves for a game that was less than 1000 moves, that I’m frankly still “whetted” from the experience of playing a Cruel game.
And yes, as someone who grew up on them, I’m quite cognizant that graphical adventure games have almost never cracked the “it is either impossible to lose any progress or you have to make backups every 10 minutes” nut either. I sure wish they could!