Excerpt from an article where I realized the following doesn’t really fit:

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Dead Rising intends that the player die and restart over and over, each time retaining experience and skills from the previous attempt. The idea is for the player to keep trying different things, exploring new places, and understanding how all the events in the game’s short timeline fit together. With every failure, the player learns a little bit more about the world that may come in handy later. The retention of skills and experience is to maintain a sense of overall progress despite the setbacks, and to prevent player from getting too bogged down in situations that they already have dealt with, to allow them to keep branching out and experimenting.