Cost of failure
Also said as Death penalty, Failure state cost, Setback
What you lose when you fail: seconds, progress, items, or the whole run. It is a separate dial from how hard the game is.
It decides how the player feels about trying. Cheap failure encourages daring and lets a game be brutally hard. Expensive failure makes every step tense, but spends the player's time repeating things they can already do.
Say it
“Respawn instantly at the start of the room, with no reload screen and no walk back. The room can be much harder if a retry costs one second.”
Where you’ve seen it
Super Meat Boy puts you back at the start of a short level in about a second. In Dark Souls, you drop your souls where you die, and you lose them for good if you die again before getting back to them.
Not to be confused with difficulty
Difficulty is how likely you are to fail. Cost is what failing takes from you. Super Meat Boy is high on the first and low on the second.