Soft locking refers to when a player manages to create a scenario where they can no longer progress in a computer or video game. Soft locking can occur when a player gets out of bounds, loses an necessary item, kills a vital NPC, or otherwise locks themselves out of being able to reach the ending in their current game. One of the really pernicious elements of soft locking is that it's not always clear when it has occurred. As a general rule games are designed with the intent that it be impossible to soft lock them. Level designers try not to put any pits into games that you can't get yourself out of or that don't kill you outright. If a vital character dies you should get a game over screen same as running out of health or time. Basic design philosophy says that the player should always know when they've lost or won. This means that anytime that it seems to the player like they've screwed themselves they have to weigh that against how competent they think the developers were.
Fell into a space you can't get out of? Have you missed a part of the movement mechanics?
Killed the NPC that you need to get through the locked door? Is there some other way through?
Sold the Axe of Fate's Folly to buy nine hundred mana potions? Is there another way to kill Orgalorg?
In the age of ubiquitous internet walk-throughs this is less of an issue than it use to be but the odds of finding someone explaining the way out of a rare failure state is slim. How much this matters depends on the game. Some games let you save and load whenever. In those case the harm of soft lock is proportional to how judicious you've been at saving, how far back in the chain of causality the soft lock goes, and how often you over write your own saves. Other games decide when and where you can record your progress and with them you're at the mercy of the devs. These circumstances can cost the player from a few minutes too several hours and at the extremities force the player to restart the entire game.
Soft locks are in contrast to hard locks where the game actually freezes up and becomes non-responsive. The obvious difference is that it's pretty hard to miss or misinterpret when a game is hard locked. Hard locks carry the same problems of potentially destroying a play through. Whether hard or soft a lock in this sense represents the end of a play through, in part or whole, and if the instance is egregious enough a total cessation of play. This is often followed by a scathing review and a solemn vow never to buy from that developer again. For this reason quality assurance tends to be fairly aggressive in stomping these out in specific instances and guarding against them through general design.
IRON NODER XV: LAST SECOND BARE BONES IRON NODER FREAKOUT!