Darkest Dungeon
A turn-based dungeon crawler where your heroes have a stress bar alongside their health bar -- push it too far and they don't just get weaker, they break into permanent, party-damaging afflictions.
- //Heroes have hit points AND a separate stress bar -- stress climbs from darkness, dead bodies, and watching teammates suffer, not just combat damage.
- //At maximum stress, heroes have an affliction event, becoming permanently Abusive, Masochistic, Paranoid, or Hopeless -- rarer, they can become Virtuous instead, gaining bonuses under pressure.
- //At 200 stress, a hero can die of a heart attack regardless of their current hit points.
- //Narrated entirely by Wayne June, whose Gothic, resigned vocal delivery frames the stress system as tragedy rather than mechanics.
- //Darkest Dungeon 2's single-run roguelite structure deliberately removes the accumulated hero history that made the original's afflictions feel personal -- a different, not lesser, design choice.
Darkest Dungeon is a turn-based dungeon crawler where you send a constantly-replenishing roster of heroes into increasingly grim expeditions from a decaying hamlet. Every hero has hit points and a separate stress bar, and stress climbs from darkness, dead bodies, failed checks, and watching teammates suffer, not just from taking damage. Push it too far and a hero has an affliction event, becoming Abusive, Masochistic, Paranoid, or Hopeless -- a permanent behavioural shift that actively hurts the rest of your party, not just a stat penalty. Wayne June's narration frames the whole thing as Gothic tragedy rather than mechanics, and the horror comes from watching people you've invested real time in become worse versions of themselves because of choices you made.
One of the most mechanically original horror games ever made. The stress system produces something no jump scare can: watching people you've come to care about deteriorate, knowing you're partly responsible. Eight years and dozens of games have cited it as an influence. None have replicated what it actually does.