10 Games With Permadeath That Are 10/10 Masterpieces

More than mostly dead

There’s something reassuring about knowing you can pick up some extra lives in a video game, ever since the days of Super Mario Bros. and Pac-Man. When your character dies, the action resumes right where you left off — or pretty close to it. You don’t lose much progress. Things can continue largely as they were.

Some games don’t offer that safety net. The best of them are better for it, building on the limitation to produce a truly unique experience. They’re often challenging, but it goes beyond that. With the difficulty comes the sense that the stakes are real. If the thought of permadeath gets your heart racing in all the right ways, here are 10 games with that mechanic that you should seek out as soon as you can.

11 Rogue Legacy 2

Available on: Switch, PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X

In the original Rogue Legacy, players assume the role of a whole line of heroes, all of them exploring a dark castle in search of a cure for an ailing king. Each time a family member dies, their child takes up the hero’s mantle. That child has advantages that might allow them to finally succeed where their ancestors failed, but they may also suffer from unexpected new limitations that make the task more difficult. Every new run builds the family fortune, which grants new resources that should eventually lead to success. But you have to wonder: by the time you reach the end of the game, what will success even look like, and how many innocent lives will have been lost? 2022’s Rogue Legacy 2 revisits the concept with additional polish and a much deeper narrative to make it all practically irresistible.

10 The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

Available on: 3DS, Switch, Wii U, PS4, Vita, PC, Xbox One

Released in 2011, The Binding of Isaac is a game from Edmund McMillen (Mewgenics) and Florian Himsl about a little boy named Isaac who flees to the basement after his God-fearing mother turns homicidal and goes after him with a kitchen knife. Fearing for his life, he battles all sorts of nightmares while negotiating a seemingly endless series of mini-dungeons populated by nightmarish creatures determined to put an end to him. He gathers loot and resources along the way to survive showdowns with powerful foes. It all makes for a dark but strangely compelling experience. A significantly expanded package, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, was released in 2014 to provide players with new collectibles and features to justify many, many more runs. But they all end the same way when I’m in control: with Isaac losing his life.

9 Canabalt

Available on: Android, iOS, PC, PSP

Canabalt was made to be played with one hand, if it suits you. Actually, you can play it with just a single button: the one you press to make your character jump. As your sharp-dressed hero sprints across city rooftops, leaping between crumbling structures or to clear obstacles, his urgency steadily increases and so does his speed. Eventually, it will all come crashing down. But before it does, your goal is to get as far as possible before turning into “a fine mist.” Your score is the distance traveled before disaster finally strikes.

8 Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Available on: Switch

The Fire Emblem games have famously incorporated permadeath since the very beginning. You can play pretty much any of them with that mechanic enabled, though later ones do make it optional. Not everyone likes to sink many hours into their character’s development, only to lose that connection forever when a battle goes horribly wrong. The Divine Pulse ability, which you can use to rewind your previous actions, provides a welcome chance to set things right. You might well find yourself taking advantage of it, because Fire Emblem: Three Houses makes a loss even more difficult to bear than usual. You might become close to some of your characters while clearing the slice-of-life events between battles, and having to go without seeing their smiling face for the remainder of your adventure can be a bit much to take. There’s always a trade-off.

7 Darkest Dungeon

Available on: Switch, PS4, Vita, PC, Xbox One

An ancient evil slumbers beneath your ancestral home, and only you can put an end to it. That’s the idea in Darkest Dungeon, a turn-based RPG that lets you send a band of adventurers on what might well prove a suicide mission. First you deploy them to surrounding dungeons, where they can find the loot necessary to rebuild the local town and upgrade its facilities. Then you send them to their doom, equipped with powerful new weapons and armor but probably not prepared for the eldritch horrors they will encounter. With determination and enough heroes lost, you might gain the knowledge necessary for your latest band of adventurers to conquer great evil. Or they might all die once again. It’s alright, though; that’s a risk you’re willing to take.

6 Heavy Rain

Available on: PS3, PS4, PC

In Heavy Rain, you play as a man whose young son goes missing at a park. From there, you launch an investigation to find him and bring him back home, whatever the cost. You already lost one son, years earlier, to a car crash. You’re determined not to lose another. Along the way, you’ll meet a cast of strangers who are also investigating for reasons of their own. You’ll control each of them along the way, learning about their motivations as the twists keep coming. Just how much you learn by the end is up to you. Along the way, pretty much anyone can die. And if they should happen to perish, the story doesn’t come grinding to a halt. It keeps right on going, without a key character to make the connections you might desperately need to get to the truth. It’s a unique experience that invites experimentation, even after you know some of its darkest secrets.

5 Until Dawn

Available on: PS4

Originally planned for the PlayStation 3, but eventually released on the PlayStation 4 instead, Until Dawn is a slasher-inspired horror game that follows several young friends who have reunited at a remote lodge where terrible events transpired one year prior. On that fateful evening, two sisters fell off a cliff while fleeing from a stranger with a flamethrower. As the friends gather to mark the anniversary, a new nightmare begins. During the events that follow, any or all of them might become the next victims and pay a permanent price for their shortcomings. The game saves automatically at various points, so any bad decisions you make cast long shadows that impact the rest of your experience. Sony also published a remake in 2024 for the PlayStation 5, but the original version is the one that really brings the horror home.

4 The Quarry

Available on: PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X

Take Until Dawn, but set it in an idyllic summer camp. That’s the idea behind The Quarry. Developed by Supermassive Games, it’s the ambitious spiritual successor to the team’s earlier success story. This time around, cinematic inspiration comes from slashers like Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp. Players once again are tasked with making sure the young characters live to see the next day. Along the way, there are plenty of reasons things might go awry. Should the worst occur, those characters are gone for good, at least on your initial trip through the game, victims of a fate they could never have imagined. Not every story has to have a happy ending.

Get Polygon’s Wishlister newsletter

A weekly cheat sheet to what you’ll eventually love to play. No buying, no commitment — just saving for later.

Free. Unsubscribe anytime.

3

2 Don't Starve

Available on: Switch, PS4, PC, Xbox One

Don’t Starve has a title that suggests there will be a lot of starving, which is appropriate. It drops players in a hostile wilderness environment without directions and leaves them to find a way to survive. Three meters monitor their hunger, health, and sanity. If any of those meters drop too low, it’s a problem. You’ll spend daylight gathering the resources necessary to survive the night, and you’ll spend your evening hours huddled near a fire, hoping the shadows outside your line of sight don’t converge on you and end you. The longer you survive, the better your resources become, but you’ll face harsher weather and greater danger with the passage of time. The game has multiple modes, and one of them is endless. If you prefer, there’s also an Adventure Mode with more restrictions that can eventually let you roll credits. You just have to make sure your character stays alive that long.