From a psychological perspective, the concept of “sane” is a bit difficult to define. Even people with the mind who say “I’m sane” may actually be completely out of the locker by general social standards. At least in real life, it’s not something you can quantify.
But video games are different. Everything about the game is based on numbers and statistics, allowing even the mental well-being of the characters to become a quantifiable game mechanic.
Games using Sanity Systems often progress about them in slightly different ways, but have the general theme that everything is rooted in very stressful, sometimes supernatural situations.
Let’s take a look at 10 of the best examples of this idea.
10 Amnesia: Dark Descend
Please do not look directly
Perhaps one of the most famous games with sane mechanics, especially psychological horror games, is the dark descent, the original amnesia. Being trapped in a dark, Gothic castle is rather uncomfortable in itself, but amnesia decides to throw humanoid terror and cannibalism into the mix.
In amnesia, standing in the dark and staring directly at your enemy will passively drain your sanity as you stand in an illuminated area and solve puzzles, and as you progress through the game, you will generally be able to passively drain your sanity by staring directly at your enemies. Lighting torches and lanterns provide a small, safe haven from insanity, so it’s important to have some craters on hand.
If your sanity gets too low, you start to hallucinate. Your vision can be distorted and distorted, causing harmless objects to be ominously twisted, and false enemies could appear and disappear. Once your sanity is in the depths, you will be paralyzed to the bed for a while, and all nearby enemies will be warned immediately to your location.
9 60 seconds!
Time erodes everything
Many games have apocalyptic settings, but most of them focus on combat, survival and infrastructure. Few attempts to tackle the very real and extremely dangerous sense of hopelessness that comes with trying to survive such a situation. One of those numbers is 60 seconds!
In this game, you will need to manage a family of four to try to survive the nuclear apocalypse in the Fallout Shelter. In addition to eating everyone and keeping them healthy, you need to be aware of the sanity of each family. The general stress of isolation, coupled with morally suspicious circumstances, such as neighbour attacks, comes at the expense of that.
As their families succumb to insanity, they can hurt important supplies at the shelter and make other members scared. In the worst case, they could quickly wander from the shelter, but were never seen again.
8 The darkest dungeon
Cracks under pressure
You know the feeling when you’re ready to go home five minutes until the end of your work shift, when someone drops a stack of documents on your desk? Take that level of abuse despair, multiply it by about 100, and you have an idea about what Danjo is like in the darkest dungeon at your party.
Whenever your party is traveling through the dungeon, battles with random events, traps, and lovecraft horrors are shown by a dark meter under their health, where stress accumulates in your character.
If the stress meter is fully satisfied, the character’s meter will be tested. If they are shortage, they will be struck by infuriating suffering, selfish, cowardly, or completely incomprehensible, sabotage and emphasize your party further.
However, in rare circumstances, the tested person actually achieves a state of virtue, overcomes fear and stress, transforming him into a brave hero of the righteous man. Sadly, this condition is strictly temporary, but suffering requires direct intervention to restore stress to neutral levels.
7 Eternal Darkness: The Requiem of Sanity
Madness beyond the fourth wall
Most games with Sanity Mechanics prefer to keep things a little more subtle and drive away the effect to simple hallucinations and flat statistical penalties. But Eternal Darkness is not most games. No, this is a game where you beat your head with madness and enjoy it.
In the eternal darkness, sanity is one of three primitive forces, ruled by the ancient Xel’lotath, alongside power and magic. Enemies of any affinity can passively drain a character’s sanity simply by exhausting the green meter. As your sanity decreases, the sanity effect of the game’s signature begins to become apparent.
Starts small with a distorted camera angle and strange sounds. After that, you get up in a room full of fake items, the character’s head pops out, and even the fake volume slider looks like someone is sitting on the remote. It’s a bit funny that you’re a bit insane in reality, but once you lose your sanity completely, you start to lose your health.
6 don’t starve
Quarantine isn’t good for you
Have you ever been to camp yourself? Some say it’s really fun and relaxing, but others find isolation a bit painful. It’s usually fine if there’s something nearby or something, but there are definitely no lodges to evacuate while playing.
Sanity needs to be managed to keep your character healthy and hunger free from starvation. In a broad sense, it’s not that complicated. Eat delicious food, get plenty of sleep, and get away from dark, overtly hostile territory. That way, your sanity will not be affected. Of course, you need to deal with the stress, as you can’t get the ingredients for cooking or crafting without challenging dangerous territory.
As your sanity drops, mysterious, shadowy creatures begin to appear in your peripheral vision. At first, these are just hallucinations, but once your sanity passes the critical threshold it will physically appear and come for your throat. This comes with distorted visuals and music.
5 Lobotomy Corporation | Monster Management Simulation
ol ‘Corporate Soul-Crushing
Anyone who has done nine or five jobs knows how to drain your office life can lead to your mental fortitude. It’s bad enough to be the subject of busy work and be forced to wear a suit, but what if you had to do it all while protecting your mind from indescribable fear? Well, it’s going to be a pretty normal day for Lobotomy Corporation.
You need to look at the sanity gauges of many employees rather than your own. Psychological damage from hostile abnormalities affects the employee’s sanity, and its critical threshold depends on individual statistics.
When an employee goes completely crazy, other statistics determine what happens next. Some employees wander aimlessly, releasing some sabotage equipment and anomalies, cornering and killing other employees and themselves.
4 Fasmus phobia
Ghosts will cut your heart
It is an old trope where evil spirits either take away people’s vitality or just for laughs, evil spirits prey on eerie minds. It also makes sense that professional ghost hunters need to own a strong, mental fortitude. Maintaining your wisdom is the only way to keep your spirit checked with fastom phobia.
All players in the Phasmophobia round have individual sanity levels, which are averaged to the team’s sanity rating. Sanity is passively excreted through interaction with current ghosts and using supernatural items, and can only be recovered by very specific items such as sane pills.
Once the team’s sanity is sufficiently low, the ghosts become more obviously hostile, causing hunting, and exhibiting more powerful and dangerous abilities. Some ghosts are only interested in individual sanity levels and target low-sane players while leaving Sana players behind.
3 Shadow Hearts
Random battles are stressful
Random battles are a common sight in many JRPGs, and there’s nothing that everyone feels needs to comment on in space. But in reality, being constantly plagued by the horrors of every corner of the other world is quite upsetting.
In the original Shadow Hearts and its sequels, all characters have normal HP and MP plus sanity (SP) counts. When a character is attacked by an enemy, the SP gradually decreases. If it reaches zero, they will fall and become ferocate, either wasting a turn or attacking an alliance. Repair items are required to replenish your SP.
Interestingly, characters like Yuri who have experiences intertwining with strangers have higher base SP stats and can withstand a bit more sanity loss. Conversely, characters like Alice who don’t directly fight otherworldly creatures have lower base SP stats and easily succumb to insanity.
2 The world of horror
There’s more than health
In World of Horror, the easiest way for the old gods to let you go from your back is to plant a pointed thing on your back, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the only way. When we stand up to fears we don’t know, our mind is just as vulnerable as our body.
In addition to stamina, which governs your ability to withstand pain and injuries, you need to track reason statistics. Fearful, surprising and overtly supernatural events have damaged your reasons, honing your ability to understand and process images, and a lethal mind was never intended.
In a particular combat encounter, the strange enemy will attack your reason directly instead of your stamina, or target both at the same time.
If your reason is completely drained, you will be reduced to lighthearted confusion and commit to a mental hospital, resulting in the end of the game. When you are trapped in a padded room, the old gods are unable to freely pursue the agenda that casts their world at will.
1 Edge
What is there in the water?
Fishing in a small raft in a pond is a relaxing way to spend the afternoon. However, professional fishing in the middle of the ocean is not relaxing. It can be very difficult and very stressful, especially when you try to do it while the outside is pitch black. That’s bad enough in itself, but the whole situation gets even worse when the ocean is raw with dr-like fear.
On the edge, when you drive a boat at night and get attacked by sea terror, the panic meter, which represents the convulsion eye at the top of the screen, increases. Panic can alleviate panic by traveling only during the day with good night and only during the day, but unfortunately, this game requires you to control it at night.
If the panic is too high, strange events will start to occur. Rocks jump out of the water out of nowhere, damaging the ship, birds swooping down and stealing fish, and more monsters like night anglers appear.
