3. FTL: Faster Than Light
Buy FTL: Advanced Edition at GOG Your spaceship's just survived an intense battle against a formidable attacker. You've come out victorious, but several rooms on your ship are on fire. You stop the blaze spreading by sealing off the affected rooms, then sucking the oxygen out of them to put the fire out. The thing is, during this entire ordeal, one of your most experienced crew members was in one of those rooms. They didn't make it out, they're dead, and they're not coming back. This is a typical experience in FTL, a spaceship sim in which you manage a ship and its crew as they traverse the vast blackness of space. Gameplay-wise, it's a cross between Oregon Trail and rogue-likes, and uses permadeath to keep you on your toes constantly. But it's not just permadeath which makes FTL a profound exploration of death. You'll encounter plenty of situations where you just won't have a hope of saving individual crew members and will see them die, or will even have to consign them to death in order to save everyone else. The fact that your crew members level up and become more skilled as the game goes on helps you relate to them more, because like you they're constantly progressing themselves. They also become more significant to the ship and crew as the game goes on, and their loss could have long-term consequences on everyone's well-being. There's a kind of fatalism about FTL, as there's a high chance that your whole crew, who you grow quite fond of, will die eventually. Despite that, you seek to give them as great a run at their short spacefaring life as possible.