Best Perma Death Games on Steam
Games where death can permanently erase characters, progress, or runs.
Browse all Perma Death →
1Lethal Company - A co-op horror about scavenging at abandoned moons to sell scrap to the Company.
Oct 23, 2023
In this game, you can…
- sell every last scrap, then haul a teammate's body to the counter for the final few credits to hit quota.
- stay on the ship as mission control, use the terminal to open doors and spot threats, and talk your team back alive through the maze.
- listen to your friend's voice get muffled and cut off mid-sentence as a monster grabs them in proximity chat.
- hear a teammate dying over the radio while you keep scavenging, and the person guiding you keeps talking after they're already dead.
- open a trapped teleporter room, watch one rescue turn into a chain of monster attacks, and still have to find a way out.
- step into a mineshaft because your friends told you to, then they later find you cocooned and hanging from the ceiling.
- watch a teammate calmly warn you about a landmine, then immediately scream about a spider and get blown up mid-run.
- buy gear like jetpacks, ladders, and stun grenades, then accidentally turn them into hazards that kill your own crew.
2R.E.P.O. - An online co-op horror game with up to 6 players. Locate valuable, fully physics-based objects and handle them with care as you retrieve and extract to satisfy your creator's desires.
Feb 26, 2025
In this game, you can…
- get dumped into a boxing arena when the mission fails and beat your friends to crown a winner.
- run over a teammate with the cart, pick up their body, and use it to kill a monster.
- watch a monster sprint up, snatch a 20k statue you can barely lift, and hurl it back hard enough to wipe the team.
- revive teammates mid-round by cashing out their head, or dragging them back to the truck for a revive.
- haul fragile, fully physics-based treasure like pianos and antique vases that can smash, drop, or lose value on the way out.
- pick up crouching teammates, throw them onto shelves, and turn their bodies into weapons or hazards.
- sneak past monsters while dragging sofa-sized loot, then get yanked down a hallway by a ghost as someone drops into an elevator shaft.
- hide under furniture and whisper in proximity voice chat while monsters search, with the dead and living stuck in separate comms.
3Hades - Defy the god of the dead as you hack and slash out of the Underworld in this rogue-like dungeon crawler from the creators of Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre.
Sep 17, 2020
In this game, you can…
- choose a power-up and trigger a new bit of gossip between gods mid-run.
- die, walk out of a blood pool at home, then talk to everyone for new dialogue and upgrades before trying again.
- give gifts to characters and get powerful keepsakes back, so your friendships directly change your combat build.
- swap between six weapons that play wildly differently, including aspects that can completely change how the weapon works.
- stack your own difficulty modifiers for better rewards, choosing exactly which new handicaps you want to deal with.
- finish a room, pick between two next paths, and watch your build evolve choice by choice until it collides with a boss fight.
- have the story react to exactly how your last run ended, with characters teasing or comforting you about specific deaths and wins.
4Darkest Dungeon® - Darkest Dungeon is a challenging gothic roguelike turn-based RPG about the psychological stresses of adventuring. Recruit, train, and lead a team of flawed heroes against unimaginable horrors, stress, disease, and the ever-encroaching dark. Can you keep your heroes together when all hope is lost?
Jan 19, 2016
In this game, you can…
- watch a hero snap from stress and start refusing orders or even attacking teammates mid-fight.
- deliberately let the torch go out to change how battles work and gamble for better loot before looting a chest.
- come back from a failed mission diseased and traumatized, then send heroes to the tavern, abbey, brothel, or sanitarium to recover.
- bail out of a dungeon run mid-expedition, turning the rest of the crawl into a constant push-or-retreat decision.
- have a random miniboss like the Collector appear out of nowhere and wreck an expedition that was going fine.
- build parties where each character can only use certain moves from certain positions, so rearranging your lineup changes what anyone can do.
- lose heroes permanently, then recruit replacements and keep the campaign going with the town upgrades you managed to bring back.
5Hades II - Battle beyond the Underworld using dark sorcery to take on the Titan of Time in this bewitching sequel to the award-winning rogue-like dungeon crawler.
Sep 25, 2025
In this game, you can…
- mute the music mid-boss and get a unique reaction for doing it.
- fight a boss whose music is so catchy you might stop attacking just to listen.
- run two separate campaigns with different routes, locations, and bosses: one in the Underworld, one on the surface.
- drop a binding circle on the floor and build your whole run around it.
- charge attacks, specials, and your cast into omega moves that spend magick and slow time while you aim.
- craft upgrades between runs with a cauldron, using reagents you gathered during your last escape attempt.
- swap keepsakes between regions mid-run to change what powers you're leaning on for the next stretch.
- get new dialogue and character reactions popping up even after dozens of runs.
6My Summer Car - My Summer Car is the ultimate car owning, building, fixing, tuning, maintenance AND permadeath life survival simulator. You start the game with hundreds of loose parts and assemble both car and engine.
Jan 8, 2025
In this game, you can…
- tighten every bolt on a mail-ordered car build, and watch a single missed one make a wheel fall off on the road.
- leave a sauna oven on, come back later, and find the whole house on fire.
- enter a rally event, wreck your build, rebuild it, and keep retrying until you finally take first place.
- tune engine timing and valves by hand, and wreck the engine if you set them wrong.
- tow a broken car with a tractor, have the rope snap at train tracks, reattach it, and watch a train obliterate the car.
- steal a slot machine with a van, hit the owner on his bike, and roll up to a police checkpoint with illegal fuel and bad brakes.
- assemble a car from hundreds of loose parts while juggling food, sleep, beer, sauna, and needing to pee.
7Don't Starve - Don’t Starve is an uncompromising wilderness survival game full of science and magic. Enter a strange and unexplored world full of strange creatures, dangers, and surprises. Gather resources to craft items and structures that match your survival style.
Apr 23, 2013
In this game, you can…
- watch nightfall turn lethal as the darkness itself attacks you within seconds if you aren't holding a light.
- go insane and have your sanity turn into real combat threats that start hunting you around camp.
- build a base near friendly pigs for protection, then watch a full moon turn them into werepigs that attack you.
- start a brand-new random world every run, then spend weeks mapping it while new monsters and hazards keep spawning.
- pick up a harmless-looking plant or hit a beehive, then get instantly punished by something you didn't know was dangerous.
- hear hounds howling in the distance, gear up, then kite the pack into a beefalo herd and let them tear each other apart.
- die, then respawn using a Touch Stone or a one-time resurrection item and keep the same world going.
- drop into a sinkhole, lose the light above, then get trapped underground with spiders, rabbit-people, and bigger things closing in.
8Noita - Noita is a magical action roguelite set in a world where every pixel is physically simulated. Fight, explore, melt, burn, freeze and evaporate your way through the procedurally generated world using spells you've created yourself.
Oct 15, 2020
In this game, you can…
- swap positions with something you launched so far away it clips out of reality, and end up somewhere it shouldn't exist.
- trigger a chain reaction where electricity detonates a hanging bomb, the blast becomes gas, the gas ignites, and the whole oil pool erupts.
- turn an eldritch monster into a sheep, then teleport it into lava — or just dig a tunnel and ignore it.
- turn a harmless-looking spell into a face-level explosion or a portal to a tentacle realm.
- eat weird fungus, vomit, and watch the vomit transform into lava.
- build a wand that spawns a lava star with its own gravity and melts you instantly.
- kick objects like minecarts into enemies and use the physics as your weapon.
- get turned into a sheep by a pink potion even after you can vaporize mountains and turn ground into gold.
9FTL: Faster Than Light - This "spaceship simulation roguelike-like" allows you to take your ship and crew on an adventure through a randomly generated galaxy filled with glory and bitter defeat.
Sep 14, 2012
In this game, you can…
- vent rooms into space to suffocate boarders or put out fires.
- reach the final boss, win the fight, then learn it has three phases and the battle keeps escalating.
- teleport your crew onto an enemy ship to sabotage systems and fight room-to-room, then lose them if the ship explodes first.
- hit a wrecked ship system again to open hull breaches that keep repair crews dying inside.
- pause mid-fight to queue repairs, reroute power, and fire weapons, then unpause for a second to let the plan land.
- get a run-ending chain reaction where fires, breaches, no oxygen, and boarders all happen at once.
- hack or mind-control enemy systems so their own doors trap their crew while your weapons tear the ship apart.
10The Binding of Isaac - Now 20% More Evil with the Free Halloween update!
Sep 28, 2011
In this game, you can…
- take a dead cat that gives you 9 lives, but each life comes back with only one heart.
- trade your heart containers to the Devil for power after a boss, or refuse and try for an Angel offer later.
- pick up a treasure item and have your body and attacks mutate, like homing shots or poisonous explosions.
- escape into a basement after your mom hears God demand a sacrifice, then fight through floors of monsters to face her.
- walk into a room, get locked in, and either clear every enemy or spend a bomb to blast a way out.
- stack item combos that suddenly turn a miserable run into an absurd, screen-filling death machine.
- use bombs to uncover secret rooms and hidden paths tucked into the floor's layout.
- start seeing new characters, floors, bosses, and items unlock after wins, so the game keeps expanding instead of ending.
