Will/sanity
A mental-resilience meter that depletes under exposure to horror, darkness, or the supernatural, with low values triggering hallucinations, penalties, or worse. Amnesia's sanity, Don't Starve's shadow-summoning insanity, and Darkest Dungeon's psychological pressure make the mind a resource the environment attacks. Designers use will/sanity to build dread and psychological horror (the threat is internal, not just external), to make darkness and monsters costly to face beyond physical danger, to create a second survival axis, and to generate unsettling effects (unreliable perception, phantom threats) that heighten tension. Key decisions: what drains sanity (darkness, monster sightings, gruesome events) and what restores it (light, safety, items), the effects of low sanity (cosmetic scares, real mechanical penalties, or spawning actual threats as in Don't Starve), whether sanity loss is recoverable, and telegraphing so the player feels the descent. Pitfall: sanity that only produces cosmetic screen effects is ignorable flavor, while sanity that spirals into an unrecoverable death sentence feels punishing — the compelling version makes managing sanity a real, winnable resource battle where the psychological effects meaningfully change how the player must operate.
- Dev effort: Medium
- Timing: Real-time or turn-based
- Common in: survival-horror, roguelike
Seen in
- Darkest Dungeon
- Don't Starve
- Amnesia: The Dark Descent