There's also the interesting looking One Hour One Life that I haven't had a chance to play yet. It will be cool if it gains enough traction to really see mass progression due to how the mechanics work.
OHOL is fantastic and is, at heart, about parenting, aging, and death.
I'm a big Rohrer fan and death seems like a recurring theme throughout his games:
-Passage: where you pass through an entire life in 5 minutes
-The Castle Doctrine: a permadeath home defense MMO where you set death traps and try, often impotently, to defend your small family. When you fail to defend them, you'll get to watch the security tapes in detail and come home to their mutilated corpses.
I would also like to add x-com on Ironman. Losing a soldier because you got sloppy and arrogant; putting them in an indefensible position and watching them get slaughtered. Do that enough times and you literally cannot win with just rookie replacements. But yea, I felt actually bad for losing some soldiers in my Ironman runs.
Also Darkest Dungeon. But problem with DD is that though you may lose characters permanently, it is impossible to lose the game, as both time and number of new recruits are essentially infinite. Atleast in Xcom there is someway to lose the metagame, if enough countries withdraw support(I think), but in DD, it continues as infinitum.
XCOM has too much of an RNG factor for me. You can make the right choices (gearing, squad composition, positioning, targeting, etc.) and still lose soldiers due to streaks of misfortune. I personally hate being punished (usually brutally) due to factors outside my control, so I eventually gave up on the game.
In Moria/Morgul you spent forever to build your character, learning spells and getting nice equipment. Then you die of a poisionous rat and was presented with a gravestone and had to start over with a new character. It was painful to die to say the least.
The point of Hardcore mode is to play on the ranked seasonal ladders where you get permanent rewards for high scores, which means raising the difficulty.
"Games aren't hard if you lower the difficulty" is a strange argument to make.
- Diablo 3's hardcore mode, where you have a single life and your gameplay and saves are on a cloud server
- Far Cry 2 permadeath journals
- Roguelike strategy games like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld
- One chance, a browser game designed around a single playthrough (although the saves are hidden in a cookie that can be cleared)