The scariest moment in games for me so far this year has been choosing between risking madness from isolation and traveling with a hungry cannibal.

The Curious Expedition is an exploration game with a sanity meter. Your sanity depletes as you travel and when it runs out, random bad things happen to your party. My latest expedition was on the rocks; Amelia Earhart had run out of whiskey and the golden pyramid was halfway across the map. I had just visited a slaver camp to see if they had any food to trade (eating food restores Sanity); they didn't, so I bought an enslaved tribal shaman instead. A few days later, after our Sanity had run out and I was trying to reach someplace to rest before we went mad, I woke up to discover the shaman had turned cannibalistic and eaten the only other expedition member. Amelia was now alone with a cannibalistic shaman and a pack mule. I recalled what happened the last time I traveled alone with a cannibal and dismissed the shaman from the expedition while his stomach was still full. I would try to complete the trek with just my pack mule.

Over the next 2 weeks, Amelia began conversing with the pack mule, who would crack jokes about our predicament in an attempt to make her feel better. Jokes can't replace food, though, and eventually Amelia tearfully said goodbye to the pack mule just before she slaughtered him for meat. The desperate meal raised my Sanity a bit, but not enough to get somewhere I could replenish it to full. Soon Amelia was wandering through the jungle, talking to herself alone by the campfire, desperately trying to reassure herself everything would be fine.

One night, as she babbled to herself, the cannibalistic shaman emerged from behind her, placing a hand on her shoulder and smiling. Amelia was so desperate for human contact she was relieved at the sight of him, although I wondered if his smile was sincere or that of a hungry man looking at a pig. The choice loomed large on the screen: do I welcome him back into the party with open arms? Or do I drive him off and try to continue on by myself?

I chose to drive him off. Amelia pulled her gun and screamed at him to get away; he disappeared back into the underbrush. After he left, Amelia wondered if she had actually seen him, or just hallucinated it. I didn't know either.

Amelia lost all hope several days later. She wrote a final entry in her journal in the hopes some other expedition would find it, then laid down and never got up. Her attempt to become the most famous explorer ever ended in tragedy.

This game is dark.

Sounds like a fascinating experience and one that I am definitely interested in. I see they are nearing the end of early access according to their steam page so I'll definitely check it out once it's final version is released.

What's the variety in the number of dark endings you can get (the different kind of hallucinations and psychotic episodes characters can experience for example)?

Maybe a half-dozen or so. Zero Sanity kills you through a bunch of small random events that remove your expedition members until you're the only one left; after that you have about 1-2 weeks of travel before you die. You can also die if your expedition is at 0 Sanity and the only members left are you & a cannibal. You can also die in combat, or fall into a growing chasm you can trigger by looting ancient shrines. While it technically isn't a game over, you can also get stuck in an unwinnable state and just have to quit the game, like this:

Here I took a wrong turn while a flood curse was pursuing me and ended up stuck between a chasm and an uncrossable lake.

Here's another expedition where the triggered chasm became larger than I expected and trapped me in this desert. I could have escaped... if I had any dynamite to blow up one of the mountains to the north. But you never have enough inventory slots to carry everything you want to, and sometimes you just can't find any dynamite to buy/trade.

It's not as tough as FTL, but this game still regularly kicks my ass. (I estimate I've won about 20% of the games I've attempted in Curious Expedition, compared to 3% of my FTL games.)