or by sacrificing one or two 'relic'
I wonder if there is a way to remove the curses that you accrue when your stress bar fills up? Right now, it seems like your best strategy is to just restart the game when you become afflicted--because the play times are so short (so the cost of restarting is low), and the curses are so devastating (so the cost of continuing is high). If there were some way to *remove* a curse, though, that could tip the cost-benefit ratio enough to keep people playing even after they've been cursed?
I just wanted to say that I'm not restarting every run: Out of my first three runs, I was killed on the first two, while I was still figuring out how things worked. I got very badly cursed on my third run, after an extended famine right out of the gate, before I could get any real resiliency. The curses snowballed pretty quickly into an unwinnable game. On the fourth run, I was very careful to manage hunger and weapons, and--with a bit of luck--sailed through to the end.