There aren't enough reverse RPGs where you slowly age and lose skill points and the game gets harder and harder. Which is surprising if only because "game where the skill floor slowly rises as you master its systems" feels like a much more natural arc than "game where you start pathetic and it's super hard and then 40 hours later you've ascended to godhood and combat is trivial."
The thing is though:
- The player character becoming more powerful as the player's skill level rises is conducive to alignment;
- Rising character power can, in a properly designed system, translate to a rising skill floor. Most commonly this is because in an RPG, as you advance through the game you acquire more abilities, and you're expected more and more to understand and employ those abilities competently; so the power curve is met by a complexity curve.
A very standard thing in RPG design is in fact to make the power curve totally illusory – the numbers on enemies just scale with the player's numbers so that, for at-level encounters, there's always parity. But the complexity curve creates a rising challenge, while the process of adding more options + 'number go up' creates the sense of progression that facilitates alignment.
Another version of this is one where encounter difficulty scales in ways that make encounters more demanding from the player; you have more and better tools, but the margins of how you're supposed to use them are thinner. This is very common in action RPGs; both Dark Souls and Mass Effect are kind of in this space.
roguelike where instead of dying, your character collects more and more impairments
I'm reminded of how “Deus Ex” included the ability to get maimed.
Rather than one singular hit-point bar*, you actually had six: Head, torso, two arms, and two legs. Each corresponded to a part of your character model, so if you got hit in the head, you lost head HP, whereas if you got hit in an arm, you lost HP from that arm. Most enemies shoot for center mass and that's the biggest part of your model anyway, so you mostly took damage in your torso, but not exclusively (and some hazards, like radiation, dealt damage equally).
If your head or torso dropped to zero, you died. And your head had the fewest HP of any part of you, which served to model head shots very well—getting hit in the head was generally a fast way to die, and sometimes an insta-kill.
If one arm dropped to zero, that arm became useless, and you could no longer wield two-handed weapons like the shotgun or GEP gun (rocket launcher). If both arms dropped to zero, you couldn't use anything until you got your ass to a hospital robot.
If one leg dropped to zero, you could no longer sprint. (Though the game did not force you to hop.) If both legs dropped to zero, you could no longer stand—you fell to the ground and, if you still had at least one arm, you could only crawl anywhere.
This being a sci-fi future with technology we can only dream of, and also a game, all of this was healable, though I remember lost limbs requiring a hospital robot—you couldn't just eat medkits until both your arms and legs worked. Even so, it was more simulation of disability than we see in most games.
*Metaphorically speaking. The game's UI represented your six bags of hit points as a human silhouette; each segment of it faded from green to yellow to red as you lost hit points from that part, until turning black upon falling to zero.
