Omg, I didn't even think about Mask of the Betrayer. Yes. That system was very good. It was always a hard choice, do I want this powerful ability and risk possibly dying from not being able to consume enough spirits?
The more you used the Curse the more powerful you became but this also made you need to consume more spirits. Also using the abilities also made your hunger go down faster but the abilities were scaled so well that using them made the game easier but the game also became harder because of the hunger level.
Edit: Also the more you used the Curse the less control over it you had.
It also made the "evil" playthrough much more relatable. Doing everything you can to sustain yourself makes sense. In fact, I think the best playthrough of MotB is as a good character who slowly gets eroded by the curse and is forced to make some of the pragmatic evil choices. In later playthroughs, it's easy to metagame the curse, so you still have to kind of force yourself into that playthrough, but the mechanics make it much more satisfying.
The dynamic with the tadpole is very different. It just feels neutered. Like, there's the one scene where Omeluum tries to help, and the narrator describes in vivid detail how the tadpole grows a bit and presumably displaces part of our brain, and I guess this is ... fine? Yeah, let's keep doing that.
Part of the problem is that the Emperor is both a manipulative bastard but also completely honest when it comes to the tadpole. That brain worm? Yeah, let it grow more powerful, it's all good. And it is all good, when it really didn't need to be.
