Fewer games than I'd like have captured that feeling of everything getting really out of hand. Not just getting harder, but putting you in a situation that's truly deteriorating all around you.
Last Train Home has an intriguing premise: taking the Czechoslovak Legion home from the Eastern front via an armoured train directly through the chaos of the Russian Civil War. Its unusual mixture of survival sim, RPG, tactical skirmishes, and narrative history holds together, I think, precisely because your efforts to make it all work provide such a contrast to what an incredible mess the world around you is becoming.