G4G: No hive mind, just your mind.

Sadly my big splurge on the Deckbuilder Chrono Ark was way too long, so I decided to look at some mechanics I found interesting and other games to contrast with.

The health bar is only of those fairly standard gaming mechanics. But it is interesting to see some of the ways it has been played with.

Bloodborne has the regain mechanic, where there is a window after you are hit you can recover some of those hitpoints by counterattacking, encouraging a more aggressive playstyle (although you still have to work out the enemies combos or your counterattack just might end up walking right into getting smacked hard again).

Thymesia is a Soulslike with an interesting take on the health bar, but not your own. Enemies essentially have two. They have a white health bar that your light attacks cut through to reach the juicy green healthbar underneath it, which you gouge out with your heavy attacks. It’s an interesting mechanic that incentivises you to mix up your light and heavies in combat even against simpler foes, especially since the enemy can regenerate their white health bar up to their green if you don’t hit them for long enough (a lot more noticeable in boss fights).

Chrono Ark has something that at first seems a little similar, but in function works quite differently. When your characters are hit the area on your health bar the damage was taken is lit up as green. This isn’t a secondary health bar like Thymesia, rather this is closer to Bloodborne’s regain mechanic. This section of your health bar can be easily recovered by your healing cards. If you get hit a second time though? That new damage is the green part of your health bar while the previous chunk is now empty, and while you CAN heal past the green segment of your health to your max, it is at greatly reduced efficiency.

This mechanic effectively makes a space for the “defense” character role to this game (Chrono Ark has three fairly standard roles, attack defense and heal), since they usually have one way or another to “protect” the health bar to prevent the green segment of your health bar from being reduced (although different defence characters do it in different ways), making healing a whole lot easier.

It is also one of the few games that allows you to have negative health. It has a “Death’s Door” mechanic similar to Darkest Dungeon, so long as you have 1hp no attack will kill your character, you’ll just go deep into the negatives. Once you get hit while at 0 or in the negatives though, that character dies. This usually means you’ll have an opportunity to recover their health before they die, even if it doesn’t always work out.

Those are the recent ones that I found interesting. While I’m happy if anyone has any other game that they found pretty interesting with how they used it, just have questions about the games I mentioned, or if they have ideas for their own mechanics, there were a couple of games, I was also wondering if someone had more details on a couple of games in particular.

I remember playing a medabots game waaay back when where it had split hp on different limbs, I’m curious if someone played it or a similar game and how they found that style of hit points worked for the game in question.