The dungeon crawler Darkest Dungeon uses a slightly unusual system for life/death: characters don’t die when they reach 0 hit points. Instead, they enter a state of "Death Door", meaning that each hit they take has a (quite high) chance of being fatal. A side-effect is that the hit that take the character to 0 hit points can not be the one that kill them.

The healing system works very well with that, providing mostly weak slightly randomized heals, that can only be used during fights (so at the cost of an action/attack). The combination of these systems is that characters will spend a lot of time a very low health levels, that tends to heighten the stress level of the player. Since most of the game revolves around stress (of the characters and of the player) this is a good example of mechanics working to reinforce the thematics.

The medbay may sell some medkits in limited quantities. Medkits and other healing consumables may also be found in the randomly-generated dungeons. They are not so plentiful that you can fill up your inventory space at once, and you want to save that space for other loot anyways.

But *only* the plot. From a gameplay perspective, there's no way to turn back time or undo things.

Naturally that is true because being able to rewind time on battles and other things would probably make too much sense.

Shadowrun Returns trilogy (following, I believe, the actual tabletop rules)- magic can only ever heal your most recent injury.

So if you've lost 10 HP from one attack, Heal will restore 10 HP. But if you get hit twice for 9 HP and then 1 HP, Heal will restore 1. It doesn't matter how many HP you're still missing once you've been healed, magic can't top you up any further.

It seems that many people are missing the point of the topic, and mentioning games where all practical healing is weak.

What this topic is intended to be about is situations like the ones I mention in the first post where most of the healing is weak, but there's *one* practical healing ability that's much more powerful than the rest.

Ahh, great example. I always keep on bringing up DD1 here because it has great gameplay that should be studied even if OP doesn't want to play it due to a time limit. At least she can watch a playthrough.

In that game, the Occultist has an insane healing ability called Wyrd Reconstruction that rolls a die based on your levels; level 1 for 0-13 HP, level 2 for 0-17 HP, level 3 for 0-19 HP, level 4 for 0-19 HP, and level 5 for 0-22 HP. And when you are healed by this skill, your characters start to bleed to prevent over-reliance on stalling. Definitely both a fun and infuriating RNG mechanic by all players of the game. Based on this die roll, you have to either play more cautiously or can afford to be more aggressive in finishing the battle.

As for why some games are as OP has described, I feel the devs reward cautious players for being more conservative with their resources with weaker healing spells at the start. And once they've unlocked the rest of the battle system and have mastered it, being cautious slows down gameplay pacing. So stronger healing spells enable them to play more aggressively. If the game was stingy on the heals all entire game, the gameplay might get too old if the loop isn't satisfying enough.

Let’s keep in mind that only the hardest difficulty level (out of three levels) includes a time limit.

I don’t really like that either so I play on the medium one instead, despite finding the game a bit too easy in this mode once you got the basics.

This is the first time I had so much fun with a healing ability in a dungeon crawler ;)

Makes me think about some interesting heals in some of the Final Fantasy games:
^ FF3: The Evoker can heal by summoning Ifrit. Half the time, the spell heals your party, and in the 3D remake it's a *really* powerful heal, but the other half of the time it instead deals damage to one enemy. Sages get this in the 3D remake (and it uses a spell level that doesn't have healing), but not in the original.
* FF4: Rosa can pray to restore HP to the party, but it doesn't always work. It, however, is free, and in the 3D remake, it also restores MP. There's also the Asura summon, and in the DS version (only), Whyt, which is a nice healing summon if given a healing spell as its only active ability.
* FF5: The "Animals" ability, learned by the Archer, will sometimes heal the party. It costs nothing to use, and it restores more than Cura (and is available well before Curaga shows up), but that's only one possible effect (and, at reasonable levels, is the only worthwhile effect). This game also introduces White Wind, which heals the entire party, but uses the caster's HP as the amount to heal, creating some interesting dynamics.
* FF6: Some of Mog's Dances and Gau's Rages will cast healing spells. Gau can cast Raise this way likely before anyone else gets access to that spell.

Also, Seltzer Water has a weak healing via his slots command. (All misses) Which certainly is better than Joker Doom.

Setzer, Seltzer. It's a play on the name of an awful playboy. Don't forget how Relm can completely break the game in three distinct ways!

Do any of those ways *not* involve glitches?

(To be honest, excluding glitch uses (which, if they happen accidentally, are more likely harmful than good), Relm's Sketch ability has always felt underwhelming. (Well, also excluding the one time Sketch is required.))

Oh yes, great point. I was thinking more of the torchlight as a soft time limit since it drains the more you explore each dungeon expedition. I'm also playing the medium difficulty right now and it's stupidly difficult; I wouldn't even dare trying the hard mode with or without Crimson Court DLC.

I did had a thought that went something along the lines of " sjees, thats ridicilous " when playing star trader : frontiers