Have a Nice Deathis a great gamewith gorgeous visualsand excellent, fast-paced gameplay — it really got me hookeddespite my past difficulties with getting into roguelikes. However, there’s one aspect of the game that isjustannoying enough to hold it back from absolute greatness — that being its holistically pedantic healing system.
While most of Have a Nice Death is pretty traditional for a roguelike, with each element done to a tip-top standard, Magic Design Studios' injury and anima mechanics makes the art of regaining health plain awkward.
The game’s health bar is pretty standard—just a nice bar displaying how much health you have in white, with the exact amount of health displayed by a number to its right. You’re gonna be taking a lot of damage learning the ropes, so you’ll be wanting to pick up some animas; these swirling blue orbs are Have A Nice Death’s main health pickups. They can be found at the end of anima departments, as prizes for completing arena challenges, in the store, and (rarely) as drops from slain foes.
you may carry three of these glowing things at any one time to use at your convenience with the push of a button, patching you up for 15 HP. Whilst animas and other healing items (which we’ll discuss in a moment) are relatively scarce, if the system was as simple as ‘use anima, get 15 HP’ then I wouldn’t be here moaning about it. The hardship in getting health items works pretty well to boost the game’s overall difficulty and makes finding big-ticket heals extremely rewarding. However, the scarcity is in addition to another factor: the game’s injury system.
See, when you take damage in Have a Nice Death, it isn’t simply demonstrated by your white bar of health going down. Instead, part of the area where you’re missing health will be replaced with a grayed-out section. This is your injury; animas, lifesteal powerups, and other minor health consumables can only heal within the limits of this grayed-out area. We can see this on the image above: my current health is represented by the white bar whilst the health I’m missing is represented by the gray andblack. The aforementioned items can only heal within that gray area, not the black.
The only way to regain health outside this gray area is with golden animas (found either through similar means as regular animas or through finding an additional anima once your anima storage is full, up to a total of three additional animas to make three golden animas) or with ‘Pure Heal’ items that are rarely found.
So rather than just healing you, we have this whole song-and-dance about waiting for the right time to use healing items — not on the basis of whether they’re worth using, but based on this secondary spanner in the works of an injury system that doesn’t add value to the mechanic. I assume that such an injury system is there to boost difficulty and add some more complexity to using healing items — but complexity is not intrinsically a good thing and, in the case of injuries, can potentially just make things more obtuse.
It took me a good few hours before I really grasped the system, and it always felt like a nuisance rather than a refreshing twist. Healing items are already scarce in the game — there’s no reason to add another dose of difficulty into the mix. I also don’t like how an errant tap of the anima button will use an anima even if you physically can’t because your health bar is full or you have no injury present. Why let me use an anima if it’ll just go to waste? I wouldn’t mind so much if it was more of a process, but it only adds to the annoyance of the system with how easily an anima can be consumed.
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Another thing that makes this healing system a bugbear is the presence of weapon options that sacrifice health for a potent benefit or optional contracts available at the start of a run that will deal damage to you in return for a substantial starter bonus. Normally, I’m a big fan of systems that allow the player to opt into things that will be detrimental to their self in exchange for a strategic advantage. However, when the potential toregainhealth is both scarce and a nuisance to apply, using it as a resource (especially with any level of regularity) is heavily disincentivized. This is a shame because it cuts off a small but notable pool of options out of sheer necessity.
I still consider Have A Nice Death to be incredibly solid, but the game presents more of a reeling system than a healing system. It’s overly obtuse despite the relative scarcity of healing items and doesn’t blend well with a few of the game’s options that ask you to use health as a resource. It’s not pining, it’s passed on.
