Healing is a staple of any soulslike. From the very beginning, Demon’s Souls introduced healing items to the genre to fight off the dangers of the world. The healing items were consumable, however, forcing the player to either get good enough to use fewer healing items or find spots to farm the various levels of healing items to have a stash.
Dark Souls ditched the types of consumable grass and instead introduced the Estus Flask - the healing item that comes with several healing charges which auto-refill when you rest at a bonfire or die.
Apart from Bloodborne, which had Blood Vials (controversial), Estus Flasks or similar have become a mainstay of the genre. But which of these are better for the game and which do you prefer?
Estus Flasks come with limited charges, but they refill automatically, so you don’t have to farm healing items and can just focus on the boss fight that’s giving you trouble. Consumable healing usually comes in larger quantities (20 Blood Vials plus a couple extra if you use specific runes), so you have more healing at your disposal in a boss fight, hence you can be more aggressive and reckless, but you run the risk of running out of healing at some point, so you might have to farm them at some point.
Thoughts?
The Surge has the best healing system IMO. First off, it’s got options. You can heal a medium chunk at once, or a bigger amount over a period of time. You can even swap out the healing utility for a different utility altogether or use both healing tools at once. Next, you get X charges every rest/reset, but you can also gain more by attacking something and building up energy.
But altogether, all of them are light years ahead of LOOSE WALL MEAT like in NES and SNES classics.