Damage race versus sustainable survival

written 2026-11-13

In most action games, there's no alternative strategy to damage race: kill the enemy before they kill you. You might have some strategic choices, but your strategy is always basically this. So every tactical decision can be approached by comparing how much damage you'd expect to do to how much health you'd expect to lose. For example, you usually won't want to trade hits evenly because enemies in most games have more health than you. But if the enemy is temporarily vulnerable to increased damage, it might be worth purposely getting hit by a projectile to get in range.

But some games offer a fundamentally different strategy: sustainable survival. This strategy is to heal as much health as you lose, so that your health doesn't go down over time. For it to be possible, the game must have a way to heal indefinitely during combat. For example, in Hollow Knight, you have a resource called soul that can be spent either to heal or deal damage, and it refills from hitting enemies with basic attacks.

In this strategy, you probably *don't* take a small hit in order to deal more damage, because the enemy's health doesn't matter if you can survive sustainably. You also never spend soul on damage, *no matter how efficient* (except maybe if your soul is full).

But mostly these strategy are implemented through equipment choices. For example in Hollow Knight if you plan to damage race, you equip charms like Shaman Stone (spells do more damage) and Spell Twister (spells cost less soul). These charms are very efficient but they don't help you survive sustainability. If you plan to survive sustainably, you equip charms like Quick Focus (makes healing faster so less risk of being hit during it) and Soul Catcher (get more soul).

How do you decide which strategy to use? Whichever seems more feasible. If the enemy has low health, or almost never offers you safe opportunities to heal, you should probably damage race. Otherwise, you should probably play for sustainable survival.

Another consideration is whether the enemy's danger level changes throughout the fight. If you're fighting multiple enemies at once, killing some of them makes you safer, so you should try to do that as soon as possible, even if you plan to change to sustainable survival once there's only one enemy.

On the other hand if the enemy gets more dangerous as their health reduces, maybe you should play sustainable survival at first and switch to damage racing once that becomes unfeasible.

In my experience, games that offer sustainable survival usually favor it over damage race. This includes Hollow Knight, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus, and Lone Fungus: Melody of Spores.