Health is a continuous numerical value
Taking damage causes stress to accrue (a reversed bar that increases from the right)
If the player's health falls below the stress threshold, it is one way and they are unable to heal past it
This penalizes the player for taking too many successive hits without resetting stress and relying on regenerative and healing passives/health steal
Consumables can decrease or even rest stress
Consumables take a short time to consume (e.g. 1-2 second use time), and give an immediate health boost and stress reduction, some high-tier consumables even completely resetting stress
A temporary Heal Fatigue de-buff is inflicted after using a consumable. If the player uses a consumable while under Health Fatigue, they will not lose any accrued stress, making it risky to spam healing as the player may take too many hits too fast and spiral down their max health trying to keep eating until they die, encouraging players to not recklessly take damage and space out their healing resetting after Heal Fatigue is gone so they can get as much stress reduction out of it they can
Some armor or equipment might have specific damage resistances (which will decrease damage taken alongside stress accrued)
Stress increases logarithmically
Game-play loop consists of fast paced attacking, with incentives to periodically disengage from enemies to recover health and recover battle stress, increasing the dodge skill helps with this as it makes consumables less risky to use and makes it less likely to take damage and accrue any stress in the first place
Health is a limited resource that should be carefully monitored, the player might start with 100 health, and can gain max health throughout the game via health-specialized items/rewards (either from bosses/enemy drops/loot chests/quests/etc.)