PC Gaming

This is a tired old gimmick.

It can work situationally. Different games have different approaches to health and to UI. Mario had different sprites and mechanical implications for health. Spyro the Dragon had Sparks change color, and if you lost Sparks entirely it became a pain to collect things.

But most of the time, often in modern action/horror games, it's just nonsense. A pretty transparent attempt to make the player "feel" in danger by making the character bloody or putting up an increasingly opaque vignette without actually communicating health well. It makes it all that much more easier to try to give the player the feeling of "surviving that attack on 1HP" without actually having to fudge numbers.

There has been a trend the past several years of thinking UI = bad, and that less UI = more good. I find it incredibly annoying. Just give me the UI. Give me the minimap. These are things that are so useful in real life that humans have been trying to make them for thousands of years. We made smartphones and GPS systems because maps are great. Google and Meta and Apple and tons of other companies have been trying to make AR glasses a thing for years. It honestly breaks my "immersion" to NOT have a minimal in games like Horizon Zero Dawn.

It CAN be interesting to do stuff like this if the game is designed around it, but usually it just feels like the devs are trying to re-invent stuff they don't need to, or following trends for the sake of being trendy.