Healer games?

A while back I wrote that I wanted a single-player game where you play as a healer.

Some of the most fun I’ve ever had in a game was playing as a healer in City of Heroes. (Oh, how I miss that game.) Running around in hectic fights, dropping AoE and targeted heals and juggling my cooldowns for maximum efficiency, avoiding aggro and damage myself, popping the Absorb Pain panic button when necessary, keeping my allies standing and reviving them when they fell. It was a game of frantic and reactive resource allocation with clear stakes and feedback. I loved it. I was also good at it - many players told me I was the best healer they’d ever teamed with.

But there are some problems with MMOs and I stopped playing them. After which I was never able to find a game that recreated that experience I’d so enjoyed.

There are games that are about healers on the story level, but this doesn’t generally show up in the mechanics. Dr. Mario is fundamentally a match-3 puzzler. Princess Remedy is a shoot ‘em up. Trauma Center is a surgical sim. About the closest I’ve seen is A Healer Only Lives Twice, but that’s an unwinnable roguelike without a lot of depth or polish.

And of course there are restoration games where the experience and mechanics are actually about healing, though you’re generally healing objects or landscapes rather than people and there’s none of the hectic resource management.

These games are all worthwhile, but none of them provide the experience I was looking for - reading a constantly-changing situation to see where I am needed most and rushing there to avert disaster and enable my team to succeed. In a sense, the games I’ve found that come closest to providing this are actually Musou games like Dynasty Warriors and their spinoffs!

Several years ago, I made a proof of concept of a healer game which I called Triage. It’s extremely rough, unwinnable, and not fun for more than a minute or so, but it did prove to me that there is a fun core here and I would in theory like to return to it and flesh it out some time.

Meanwhile, please let me know if you know of any good healer games.