Journey to Silius is balanced such that ammo is more valuable than health. This is the case because the player possesses 3 health bars to a continue and only 1 ammo bar*, though expending ammo rarely saves health in a 3:1 ratio. For ammo to be of greater or equal value to health, it would need on average to decrease the health lost to the enemy it was used upon by a factor of 3. Put differently, it would need to kill damage-dealing enemies 3x as quickly, below which rate it would not be useful against enemies with less than a 2/3 chance of dealing damage.
The "ammo" and "health" abstracts underpin a strategic decision presented to the player: to fire a weapon [consume ammo in exchange for advanced targeting or damage rate] or to accept a mechanical limitation [smaller attack zone, shorter action timers, longer conflicts] which creates varyingly a finer tuned style of play or a higher probability of error, dependent upon the enemy/layout at hand and the player's technical** skill. Where the prolonged conflicts (resulting from the slower damage rate of ammo conservation) exceed the full cycle of an enemy's actions, this puts especial pressure on the player's ability to repeat a single technique reliably.
Thence, Journey to Silius feels like a lot of doing the same thing over and over. In a way it's like a survival horror game where you can kill everything with the knife if you kite it properly, except that in Silius it's slightly easier and much more necessary to do so. Like if you took RE2 and gave the player only a knife and a shotgun with one bullet for every dozen zombies, then placed a dozen zombies at every bottleneck.
*Journey to Silius features ammo and health restoratives which should alter these ratios. However, as far as I have discovered, the rate of appearance of these items is completely random. This means the player can't rely on their presence and must plan/execute as though they will not appear - that, or accept a built-in failure probability even on a perfect execution.
** a "technique" here refers to the combination of a game input and a timing. A timing is the combination of a [feedback] trigger and a length of time.
