The mouse in Exanima does not control your weapon, it turns your body and provides accurate targeting. Combined with other inputs this of course has a massive effect on the placement and power of your blows. Good footwork and body movement are crucial in Exanima, and where the combat system really shines, once you figure out what the hell you're doing :).

I uploaded one of my live streams that's just pure combat, if you want to get an idea of what it's like. It's just duels against unskilled opponents and I'm messing about to show footwork improvements, but it does give an idea. The combat and animation has improved somewhat since, but not that significantly.

https://youtu.be/jFPW16orgk8?t=2m9s

It's really not as much of an issue as it might sound, health does not work like in typical games where you constantly take damage and need to heal. The reduction to health comes from serious injuries such as being cut by a bladed weapon, but armour works very realistically (more so than in most films or other fiction) and will effectively stop you from being cut. You cannot cut through chain or plate armour, and even layered cloth is extremely difficult to cut and will prevent most or all damage. You can wear all this armour in layers, On your torso alone you can wear a gambeson, a chain shirt, a padded coat and a cuirass.

We call non lethal damage "stamina", which regenerates quickly. If you are beaten down to 0 stamina you lose consciousness (you might want to run away before this happens!). You will only suffer a slight bit of health and regain consciousness shortly after. People often consider this game to be very hard, but actually surviving is extremely easy if you're not reckless and don't expect to steamroll everything in your path without even being adequately geared, which amusingly people often do. People who get into the spirit of the game instead of acting like reckless homicidal maniancs (many encounters are not hostile unless provoked) get through the entire game on their first playthrough without incident.

Before we start comparing it to other games I think it's important to understand the core philosophy behind both Exanima and SG.

This is not trying to be a realistic game, it's in a sense not trying to be a game at all. It is attempting create a functional (as opposed to true to life) simulated a world, and that world is indifferent to the player. As much as possible, things are not designed from the perspective of how they should be experienced by the player, but rather how they should function for their own sake.

Things are simulated at a very low level, with the intent of making them actually functional within the simulation. For example, the AI doesn't apparently display particularly complex behavours in Exanima, however they have distinct personalities, moods and "emotions", they remember encounters with others and establish opinions of them, they react to details such as eye contact and how quickly and aggressively you move. They perceive threats and react accordingly, they may fight or flee and in either case do their very best to succeed rather than do something for the player's benefit.

If something doesn't really make sense we avoid it. Things must be explained from the perspective of the world and lore. Is there any reason for this to exist? How would it actually work? If those questions can't be answered then it won't be in the game. This even applies to our "magic", the items and the environments, which are painstakingly researched so that everything in them is part of their function and an accurate reconstruction.

Metagame mechanics are few and well separated from the core experience. The closest thing we have to what you describe is a global experience system. A quarter of all experience you earn while playing becomes a permanent amount of experience (up to enough for 5 skill techniques) that you can assign to newly created characters, and retroactively applied to all existing characters.

What these games try to accomplish is a world where every small detail makes genuine sense, and everything intuitively functions in the way that you would expect it to. It's a lofty goal, but we are doing it one piece at a time, you will notice this playing the game if you pay attention, and there's a lot of very dynamic things to interact with, the detail of which might surprise you.

The arena mode, at least in its current format, is somewhat an exception to this. It was a late addition in response to the player's love of the combat :).