Resource management in Stygian: Outer Gods is severe by design. The game's difficulty curve is mostly a resource curve - encounters themselves are readable, but you rarely have the means to fight them conventionally. Learning what to carry and what to leave behind is the core skill.
Bullets are the most rationed resource in the game, and the count is always visible. Different firearms take different ammunition, which means a stockpile is often less useful than it looks if it does not match the gun in your hands. Melee is always free, which is not a comfortable observation to make in a game that keeps pushing you toward guns.
The genuinely efficient approach is to treat fights as optional. A large share of the game can be completed by avoidance, and ammunition saved on one encounter funds the one encounter you genuinely cannot walk away from.
Healing is available but priced against the same pool of resources, and the game is not generous about wounds. Health does not regenerate on a timer - restoring yourself costs an item, and those items are also used for other purposes. Carrying fewer of everything is often the strongest build you have.
The crafting system covers ammunition, medical supplies, survival equipment and utility items. Recipes are not hidden behind skill trees - they are found, and finding them is part of exploration. The crafting bench is where the RPG layer meets the survival layer, because many recipes need components that only exist in specific districts, which turns a supply run into a navigation decision.
Artifacts are the RPG progression backbone - permanent upgrades and passive abilities found across Kingsport. They do not follow a single tree. Some build a combat identity around specific weapons, some trade combat power for utility and information, and some only become useful once your sanity handling changes. This is the progression layer that lets two players at the same point in the game have genuinely different capabilities.
Light sources have limited duration, and light is what makes the fog navigable. Managing a flashlight or lamp against the clock is an ongoing cost, and there are points in the game where you are deliberately running dark - because being seen is worse than being lost. The tension between the two is the most reliable source of suspense the game has.