Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

The game's highlight is the atmosphere, the devs totally nailed it. There are some narrative issues later in the game (had to use wikipedia to understand some parts of the plot) but generally it's a great game that puts many AAA titles to shame. Recommended for those who are looking for a unique experience!

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice puts you in control of a female Pict (Iron Age peoples from Scotland) on a personal quest to rescue her beloved from Helheim, the Norse underworld. And if that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, know that it's a reflection of the pretentiousness that plagues the game and the hype surrounding it. The developer, the gaming media, and the game's fans all so very badly want you to say it's not brilliant so that they can tell you you're just too dumb, insensitive, sexist, etc. to appreciate it. Truth is, there's much less game here than you're going to find in hundreds of other titles. It spends much of its time being a walking simulator, albeit a visually attractive one at times. Progress along the game's linear path is gated by puzzles and combat sequences. There's nothing to fight outside these sequences, and virtually nothing else to interact with (runestones that feed you Norse mythology being a notable exception). Puzzle varieties are limited to a mere handful and quickly become repetitious. The real meat of the game is the main character, Senua, and unraveling her story. She suffers from psychosis, which manifests as voices in her head and the ability to see things that other people never notice. Despite my worry that it would feel like a gimmick, I found her personal demons credible. Once I learned where they came from, anyway. After a brutally slow start, things pick up during the "middle" part, with the pieces of the story falling into place more quickly and the zones being shorter. The characteristics that make it hard to play early on, including a persistent, oppressive, uneasy feeling, come together to put the player in Senua's head, to enable us to feel what she feels. The use of the camera, lighting, weather, and sound (and silence) to evoke a psychological response is next-level game design. So there is some good stuff here, but I can't help but feel it works better as a demo or study in game design than an actual game.

I make it short and brief here: Positives: - Mythology - Story - Characters - Atmosphere - Music - Graphics - Audio most of the time Negatives: - Enemy Variety - Combat - Camera - Post processing nightmare during combat - Only mediocre binaural 3D Audio since audio mixing is half baked I aborted my playthrough since it got stale immediately. I had to force myself through slowass walking sim sections with little interesting landmarks to look at. I had to endure kindergarten "where is waldo" rune "puzzles". Combat is a frustrating and also overly simplistic nightmare. Two attacks, thats it. No combos, no depth, its literally a puddle, a few cm wide and only a few mm deep. Almost no enemy variety, only bigger dudes with stronger attacks as the game gets harder. The combat is not difficult, its just that they throw a shit ton of enemies and waves of enemies onto you and drain you of patience, while you fight the camera and evasion and parry system due to animation stalls, half baked hitboxes and having no situational awareness during fighting because of the aforementioned garbage supernarrow fov camera, whenever they circle you, you gotta rely on your innervoices to tell you to evade, which often can fail as you evade into one of the dudes you didnt see, it also forces an enemy lock on, which in itself is pretty bad in terms of switching, I wish there was none to begin with since sometimes you are stuck attacking one guy while the rest around you is having a field day annoying you, its why the game has a second chance mechanic once you are down. It´s servicable as a game, but honestly pretty badly designed and often, inbetween the bigger storyparts becomes a chore and snoozefest, senuas jogging and walking speed isnt helping either. It´s so to say an artifically dificult game and I hate those with passion. Don´t know what to say, fanboys are overhyping games from smaller studios nowadays, though this game does not deserve such praise.

Combat is heavily reliant on timing. The last 1/3 of the game is in an area with rain and many other effects that make the frame rate drop significantly (not that it was much stable the rest of the game). In this same area, a new enemy is introduced that requires extra timing and reflexes. If you are going to to threaten the player with "fail too many times and you will lose your progress" you better deliver on the whole combat experience.

In this game, you can clearly see that devs genuinely wanted to make a really good game. And they succeed, the game is great and definitely worth of money. But, but it is good to know what kind of game are you buying. At first, the gameplay is very "console like". You are slowly walking/running in a small corridor, and in some places, there is arena fight (which is ok). That is all. You cannot jump, there is almost no interaction with objects in the game, you cannot move anything (only doors and bridges), take anything, the world is very static. Puzzles are nice, but the variety of puzzle mechanisms is not too high. Although there are many characters communicating with their voices, the world is mostly deserted. I have a similar feeling from Darksouls and I do not prefer this abandoned places. The less one knows about the story is the better. But the narration is definitely impressive, it raises interesting thoughts and that is exactly what a good story should do. Just concerning the main character, she seems slightly "insufficiently portrayed" to me. In the sense that even after finishing the game, I was not able to tell what kind of personality she has. I do not know who is she. You see a lot of things which she experienced, but very few of reaction which would give her some personal attributes. This is maybe an intention, it allows for the player to easier be "in her skin". But I like much more the other approach because it allows one to care about the character and his story. Here, I care much less if she succeeds, because I did not know her, only know that a lot of people hurt her, she is scared and she has a strong will.