Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

Probably the most impressive thing this game has to offer is the way it uses sound. They obviously devoted a lot of time to the sound in this game, and it really shows. The voices in Senua's (and your) head are important not just for the story, but also for the way that the game is played. You'll need to listen carefully to them, and the world around you. This game MUST be played with headphones, both for atmosphere and for gameplay purposes. The game can be most aptly described as an Action Puzzle game. Apart from a few maze puzzles, the rest of the puzzles are about matching shapes on the screen to the environment around you. Most of the time they aren't difficult to figure out. But occasionally they can become more ambiguous, and well, annoying. The game really would have benefited from some more traditional puzzle solving too, just to mix things up and throw some more variety in there. Sadly, I have mixed feelings about the combat too. Sometimes it can be intense - but when it doesn't go your way it can be infuriating. The reason for this is because although it's very "cinematic", it's not very dynamic. It's actually fairly simplistic, stiff, and repetitive; and it feels pretty clunky, especially when you're surrounded. This was likely intentional, as a way to make the player feel vulnerable, but there are ways to do that without making them feel restricted. The atmosphere, the story, the art style and the sound are all totally on point. But both the puzzles and the combat leave something to be desired, and that's the whole "game" part of the game. So that’s unfortunate. I’d really love a sequel where they improved on these things, and despite my annoyances, I really hope this one sells well. You can tell it was made with care, with a lot of thought and a lot of heart, and though I do have mixed feelings, I'm glad I had this experience. Bad name though. I still don't know what a "Hellblade" is.

...but it's not my cup of tea. While I like the art style and general atmosphere of the game, the gameplay itself is mostly annoying. The fights are very repetitive and the controls feel clunky. The encounters feel random and arbitrary, since the enemies are always the same, show the same behaviour and pop up out of nothing, just to dissapear when defeated. My fights go like this: dodge, dodge, dodge, strike... Meanwhile, my character is always automatically focussed on one enemy - so I try to out manoeuvre that opponent by dodging. However, sometimes my automated focus switches to another (of screen) enemy and I run directly into a hit of my original foe. In addition with the restricted movability during the fights, this makes the controls really clunky. Besides the fights, the only other gameplay element I've seen so far are search puzzles, which aren't intriguing or rewarding. As for the fights, I just do stuff to progress, but I don't enjoy it. I still love the idea and premise of the game, but I regret buying it since I probably won't finish it.

The graphics in this game are beautiful, and the main character is very well-done. Some of the other acting is a little cheesy. The first problem is that if you have AMD graphics, you should avoid this game. Around halfway through the game, your framerate can drop down to the 20s or even 10s and there is absolutely no fix or anything you can do about it. Fortunately, a friend also has this game on a different machine so I was able to finish it out. The game itself is only 8-12 hours long, depending on how fast you charge through it. You'll spend about 75% of the game walking around and trying to solve puzzles that require you to find matching shapes. While it's kind of neat, it's definitely overdone in this game, and my biggest problem is that it doesn't really make much sense in relation to the story. How does simply seeing a shape allow you to go through sealed doors? You're not finding keys or doing anything special. It's just weird. The combat is visually pleasing, but it can get fairly repetitive and you'll be fighting the same few types of mobs throughout the entire game. The ending leaves a lot of questions unanswered and doesn't make very much sense. The game has zero replayability. The fights are all fairly similar, and if you know how to solve the puzzles, you could breeze through the game in just a few hours. The story itself is interesting and there are a lot of narrated, very short stories from Norse mythology that were surprisingly accurate. Senua's psychosis was implemented very, very well into the game and sucks you in and sets the tone for the entire game in a stellar fashion. The scenery is outstanding and also adds a lot to the game - more so than most games. That all being said, the concept was great and the main character is amazing. If I was a Hollywood exec, I'd be all over trying to get this made into a movie - with some changes and clarification.

I really don't get the high praise this "game" gets. It has some good elements, sure, but none that are particularly important for a game. It has incredible graphics, no argument there - the setting is beautiful and climatic, very fitting for the story and suggestive as well. Truly a sight to marvel and i can't help but wonder if that alone isn't what convinced players that it's something great... because aside from that, any other element is mediocre at best. The story, that is supposed to be Hellblade's main strength, is only okay. Yes, the psychosis of the main character is relatively unique in terms of story telling, but there were games touching upon such themes ("Sanitarium" for one). True, it's presented splendidly with voices constantly there, but let me tell you - while I understand why they are ALWAYS there, as a player, it gets very tiring fast. The biggest flaw is that, for a game, it pretty much fails at gameplay entirely. Much of the time spent playing (and, by the way, the game can be completed in 6-7 hours... including "restarts") is a walking simulator where you go in a linear fashion from point A to B, sometimes climbing or "crawling", but generally with no entertainment along the way aside from the voices that travel with you. You get to fight enemies, but this is done in a fashion not dissimilar to JRPGies and hack&slash titles, taking all the worst from the two and not much good - when you do run into an enemy, Senua enters combat mode; this is done automatically, just like exiting it. This means you draw steel ONLY when the game wants you to and you always know that the fight begins or that is over - there's no suspense to it really. The enemies consist of just few types, most of them not challenging at all and the fighting mechanics come down to simply pressing attack button with occasional dodge. Senua doesn't seem to have any really set of skill outside of her basic combo, neither do her enemies. Considering they attack in mobs, commonly one adversary, than the second and so on, you're basically feel bored by the time third one hits the dust. Puzzles are also uninspired and seem to be here just to extend the game time - most of them come down to finding certain shapes... this is horrid in that you do this constantly, the exact same shape several times in a row (seriously) and the puzzles rarely stray from this formula. It also makes little sense that just SEEING the shape opens the gate. Are you actually telling me that GODS are so stupid to put the exact same obstacle on the traveler's path, hoping that the fifth time they're faced with the same problem, they'll somehow fail? Do they know the most universal definition of "stupidity"? The game draws heavily from Norse mythology and is surprisingly accurate in this representation... thus it is sad that the presentation is also pretty boring, sometimes lost in the noise of Senua's head. The story, while intriguing, quickly grows tedious like the gameplay, because it moves along at a turtle's pace - for all its 6 hour execution, actually moments that push it forward takes place hours apart! Honestly, by the time my first hour of playing was up, I was LITERALLY falling asleep before the monitor! And, with its linear nature, "Hellblade" has no replay value whatsoever. The "game" might've made a decent movie, the unique elements of the plot could keep the viewers entertained, but it fails SPECTACULARY as a game, giving players little to actually do that could keep them entertained. If they wanted a movie, they'd go to the cinema, not buy a GAME! Now "Masquerade" put great emphasis on story too, was linear to the core, but players had things to do there. JRPGies commonly are the same with each playthrough, but again players are given stuff to do there. Hellblade just doesn't really deliver on this. Sorry, but I just cannot support the claim that this "game" is great.

Game play is slow, frustrating and often boring. There is no way to skip the 30 seconds of credits on game start up, or any of the abundant cutscenes. When you start a new game you have to sit through a 5 minute long cutscene, regardless of whether it's your first play through or 100th. Game save is "automatic" which translates into only being able to actually save the game at the start of a chapter, so unless you have enough time to play through a chapter, all progress is lost. The combat system is clunky and non-intuitive, and there is no way to test a control setup, or practice. Game play is about evenly split between combat, goofy "find the pattern" puzzles and un-skipable cutscenes, which means you spend a large portion of your time waiting for a chance to play. I wanted to like this game, but...