Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

I was in a dark place myself when I played this, but was immediately intrigued by it. I love the story, the characters, the gameplay, the tangible anguish and other feelings etc. (I could go on a very long list here.). The mental health aspect of the game is done very well. I hadn't encountered a game in which you can immerse yourself this deeply in the psychology of a character. Even as a mental health professional, you can only guess or imagine how a patient experiences mental health issues, but this game did it perfectly. I will play this again (and again) and look forward to the second part.

This game is amazing on so many levels from sound design to visuals to storytelling to character engagements to in-game music score. Set in a time period close to Ragnarok your charcter Senua of the Picts tribe sets out to recover her lover Dillion's soul from Helheim. But to even enter the gate to Helheim she must face challenges. Thus begins her quest to challenge the god of Helheim and attempt to slay her. The runes are striking. Everything is striking. I could not get over just how beautiful and lifelike the ocean physics was. I haven't seen such amazing water physics since 'Submerged'. There is no onscreen HUD or health meters to get in your way. It doesn't hand hold. Study the controls menu and you will do fine. The combat is unbelievably satisfying. It's like they studied Shadversity swordplay videos to create such a visceral experience. The villains are varied and compelling. The depiction of Hela and Fenris are unique. The multiple voices that constantly surround you is so unique. You get a very good idea of what it means to have a shattered mind. I played the game twice on Hard and on the third play through on Easy. But in a strange twist I did worse on Easy than I did on Hard. Fenris seemed a lot tougher and unpredicatable on Easy mode. I got PsyOped by the developers methinks. I experienced zero bugs in this game, ZERO. It runs effortlessly at maximum settings and is very fluid. It also showcases the full capabilities of the Unreal engine. So many colors and so many layers. Also watch the making of video that comes with the game. It's very enlightening and shows what they were aiming for with this study in madness. I highly recommend experiencing this game a couple of times.

It's an average-subpar action game carried by graphics and story, I guess? They are proud of the mental illness aspect of this game which they apparently put significant effort into, but for me it was just annoying and leaves the entire game feeling like a statement for mental health awareness, rather than a fun video game.

very interesting experience IF you use high quality earphones. puzzles get repetitive but overall cool

I love this game but it has a lot of problems. First and foremost for me was a lot of design problems that could be fixed via options, that are there for better representation/simulation. The problem is if I'm/people are put off by it, they won't experience any of that. So I'll leave the camera, FOV, wobbling, and flashing with no option to even tone it down some out of this, just with the note that at one point it got bad enough that I almost threw up. I understand it is there for a reason, and am glad its there, but not having the ability to tone it down to a point where I can tolerate it is a misstep. What is badly designed though is a lot of the rest of the game. There's some bloat in combat, one of the best moments in the game should have been more at the end but instead there's a whole section and a half interrupting it. The most egregious to me thing though is how badly paced triggers for things are. You'll have long forced walking segments (and your movespeed in the game is low even when running, it could do with a bit of an increase), with no dialogue, and then hit a dialogue trigger with another manual activated dialogue trigger, which just means I'm standing listening to dialogue and waiting for it to end. There are a ton of points like this in the game where dialogue should be running in forced segments. Those manual dialogue trigger elements are also a problem in where some of them are placed. Some are easily missable, and having stuff like that is a mistake in a game as important as this (same with achievements). A lot of stuff I feel like is wrong is because they went for artistic/filmic styles of stuff, while neglecting the fact its a game, and did some of the gaming stuff badly. If this game was shored up it'd be fantastic, and narratively/representationally I loved this, but it just falls to average when it comes to design altogether sadly.