Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

Hellblade uses many novel and tried tecniques to deliver what I consider to be the best pacing and atmosphere in any game I played, which is quite an achievement considering they number in the thousands. It's a great effort and hopefully a precedent to explore this topic in other games. Hopefully with more to them than just the topic alone. Also some of the best acting performance I have ever seen, incredible animation and almost perfect production quality. Beyond that, however, Senua's Sacrifise is an example of a focused product - literally everything that doesn't directly correlate with the game's main theme and story exposition is as barebones as it gets. Top-notch quality, but barebones. The combat - primitive, exploration - primitive, puzzles - primitive. Even the menus are primitive. What elements do exist, exist solely to contribute to the theme of psychosis, like the adaptive difficulty, audio warning and the focus(i.e. time slow) mechanic. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifise is an experience worth having and a game worth buying, but another one like this will not be needed. Games are more than just atmosphere. Much, much more.

From an artistic and narrative viewpoint this game is exceptional if given enough time. Game mechanics are... average though hence why it doesn't get 5 stars from me. Voice acting is great, Graphics are great, Stylistically it's great and it's length is just about right. On top of that Senua is such a fantastic lead character which I did not expect. It's a game that forces you to feel both uncomfortable and compelled. while it tiptoes on the line of the horror genre it's primary narrative at it's core is psychological. There's some touchy themes which it does a pretty good job of integrating without feeling too exploitative. Here are my problems - The gameplay sometimes feels loosely tied on to an otherwise solid cohesive narrative - There's some visual puzzle solving that lacks variety and sometimes feels clunky -Sometimes combat felt good, other times I felt the camera was restricting and awkward. Getting surrounded and spamming the dodge button felt lacklustre No conclusion in this review just some light peer pressure... I absolutely encourage YOU(Yes I'm talking to YOU) to play this game though to the end.

Bad gameplay, sometimes it annoying: sometimes stucking in group of enemies, vading mechaincs, stretchness of some moments. But I beat the game becouse of awesome story, main character, sound. Graphics is average but sometimes it very beautiful, main character is look realistic and animation is cool done!

The concept of the game and how puzzles are solved is fresh and interesting. Combat mechanics are amazing in my opinion. The responses are crisp and repeatable and the enemies are detailed, terrifying, and fun to fight. The audio is one of the best features of the game and I strongly recommend good heaphones. This is a beautiful game, in 4K I had to turn almost all the settings down to Medium to play it at 60 FPS but it looked great. Ansel works which allows you to pause the game and appreciate the gravity of your situation at times. Overall the game is amazing which is why I'm giving it 5 stars, and the cost was only half of a lot of AAA titles. Truthfully though, the game is woefully short and hardly utilizes the combat system to its full potential. Just 5 different attacks you can do total but combinations provide a nice variety. They mask the shallowness of the combat by not giving you any instructions, leaving you to figure it out as you go in the midst of high pressure sitatuations. I appreciated and enjoyed this but would have loved to see the combat system evolve as you progress through the game. I also would have really liked to see more enemies and more bosses. Hopefully they'll add some great DLC or take the great things from this game and apply them to something else with a little more length and depth. 13 hours and 92% achievement. I left the game on for quite a few hours during that period as well. Exciting game and I recommend purchasing it. Hope to see more from them like it in the future.

Not much to say that hasn't already been said, an experience I have never had in video game before. Just amazing.