Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

This game is short, indeed. And there are repetitive parts and visual riddles, that might feel dull. But besides this, hell, what a game! No, wait a moment, we are not talking about the game, the visuals, the controls, we are talking about the experience! Do you know, what I mean? When was the last time, a game touched your very soul? When was the last time you could realy feel the reality of the character? And when was the last time a game played with you, fouled you, ignored you? This game is one single experience from start to the end. If you can, play it within one session. Live through this nightmare and embrace the beauty of the presentation, the characters, the voice acting and everything else and put away any expectations and demands like "I dont want to see the same spot twice, I dont want to redo the riddle". Just dive into it and become completely absorbed.

Amazing, truly intense experience. Wear headphones, turn the volume up and dive in to Senua's nightmare. The combat is flud and satisfying, the enemies are menacing and the Bosses are terifying. The graphics are excellent and combine with the audio to perfectly draw you in to the warped world of the game.

From the beginning to the end the athmosphere is truly impressive and the graphics are great. I found it really hard to interrupt Hellblade and it really cool to learn about norse mythology. But I didn't like some things about Hellblade. It fellt more like a movie, which is interrupted by action/puzzling. Especially at the beginning I got really annoyed to watch another unskippable. And I found the figthing quite awful. You are always locked onto 1 random enemy. It doesn't matter who is attacking you or which one you would want to attack, it is always locked onto the wrong one and you will die due to that. It is clearly not built with keyboard/mouse in mind. I also had some technical problems with version 1.01, which should be relatively easy for them to fix.. There was something wrong with the resolution settings. I don't know to what the resolution settings are changed, but it doesn't change to what I put into it. For me the resolution used was to high. I don't know if it has something to do with using a 16:10 monitor, but it looked like it was always using the next higher resolution. Every time I died, the game froze for about a minute until it ran normally. The soundtracks would begin to run out of sync. At first I just thought the subtitles would just have flaws but the whole tracks seemed to get delayed somehow. The subtitles are not exactly what is spoken (especially further into the game) and I have seen some spelling/grammar mistakes. Why is the Hellblade Feature Movie not in fullscreen? For me it fills only about half my screen. All things considered, even with those flaws I would absolutely recommend Hellblade to anyone,.

No point in describing the game at length, it needs to be experienced in order to be understood. Just know that the subject matter is incredibly well depicted, and all the elements of the game are so carefully balanced to make a game that is an amazing example of what the media is able to convey. This is something you must try for yourself and embrace.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is an astonishing experience. I own it on GOG, and wanted to give Ninja Theory more money so I purchased it on Steam as well. It is deeply engaging from its mechanics, to its sound design, to its visuals and more. Please support developers like Ninja Theory for crafting compelling character driven video games like this that continue to redefine the potential of video games as a medium!