Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

I wanna thank NinjaTheory for taking the risk in making this very mature game. It is by far the most atmospheric and captivating gaming experience I've ever played. Hellblade gave me chills on many occasions due to its amazing sound design. The slow pacing of the game really helped to emphasize the pain and suffering of the main character and probably got me the closest in understanding on how this kind of mental illness can affect people. Thanks to new face capturing methods Senua feels really alive and is amazingly animated. A fair price, plus the decision to not implement DRM made me buy this game at fullprice.

With its high production values and daring narrative, Hellblade is as interesting as it is hard to categorize. Its main appeal is its powerful story: using Norse mythology as a background, it is a pretty frontal and uncompromising depiction of mental illness, and the toll such a condition (and the way society treats it) takes on a person. It’s kind of “artsy”, but both the writing and actor performances are so intense and sincere that you won’t blame the game for it. With its beautiful environments and breathtaking character models, it also looks gorgeous for a 2017 release by a smaller company, and seems decently optimized too (I experienced occasional stuttering, but that was on a laptop with some settings maxed out). The art direction is more than eye-candy, and plays a big role in carrying the themes of the story. The issue with H:SS is that its gameplay is… functional, but not much else. The combat has satisfying quirks, but since hostiles encounters are repetitive and drag on for WAY too long, I ended up really tired of it after a while. The puzzles are also a mixed bag, as the whole “finding hidden motives by aligning pieces of scenery” gimmick quickly overstays its welcome. Overall, everything is slow in H:SS: moving from place to place, battling wave after wave of foes… It feels less like you are controlling the heroine, and more like dragging her along. Clearly this is largely deliberate to match the contemplative atmosphere and heavy themes, but still, it’s a constant point of annoyance. In the end, it really feels that much of the gameplay is here as padding, so that H:SS is more than a walking simulator... but maybe a walking simulator would have been better, as the story would have sufficed to carry this game. While its base price is reasonable, I would recommend getting it on sale and playing it on low difficulty (and perhaps with a guide in handy), which should let you enjoy the great storytelling while minimizing the frustration of the controls.

This game seemed amazing in the first two hours or so. It built a great atmosphere and managed to visualize the mental problems of the protagonist in a way, that made me really feel it. It also features a solid fighting system and a small amount of impressive looking enemies. But, that's it. That's all! The largest amount of gameplay time is take up by puzzles that don't deserve to be called that name. You walk around very, very slowly looking at things until you find the right spot to look at things. Then you can go on to do exactly the same over and over again. There's no problem solving or even thinking involved. When you have to fight, it's always in a seperate arena and generally goes on for so long that you are fed up before half of it is over. It's not very difficult, but very tiring. What little, weak story there is, is only told through disembodied voices, making it even more forgettable. It can all be summed up like this: There's about forty-five minutes of great content that is repeated over and over again. Sadly none of this content is very much fun done more than once.

*Unique and mindblowing Sound Design *Beautiful graphics with exciting imagery *The (rune)-puzzles are a little bit annoying after solving a few. *The fights are repetitive and kill the buzz of the game a bit - there are just a few enemy-types with repetitve movesets which respawn for what feels like eternity... Especially in the late game are at least three fights which lasted for over 15-20 minutes without being interesting enough. This game is stunningly beautiful and has incredible and unique sound design. These two points alone justify to buy and experience this game. But I wished they would have been a bit bolder in their concept. The puzzle-solving and fights are not exactly the strong suit of this game. Though they take the majority of playing-time. They seemed a bit forced, like they thought that a video game has to have these sort of things in it to be considered a proper game... The strongest moments (for me) were when they let you walk through the world, let you experience it through Senua's eyes and ears. They could've easily stripped down the amount of fights and puzzles and focus a bit more on the things that make this title unique.

I don't feel like going too deep into it, but this game was really great and atmospheric, and I'd say was at least a 4 star game until the ending cutscene kept playing. Like, seriously, up to and including the first half of the ending cutscene this game was great, but it kept playing and went on to ruin the entire game because due to the topic matter this game cannot stand without a well made ending, and they decided to make a nonsensical, weird in tone plot twist with forced sequel bait when the way the story had been going it should have been impossible to make a sequel. Anyway, I gave this two stars to acknowledge how good it was up to that point, but dang that ending ruined it so bad.