Refunded after around 2 hours of play time. At the time of this review, the game was still in early access and it is - according to the store page - part of a coming trilogy. It remains to be seen if this trilogy will ever see the light of day, considering this title is in early access since 4 and a half years. At the beginning of the game the player is asked if NTR content should be included or not. I chose to have that content excluded, but the overall writing, at least during the early 1 to 2 hours, leans into the theme quite a bit - too much for me to think that I would enjoy the game. If such themes irritate you, don't bother with this game. Positive things: The art is pleasant to look at. One scene early in the beginning was animated which also looked nice. Progression of images, instead of actual animation, looks decent. Some images contain blood and slight hints of gore. The music is nothing special, but sets the mood. Negative things: The screenshots at the store page (8 pictures as of August 2024) show 4 pictures consisting of actual gameplay and RPG elements. I "played" for around 2 hours and found no gameplay at all, aside from a few choices here and there. Dialogues are irritatingly written and the questionable passing of time ("I will rescue my wife!" - Months passed...) makes me wonder if the early story is a placeholder for later revisions or if that is the finished product. I suspect the latter, texts drag on and on with details that add next to nothing to the story. Decisions of the protagonist and other characters seem nonsensical half of the times. Copious amounts of adjectives may want to create the depth of a Lovecraftian novel, but fall flat in its description of the story's events and seem processed with AI tools. At least the vocabulary used reminds me of AI chatbots. At some point there was no music over the course of several minutes, sound effects are sparsely used in general. There were no voice lines or voice sfx during my playtime.
Introduction If "Hellblade - Senua's Sacrifice" would be a movie, I would see some point in the praise it receives. Being a video game it is mediocre at best. I don't see a reason to give the game an exceptional rating, just because it tackles a subject in its narrative, that seldom gets covered in video games. In the end it's the gameplay - and for me replayability - that counts. In the 2000's PC- and videogame-reviewers were mostly able to rate games properly. For me calling this game a "masterpiece", "essential", "a game everyone should play" is one of the symptoms why a lot of people have lost their faith in the media. You won't miss much when skipping this game and may have a more enjoyable time reading a book on the subject or watching a documentary. Or playing one of the early Silent Hill games or maybe Spec Ops: The Line. That said, I try to be fair with the game in the following paragraphs. Overview Hellblade - Senua's Sacrifice is an adventure game with a strong focus on narrative, that - contrary to most indie walking simulators with bad endings - actually offers some gameplay other than walking around. The ending is still the usual indie stuff. The graphics, character models, facial expressions and animations look great. Sound and music is well done, too. Gameplay The female protagonist slowly runs around solving puzzles that vary between frustrating, boring and interesting and occasionally fights enemies, that like to spawn in your face or directly behind you to get a free hit on the player. Some reviewers (at least on Steam) wrote that the button inputs while fighting often don't work, but I can't agree with that. I played with mouse and keyboard and every button press seemed to work as intended with patch 1.02. The game offers you fast and strong attacks, a melee attack and the ability to dodge, block and slow down time. You can parry, too, but the game doesn't tell you that. It actually leaves everything for you to figure out. Checking the controls before playing helps, but not everything is listed there. I also couldn't find a manual. When traversing small wooden beams, you can also fall to your death, when losing your balance and I still don't know how to exactly keep my balance. at first it seemed to help to mash the use-button while traversing, but later i still fall to my death. But back to the fighting: Once an enemy spawns, the camera locks onto it. The game gives you buttons to switch between targets, but you can't freely move the camera during combat. Having enemies spawn behind you makes this a problem, but mashing the buttons to switch between targets gives you somewhat of an overview if an enemy spawned out of your view after deafeating another one. When downed you can often get up if you mash the buttons. I don't know which, as the game doesn't tell you that too, but I found out after getting frustrated after several deaths. Combat difficulty can be chosen between easy, normal, hard and auto. the latter choosing difficulty dynamicly based on the player's performance. I played on easy and it felt like the normal setting on other games. People who hate losing progress will probably be on edge during bossfights and when encountering new enemy types, even when choosing easy difficulty. Most puzzles amount to looking for rune shapes in the surroundings, which feels like a "Where's Waldo"-book. If you had to find Waldo from acertain position in your room from a distance, at least. You can get lucky and solve them in seconds. If you're out of luck, you can search around for half an hour to solve this type of puzzle. But they seem to get easier, once you get out of the woods. Sometimes you have limited time to solve them, being threatened with the death mechanic in this game, where it gets infuriating. Other puzzle for example have you watch or go through "portals" to see changes in the environment to progress, which is sometimes fun and sometimes not. The game also features collectibles in the form of rune stones, that tell the player some lore about nothern mythology, which I personally think, is way more interesting than Senua's story, but I guess that depends on the person. Finding all of them is not too difficult with the exception of some of the stones in the Illusion path in the beginning of the game, which may require backtracking and amiring the scripting issues in that section. Scripting of the game is bad, if you don't follow what the game wants you to do. If you backtrack in the first segments of the game, apparitions related to puzzles that have been solved, can reappear, Senua also hears voices reacting to these apparitions, even though you did all that before. Some puzzles have you walk through "portals" that change elements in the environment. When backtracking, you can see these changes, for example a path where there was a wall before, but you can't go down the path, even though you see it. An invisible barrier stops you. You have to go through the portal once again to make the wall actually appear and another time do make it disappear again! There are a lot of discussions in the steam forums about that stuff, but it was never fixed. At least it doesn't hinder the player with anything. The surroundings are very detailed and look very natural, walking around in them unfortunately offers not much. Anything besides doors can't be interacted with, the collision detecion is often times questionable und the game is very picky, where you can jump down and where not. Jumping down a few steps of some stairs from the side? Impossible. Go around and the tree and properly go down the stairs. Jumping down about 1 meter from a place where you can lower a bridge from another side to a path which you walked down to get to a higher position? You can't do that! But jumping down 3 meters if the game feels like it - no problem! Backtracking is sometimes involved after defeating a boss, but can be quickly done. Some people on the steam forums complained, that backtracking would sometimes take half an hour, but that's far from true. Story It depends from person to person if you like the story or not, I guess. Like I said above, the mythology aspects in general were more interesting for me, than Senua's story. I didn't like the direction, in which it was going close to the end and the ending was the usual indie games disappointment. Getting too much into the story will spoil a lot of things, but so much can be said: Senua, a celtic warrior woman suffering from a mental illness, wants to save the soul of her dead lover. Her youth was troubled and what's behind that little aspect of the game maybe was the reason why most game magazines like this game so much. Besides that the depiction of the norsemen is the most hellish that could be imagined, which is okay, I guess, but may not a hundred percent accurate with hundreds of impaled everythere. This is not Transylvania and the antagonist is not Vlad Tepes. Graphics Beautiful as a whole. Sometimes there is an unnaturally looking sharpen filter applied, which in my opinion looks a bit messy from a technical perspective. Other things that bother me are, if you are close to a rune location, the rune is displayed dozens of times on the display in bright red, pooping in out . In the wooden areas in the beginning of the game with all the trees and their branches and twigs my eyes started to hurt when moving. There was too much optical stuff going on. Some other optical effects are introduced here and there and it's okay. But nothing, you haven't seen in other games. Sound, Music Also very nice as a whole. You will often hear multiple female voices to underline Senua's illness, which to be honest, is sometimes very annoying. Listening to the lore of a runestone or triggering some backstory, spoken to the player, while these voices debate something, is quite distracting and for me it's hard to follow either then. I grew up with cutscenes being a breather from the gameplay, so you could put your whole attention on what is being said. Running around, inspecting things, thinking about how to approach a new area, and my character (or a sidekick or whatever) speaking exposition all the time during that annoys me to no end in today's games and makes it hard to focus on what is being said. The voices of the dead and monsters also don't sound too artificially pitched up or down, which is always a plus. It's very believable. The choice of music especially in boss battles is very nice. Verdict While Graphics and Sound Design are great as a whole and the narrative is nicely delivered, gameplay is lacking. While I don't want to say, that a lot of the puzzles are repetitive (most games have repetitive elements), the few puzzles and fights mixed with the frustration, that comes with some of them makes this game rather mediocre. Even though it's more gamey than most walking simulators, it doesn't feel very gamey. The replay value is also low and the best decision would be to watch a playthrough of the game. I logged 10 hours into the game with easy combat setting to get every achievement and finishing the game. I used guides for some of the early rune puzzles after running around for 20 minutes in one section and to find one of the lore stones on the illusion path. I do not wish to play that game again. If you'd ask me, if quality comes with a price, also in videogames, I would wholeheartedly agree, but with this game, having paid 20 € on sale, I feel a bit ripped off. And yes, if I would not have used guides, I may would have logged 1 or 2 hours more, which would mainly consist of running around like an idiot and getting frustrated. If Hellblade - Senua's Sacrifice would be a movie, I would think differently. I see myself watching a playthrough of this game from time to time, but let's be honest: If that game would be a CG movie from the developers, 90 minutes long and solt for 10 to 15 €'s, not many people would buy it, right?
