Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is master class in "interactive storytelling." It really makes you feel like you're there, experiencing her story, her way of thinking, and it's stressful as all hell. What a wild ride. The combat is meaningful and not tacked on and the puzzles are unique and engaging. There's some real creativity here. On a side note.. as an interactive story it really commits some bad game design no-nos. Ledges waist high that sometimes you can climb but most you can't, not being clear in any meaningful way which way you should go sometimes which leads to backtracking accidentally, which leads to the painfully slow movement at times, "lore books" in which the audio cuts out if you go too far from it, jarring cuts between gameplay and cutscenes, achievements are incredibly distracting (why not just give them at the end?), painful camera with edges while in combat, bad death sequences (audio, visual, jarring cuts), performance issues that cause the game to stutter a lot. These things are minor on an individual level and incredibly picky of me to point out, however they really stand out and pull you out of the immersion of the game. I'm not one that usually gets immersed in games, but man this game is incredibly good at it, and then incredibly good at taking you out of it with these game design flaws/mistakes. Regardless - highly recommend it!!
