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mozillogames · 7 years

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You'll Sacrifice Your Time to Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

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Because it’s really good.

Hellblade: Senua’a Sacrifice is a short, but intense, game that sees you travelling through beautiful landscapes, taking on Norse gods and even doing the odd puzzle all while dealing with the main character’s psychosis along the way. It’s an incredible experience that deals with some interesting subject matter and both expresses it tastefully and informatively, but also presents a gripping story and some intense gameplay.

Hellblade is a difficult game to try and describe without revealing too much of what makes it work. Even harder still given that it’s the sort of game that a lot of people will dislike, given the amount of walking and listening involved. At the same time, I’d say it shows some wonderful examples of design, going with the idea of say it, don’t plaster-your-game-with-UI it. There’s no UI at all, the closest thing you’ll ever get is the pause screen, and meanwhile everything else is in world and in the scenery, or within Senua’s own head.

If you hadn’t heard already, Senua, the game’s main character, suffers from psychosis. This manifests itself, at least most obviously to the player, as voices in her head. These voices are manifestations of people she may have dealt with in her life, such as the former slave, Druth, whom Senua found in the woods and who went on to teach her about the beliefs and culture of the Northmen, the Vikings who were raiding their lands. Others take the form of the Shadow which is an embodiment, of sorts, of the idea that Senua is cursed, tainted or worse, a thought you may see put upon her while growing up. There are also the Furies which are the general voices that will constantly plague Senua’s journey with their whispers and taunts “She’s going the wrong way” “She doesn’t know where she’s going” “Look at her, she’s scared” they’ll say as you pass through caves and forests.

These are the voices that act as the closest thing you’ll ever get to a UI or a tutorial while in the game. They whisper “Focus, you need to focus” as you approach some form of glyph or stone or perhaps they give a cursory warning about an attack from behind or even when an enemy is low on health and ready to be finished off. This is the main area of expert design that I so love in this game. The use of audio keeps you on your toes as you never fully know your surroundings or if what you’re doing is right, you can only see what’s in front of you. So the use of the voices as indicators of information means you have to always be listening out to them, even when they don’t help by creating fear within the player.

Hellblade does wonders to induce fear within the player and it’s rarely through any classical horror elements, or at least, classic video game horror elements. Basically nothing jumps at the screen and makes a loud gargling noise and in a lot of instances there isn’t actually any perceived threat. Instead the music builds up, the voices begin to flutter into a panic “They’re coming!” they’ll say with increased panic as the sky begins to turn black and the world distorts. You feel your heart begin to thump and your body become covered in a flop sweat that you thought only a snake could evoke (snakes are evil and scary), but you continue on, pressing onwards to save your beloved.

That’s ultimately the story though. Set during the Viking raids of northern Britain, Senua is a Pictish warrior who has set off to Helheim, the underworld of the Northmen, the Vikings, to save the soul of her beloved Dillion. Setting off from Orkney, after nearly all the Pictish folk were slaughtered during such a raid, Senua enters this fantasy land that reflects her understanding of the Northmen as well as their culture and gods. I say it’s a fantasy land, only because it’s nothing like what you’d find in the reality of you nor I, however to Senua it is very much real. There’s never the point in the game where they reveal that what Senua is actually fighting is a sheep in a field somewhere, instead it maintains that Senua’s reality is her reality whether it actually be real or not. While the areas you traverse reflect aspects of Senua’s life or those around her, an area of darkness where you’re pursued by a beast to reflect her childhood trapped indoors, or an area of mystic perception puzzles based around the god that the Viking raids were carried out in the name of, including their barbaric practices.

I can’t say that Hellblade is inherently fun, you can’t exactly smile your way through a beach covered in wrecked and abandoned ships or as you walk through a settlement that’s posted with flayed corpses left hung up to be feed for carrion. Everything is out to get Senua, including her own mind, so it’s very hard to ever feel safe and comforted during her quest, but this makes the whole thing ever more enthralling. The game remains fresh, for the most part, throughout the whole game both in setting and what it’ll have you do. The few constants within the game are the combat and the rune puzzles.

The latter involve trying to locate a Nordic rune within real life and this could be how some crossbeams line up to form a shape, maybe the flayed corpse lines up with another post to create another rune or even just the reflection of some driftwood to create another. These puzzles are simple, yes, but a lot of them are based around perspective and looking at objects in different angles, as well as acting as a wonderful way to get the player to actively look around this beautiful game and it is beautiful, there are lots of corpses everywhere but they look pretty, well, not pretty, but good. Well, not good, but you know, impressive? How do I word this without sounding like I’m attracted to flayed corpses? I guess there’s no way.

Combat! There’s combat in this game and it’s surprisingly satisfying for a lot of the game. Overall a simple system of heavy attack, light attack, block and dodge, and I guess there’s a kick as well, the spectacle of it comes from the nail biting manner of a lot of the combat. As you take on large groups of squid headed warriors the swapping between targets as you suddenly have to doge out of the way of an attack from behind can lead your heart to jump immediately to your mouth. When a voice in your head, almost literally so when using headphones, shouts “Look out!” or “Behind you!” the warning seems so much more real you feel the need to listen.

Combos may be simple, and the system is about as complex as being able to parry and riposte, but it works very well. It’s tight, whatever that means, and not overly complicated to muddy the whole system. The enemies are often just different enough that you can’t just walk around slamming the light attack button without a care in the world, as well as enemies willingly attacking you while your back is turned, which is something a lot of games seem to always struggle with. Sadly, where the combat often begins to fall down, you may have seen this is an issue, is that some combat sections tend to be very long and drawn out. With an adaptive difficulty that makes the game harder the better you play, if you want, you can find yourself fighting on a single bridge for well over thirty minutes as more and more angry shirtless men with shields, axes and even bigger axes just keep on coming.

It’s more a case of fatigue than anything. Having focused so harshly for so long it begins to wane and your reflexes drop making death an ever closer reality as you find yourself being knocked to the floor more and more. Then if you do find yourself finally falling in battle you might find that you’re back at the start of the bridge and stuck fighting the same dudes again, but maybe now with fewer enemies and they may not take a few hundred hits this time.

Death is possibly a permanent destiny in Hellblade. Within the opening area you’re given a haunting image of Senua falling to the floor, clasping to try and get away from the rot that crawls up her body, ultimately killing her for good, a chilling image of what may be. You’re informed that if you fall too many times, it may cause an absolute end to your journey. Whether this is true or not has yet to really be seen in a lot of circles that said the game is also very forgiving about death and whether or not it chooses to increase the rising rot. That said the sense of dread that comes with every near death encounter sets in that panic all the more.

Overall, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a fantastic game. There’s a lot of enjoyment to be had in getting completely overwhelmed by emotion, anxiety and fear, sort of. A lot of the game reminded me of my time in a mental health ward, as well as was reminiscent of my own personal experiences with the stuff. It’s the sort of game that had me almost quivering and trembling with anxiety and other trembling sensations, making me have to put the game down. However, during these brief stops I thought of little else but playing more Hellblade, and I had to go to work, and sell Hellblade to people.

It’s a great contender for a Game of the Year™ spot and is a game I find myself thinking about a lot, late a night. All those dead bodies, just hanging up, flayed. Oh boy.

#Hellblade #Senua's Sacrifice #Ninja Theory #PS4 #Steam #PC #Video Review #Game Review #Written Review #Mozillo #Action game #Psychosis #Third Person #Very pretty

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