"Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice" Review

Initially, I'd planned to make this a more experimental review and alternate between all caps and small text between paragraphs to better emulate this game, but I realized that that would make this review legitimately unpleasant to read. So, it's just going to be a run-of-the-mill regular kind of review, albeit a little shorter than usual due to the relatively bare nature of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Let us begin.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice puts you in the shoes of Senua (shocking, I know), a warrior venturing into the norse underworld to rescue the soul of her slain lover. Senua suffers from psychosis, and is pursued by a force called "the darkness", which may be the psychosis itself, some other mystical force, her father, the goddess of death, it isn't really explained and it's the weakest aspect of the story. The opening sentence of this paragraph is the plot summed up, as there really isn't much else that can be said. All the juicy story bits occur in flashbacks, but there isn't much story at all when you're in control of Senua. This isn't really a problem, as the backstory bits did enough to keep me playing, but it all converges in one of the worst, most ambiguous-in-a-bad-way endings I've seen in a while. I'll be delving further into this later, but to conclude the story section of this review, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is an ok story overall, but the payoff is nonexistent.

Now, one aspect of the story that does work pretty well (at least, until maybe an hour or two before the end) is the psychosis that plagues Senua. If you follow gaming news at all, chances are you came across a behind the scenes video for this game a few months ago, the focus of which being the research that developer Ninja Theory put into this project. They met with mental health professionals, people who actually live with psychosis, the whole nine yards, to ensure that their portrayal of it was as accurate as possible. The voices float around your head if you wear headphones, taunting you at times, encouraging you at times, and occasionally providing help in combat (i.e. shouting "behind you!" if an enemy tries to attack you from behind). Most importantly for the purposes of the game, the voices sometimes add to the occasional horror section. Imagine you know you're being stalked by a serial killer, and you have the means to defend yourself, but it's still a game of cat and mouse. Now imagine you come to a closet door and all of a sudden you hear a loud voice in the back of your head hyperventilating and saying "please please please don't open the door he's behind the door he's going to kill you i don't want to die!" I imagine that the uncertainty of the moment coupled with this voice's insistence that the killer is behind this door would make the situation all the more terrifying. These voices also give a little bit more insight into Senua's character, which is a good thing because Hellblade doesn't do much to characterize its leading lady. However, as much as I thought the voices added to the experience, starting about an hour before the end it starts to get a little out of hand. The voices start not shutting up and they end up repeating the same lines over and over again. About an hour from the end, you will not get a single moment of silence, and it's really, really, really annoying. There isn't even anything that triggers the voices to talk that much, they just start doing it. Whatever way you slice it, despite the fact that the voices start to get annoying toward the end, I personally thought they added a lot.

Mere sentences ago I made a jab at Hellblade's treatment of Senua. I'll give them this, Senua's actress, Melina Juergens, delivers every line excellently, viscerally, and believably. Make no mistake, Juergens takes what she's given and she runs with it. It's just a shame that she isn't given much. The only two emotions Senua seems to feel are intense anger and fear. Granted, I'm the one who is always saying that developers need to allow their female characters to be vulnerable for the sake of character building, but vulnerable only works if there is strength to put it into context. This gets resolved towards the end, when Senua's determination is at an all-time high, but for most of the game this is all we have. We don't even get to see her happy with the lover she's trying to rescue or anything like that. It's just frightened whispering and screaming at the top of her lungs, and as a result, despite some characterization from the voices and definite strength as a character, I thought that her overall development left something to be desired. I enjoyed Senua as a character, but I thought she could have been handled a little better. The other characters are pretty one-note too. I did enjoy Dillian, the lover the Senua is trying to rescue, but not because he was a strong character. He was one-note just like all the rest, but his note was enjoyable and I thought his support of Senua was really touching. Other than that, characters just kind of appear and we're given a little bitty glimpse of how Senua knows them. Not the strongest roster in the world, but it really didn't make too big a difference. The game itself is good enough to distract from its lousy characters.

Now, I've heard mixed opinions on the combat. Some have called it run-of-the-mill, while others have called it well-crafted, and I put myself in the camp of the latter. Sure, combat consists of blocking and a heavy and light attack like several other games, but I've never seen a game pull it off as smoothly or at the pace that Hellblade dishes it out. Unlike most heavy/light attack jamborees, Hellblade's combat is slow paced (at least until the end) with enemies plotting their tactics, trying their best to get an edge on you. The camera provides a limited view of the battlefield, so if there are multiple enemies, you'll need to make sure you don't lose sight of any, otherwise they might sneak behind you and attack while you're focused on another enemy. These enemies are smart, no doubt. They aren't the best when it comes to self-preservation, as they block attacks pretty conservatively, but in terms of tactics and taking advantage of your mistakes, they are incredibly intelligent.
As for the combat itself, it feels meaty and the swords clang satisfyingly. The parry window is generous, and you'll likely find yourself using it often. The game typically only throws two or three enemies at you at a time, but given their intelligence, even this small amount can prove challenging. So, despite the slow speed of combat, it kept me on my toes every time, due in part to the game's un-marketed permadeath-if-you-die-too-many-times mechanic. If I were you, I wouldn't worry about that, though. Combat is challenging, sure, but challenging in a makes-your-hands-sweat kind of way, not in a constantly dying kind of way.
One other thing I really enjoyed about the combat was the sheer variety in terms of attack styles. Despite only having a block and a light/strong attack, the way that Senua delivers attacks depends on a number of factors: her current speed of movement, the angle at which the enemy is from her, how much time has passed after a dodge, how much time has passed after a parry, etc. It ensures that for most of the game you won't get bored with watching the attacks. Another thing to note is enemy responsiveness. Every time you attack an enemy, they get a new cut on them. It isn't always exactly where you landed the blow, but every time the enemy gets more scarred. As their health dwindles, they'll nurse their wounds or limp towards you while still retaining their combat capabilities, and I thought that was some excellent attention to detail. In the same way, the more injured Senua gets, the slower she moves and the weaker her attacks are, and she'll clutch her stomach and limp like the enemies do. Combat is not only satisfying to play, but there's more than enough feedback to make it feel legitimately satisfying as well.

When you aren't fighting off the guards of the Norse underworld, you'll be solving environmental puzzles, which land with varying degrees of success. Most of the time, you'll be looking through the environment trying to match a symbol to trees or burn patterns on the ground that form it (i.e. the symbol will be an "R", and you'll look for an "R" made up of something in the environment). It's a unique idea that plays with perspective and forces you to look closely at everything you see, and I found myself quite impressed with how the developers managed to brand certain shapes into the environment without me noticing until I started looking for it. All-in-all, the environmental puzzles are inoffensive, but there's just too many of them, and this ties directly into perhaps the biggest issue I have with the game: It gets boring if you play it for too long. Readers, that isn't a small problem, it's the cardinal sin of gaming. Given what I just said, the score I'm giving Hellblade is probably going to make you scratch your head, but the fact remains that it just isn't a reliable time sink. One of the reasons for this is the sheer amount of puzzles required to get to the next story or gameplay bit. Typically, a game will make you do something three times before you're rewarded, correct? Well, in Hellblade, environmental puzzles can come with as many as three puzzles to solve per round, and there are four rounds total. So, despite there being 4 puzzle sections, you'll end up solving as many as 12 puzzles before you get to more of the meat, and it just feels like an attempt by the developers to pad out this relatively short game. It took me something like two weeks to beat Hellblade because I would play maybe an hour at most, get dreadfully bored, then go play something else. Like I said, the puzzles are inoffensive, but they come in far too large waves to make this game a go-to Friday night affair.

As always, I like for the last thing I touch on to be the game's technical performance, and in this regard, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is quite good. I never noticed any framerate drops, graphics were high-quality, animations were smooth and believable, and I never had any hard or soft crashes. Despite being a game with a modest budget, I could tell that a lot of this budget went into technical QA. I did, however, encounter one or two animation bugs where Senua would be stuck in the running animation while walking. So, it isn't flawless, especially in regards to sound, as the water sound effects were pretty terrible and there was quite a bit of static and popping towards the end, but overall Hellblade is a pretty strong technical package for its budget. AAA developers would do well to learn from its example.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice was advertised as being an indie-AAA experience; boasting the production values of something that might come from a AAA developer with a modest indie budget. I can say with certainty that it achieves what it sets out to do, but with some glaring flaws. Needless to say, a game that I can't play for more than an hour because I get bored with it is a game that is in need of significantly more meat. However, the fact that I was still compelled to play, even if in hour-long bursts, says something about the quality of the meat itself. The story and characters could have been stronger, and there could have been much less padding, but at the same time I can't deny that the execution of Senua's psychosis, the way that this game drips with atmosphere, and the visceral nature of the combat all make it a worthwhile experience. This game won't be for everyone, but if you take it slow, I'm confident you'll find something to like.

Let us review:
Gets boring after an hour or so -1.0
Weak story/characters - 0.3
Bad Ending - 0.7

So, the final score for Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is...

8.0/10 - Good
Decent work, Ninja Theory, decent work.