5/5 ★ – Baggins's review of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.

Hellblade takes the best aspects of the AAA market like, detailed visuals, smooth animations, realistic facial expressions and the best aspects of the indie market of focused gameplay, narrative cohesion, no filler and a low price. The game perfectly synchronises the narrative and gameplay under the subject of psychosis, which you can tell has been thoroughly researched and been curated with the help from people suffering with the condition. Examples of this includes the runic doors, in which you need to find the correct shapes in the environment to open, which mimics the obsession over patterns which can affect people with psychosis. It is also evident in how the mental illness is characterised as a darkness which is mirrored in the (semi)permadeath. The technology used for the recording of the ‘voices’ mean that the experience is best played with headphones, however, this is not required. Another benefit of a smaller team is the control and focus that could be applied to the pacing of the game, which knows exactly when to ease off the player or the hour or two completely absent from combat means the game feels rigorously curated and also provides natural places to stop the game and pick it up later. The gameplay consists of mainly interesting visual puzzles punctuated by occasional combat or boss fights. All the puzzles are varied and rarely require explanation because of how you are eased into them m. Any additional aspects that would require explaining are diegetically implemented impressively without breaking immersion or feeling condescending. The creativity of the puzzles can’t be overstated and although they occasionally reuse aspects from old puzzles they are subverted and kept fresh in clever and interesting ways. Even the puzzles know when to back off to let you breathe by reusing staple puzzles which are present through the game, like the runic doors. The combat itself is very well animated and whilst at the beginning of the game it is weighty with a good game feel by the end of the game it feels too weak with the enemies tanking hits. This could be to do with the difficulty I played which was a resident evil 4ish scaling difficulty which ensured the combat always felt like a struggle to get through. There were occasionally moments, however, where combat controls could’ve been explained with a small control prompt or something. Whilst this may have slightly damaged the immersion the game creates by foregoing any hud elements it would’ve eased the frustration of late game combat encounters and stopped the combat potentially feeling shallow to some players. The game is a masterclass in creating a strong feeling of anxiety dotted with the occasional small victory and setback sometimes merging the two. The way progression through the game is dotted with narrative and gameplay wins and losses (all deaths are canon and some victories are punished) stops the themes of mental health not feeling trivialised or easily beaten. The difficulty, subject matter and gripping narrative actually stopped the game from being fun the entire way through but instead elevated the experience to feel important and worthwhile. In conclusion the game feels like it’s trailblazing an interesting path that could be unique to the gaming medium. This game is not about mental health, this game has mental health. Control of the character was so important to the experience but retains its distance from the player by having a walking talking character that the player can’t imprint themselves on like they would in a game like half life with a silent protagonist. Through the insane detail on Senua and extreme close ups and fantastic voice acting (made more unbelievable by the fact she had never acted before) all the information is conveyed with startling authenticity. The brilliant gameplay and narrative compliment each other making the experience better than the sum of its parts and will leave you exhausted by the end.