3/5 ★ – anttopapsi's review of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.

The ‘high fidelity’ sacrificed a lot of performance and smoothness, quite a bit of jank. A lot of the game felt like it was shoving the camera into Senua’s face and expecting us to feel something and sadly it just didn’t really hit. Maybe I had too high expectations of the voices and the audio, but they just didn’t spook me in the way I would’ve hoped - there were some cool moments in the beginning where they genuinely convinced me to make some wrong decisions but it could’ve been interesting to have a stronger unreliable narrator thread, or having them evolve some other way - they lost their impact very early on. There’s also something simply frustrating about having to walk back and forth between places - it doesn’t add anything, games are often too scared to be lean and cut out all the crap, cut the crap man. Appreciated the use of live action but they felt poorly integrated to the scenes.