Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
GONNA BE HELL TO PLAY. $45 | PC, PS4 | www.hellblade.com
CREATED BY A team of just 20 and selfpublished, Ninja Theory was always putting itself in a tricky position with Hellblade. Its intentions were noble: to make a game centred around the still-taboo subject of mental illness. Unfortunately, Ninja Theory was so focused on its novel, in-game portrayal of psychosis that it forgot to build a decent game around it.
Novice actress Melina Juergens turns in an excellent performance as psychotic protagonist Senua, who has a truly harrowing time of it. The combination of Ninja Theory’s mo-cap work and Juergens’ nerve-shredding shrieks makes Suena’s demise feel uncomfortably real, and more than justifies the pre-game warning screen — one of the main mechanics is an approximation of what it’s like to suffer audiovisual hallucinations. Using 3D binaural sound, mocking whispers swirl back and forth inside the headset almost constantly while you control Senua. Ninja Theory has worked with neuroscience and psychology experts to recreate what it feels like to hear voices, and its implementation, even without a frame of reference, is deeply affecting.
If only the rest of the game could meet that bar. There are, barring a couple of exceptions, only two kinds of puzzle; both are insufferable by game’s end. The logic behind them is simple but the execution is anything but. The combat, fluid as it first seems, suffers the same problem. You must work out the controls by yourself, and Hellblade’s way of increasing difficulty is to throw more of the same grunts at you. Die too many times, and the rot in Senua’s arm will reach her head, whereupon it’s game over.
Despite going to great lengths to avoid cliché, even the hallucinations grow tired and schlocky by the second hour. Ultimately, what was intended as a thoughtful depiction of a terrible mental illness has ended up casting it as something of an asset: a helpful superpower that can give you the strength to soldier on, so long as you can put up with the odd breakdown here and there. That, we suspect, was not what Ninja Theory intended, and it’s certainly not what we had hoped for.