HELLBLADE: SENUA’S SACRIFICE
A Pict who paints a thousand words
A LONE WARRIOR MAKING a redemptive journey into a terrifying place is something we’ve all seen before. Add mythology, haunting structures, some really dark bits, basic shape-matching puzzles, and creepylooking guys who want to kill you, and the fantasy hack ’n’ slash game is complete. How do you make it fresh again?
Ninja Theory, developer of PlayStation’s HeavenlySword and multiplatform DmC, thinks it can do it with characterization. Senua is a Scottish tribeswoman who has seen her home overrun and lover killed by Scandinavian invaders. So, she carries his severed head into the Norse hell to avenge him. On its own, that would be easy to mock, but Ninja Theory has found a way to scatter uniqueness throughout the game: making Senua mentally ill.
She hears voices and has hallucinations. You can never be sure whether what you’re seeing is really real, or if it’s only real to Senua. Maybe she spends the whole game locked in a hut, her adventure playing out only in her mind, or maybe she really does it. Maybe those are the invaders she’s slaying, not skull-headed demons. The developers worked with neuroscientists and other experts to get the tone right, hoping to stave off the backlash a thoughtless treatment of the subject would bring. Senua’s blue painted face and matted hair may mark her out among videogame heroines, and Melina Juergens’s mo-cap performance is spoton, but it’s her voices you’ll remember long after the game is completed.
The Unreal 4-powered environments, heavy on effects, often take a trip to the brown world, all mud and dark caves, but the sound design is remarkable. It tells you up-front that it’s best played with positional headphones, and whacking on a pair surrounds you with the voices of Senua’s mind, cajoling and questioning you, warning you, sowing doubt. It’s one of the greatest uses of voice acting and 3D audio we’ve come across, and spinning on the spot in an early enemy-free section is an excuse just to drink it all in. Played with speakers, even surround sound, just isn’t such an intense experience, with stereo being particularly weak, thanks to a headset’s ability to drown out ambient noise.
With no HUD, and subtitles off by default, it would be easy to describe it as “cinematic.” But almost no one would make a film like this; it’s too harsh, too contrasting, and exactly the sort of thing games do well.
Combat is informed by its creators’ work on DmC, becoming a fluid dance of rolls, blocks, and strikes. That the game doesn’t think to tell you any of this is annoying—an early battle you’re not meant to win gives you just enough insight to know how to fight, even if the camera decided to tuck itself away behind a tree the first time we played it. Difficulty is adaptive, but if you’re struggling, and worried about the game’s threats to delete your save, it’s worth setting it in easy mode and persevering, because Hellblade has sights to show you, and they’re not all hellish.