Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

It's an old story, as old as you want to make it, a woman takes the severed head of her lover with her into hell. Contrary to what she tells herself her journey is not to bring him back, but to confirm that she cannot. The paradox of death is that we cannot conceive of total absence, the absolute denial of being, and that to think of death is to fall into the trap of thinking nothingness a thing that can be positively thought. This is the problem for the living, how can he be gone and I just go on? Conceiving of death in its totality is a philosophical problem, and Senua is not concerned with metaphysics. She is concerned with the severed head hanging at her side. For Senua the journey through hell is to prove that one can walk with their body through death, that the afterlife is a continuation of life, that there is no such thing as total absence. "Turn your back on death and you only see the shadow that it casts". Like the sun, death radiates its own meaning, produces its own shadows, and that's the inevitable tomorrow.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice has nothing to say, really, but it has a lot it wants to make you feel. I think where death and cruelty and meaninglessness are concerned, producing a work of feeling is basically an ethical act. Early on Senua's fights and puzzles distract from its feeling, although its strange and nonsensical puzzles are later explained as a conspiracy of madness. Why wouldn't reality adhere to the organisational patterns Senua projects onto it when reality for Senua is that which can be arranged against the total chaos that really is there? The signs that she looks for to support the answers she's already committed to? It's not a popular opinion that action games should be shorter, particularly relatively short games like Senua's Sacrifice, but this should really begin with The Bridge to Hel. Valravyn's Keep and Surtr's Domain feel like an unnecessary warmup before total despair. The fights feel like padding in these early parts, neither involved enough to invest in nor cathartic enough to match the game's mood. With The Sea of Corpses however, relentless mobs work to overwhelm and exhaust the player, which is the requisite path to ultraviolent ecstasy. Blood and blood and hands and fire and Senua with her rotting flesh screaming her way toward the rocks in which she hallucinates her mother's face.

I had been looking for a game like this for a while. I liked The Last of Us Part II because I thought of it as an exploitation work rather than a literary one with 'things to say'. In fact the game's total lack of ideas and tonal misery made it superior as an exploitation work to the ones that wink at you. The game's will to violence is moving, in that the AI and level design force you to only act out of desperation, resorting to the sloppiest and cruellest measures at the drop of the hat. It is about becoming one with chaos, and the speed at which blind adrenaline bypasses ethical thought. The arc from Downtown to the Seraphite forest makes for one of gaming's finest descents into hell. The Sea of Corpses in Senua's Sacrifice picks up from there, and the four Trials of Odin explore the psychological ramifications of this descent. The action gets sloppy and desperate, the colours bleeding into the eyes, the voices in Senua's head distributed across channels and adding to a spatial disorientation within even the most linear environments. The Trials draw affective game design back to its fundamentals: low lighting and shallow draw distance in horror, feeling space through the vibrations in the controller, how golden sunsets induce warmth in your body and the rain takes it away. It is a game that violently happens to you.

It is sensorially rich, its world rots and decays, and it is frequently geared to sensorial overload. When it finds its rhythm it is the inherent madness of the hack and slash videogame made text. But something that stands out in Senua's Sacrifice is its experiments with direct address. Senua's eyes bulge at the player, and in its heaviest moments the three dimensional spaces of the game fall away for a moving collage of grimacing faces emerging from blood and darkness, pressed flat against the screen. The game is frequently cinematic, not in the sense of looking expensive (although it does), but in its use of montaging techniques from experimental cinema, and in its understanding of the alienating pull of melodramatic acting. Here motion capture isn't deployed to make digital bodies look like natural humans but to explore human expressivity within the realm of videogames. Instead of withdrawn psychological realism Melina Juergens acts like a dancer. She expresses internal processes in such a way that the player can't help but catch and mimic them, contorting her unsettling rolling eyes and thrashing arms into the heart.

I'm not qualified to make any claims as to whether its famous use of a mental health advisor gets us anywhere closer to a visualisation of psychosis, but I doubt it. Sometimes I see people out of the corner of my eye who I know are not there, and sometimes I don't know where I am or if any of the things I remember actually happened. Sometimes my hands don't feel like my hands and I don't know if I exist anymore. I don't think aestheticising symptoms works to immerse the player in the experience of even mild depression such as mine, but what the game does so well is rescue psychological horror from generic surrealism. For a game concerned with mythologies and afterlives and eternities, it is always about the psychophysical toll taken by events in the material world, and the way this ruined world persists alongside you. Just as questions of nonexistence remain an issue for philosophical thought, Senua's Sacrifice knows that death is only a problem for the living. And if you're sobbing in the end it's not for loss, but for the persistence of life after death and the dawning of that inevitable tomorrow.

In a medium where diversity of opinion is anathema, everybody who's heard of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice knows what the general party line on it is; the concept, atmosphere, storyline, voice acting, sound design, and motion capture work are all fantastic, but the combat mechanics, exploration, and puzzle solving sections let it down, and the score you give it is dependant largely on how much you value those individual elements. I've heard that assessment repeated so many times that it was drilled into me; I've probably unthinkingly repeated it myself at some point. So while all that stuff about the atmosphere and acting is right, I can only start my review in one place - the combat in this game is fantastic, and is all the more effective for being used sparingly and often at surprising times. I was absolutely stunned by the first boss fight, at how balletic, fluid, and exhilarating the action was and how cinematic the direction was, and I'm somebody that utterly despises boss fights as a general rule. Not in this game. Here, they all convey a sense of high stakes, are all great fun to play though, are all just difficult enough to be a welcome challenge without being a total chore, and all got my pulse racing in a way games very rarely do these days. Having finished the game, after an absolutely breathless last twenty minutes of frantic and relentless crowd combat, I was left astonished that anybody could consider this side of the game to be a weakness.

As for the things everybody else praises it for: it certainly earns that praise, largely through a captivating, tortured lead performance from Melina Juergens and an atmosphere that, along with some gameplay mechanics in the late game in particular, does a brilliant job of making you feel genuinely vulnerable, an emotion and feeling that games should theoretically be great at but that's historically been vastly under-utilised. (That sustaining this atmosphere and feeling so well is the game's greatest strength is evidenced by just how badly the power ballad that plays over the ending credits clangs; it's the worst thing in the entire game by an absolute mile.) The thing I find of particular interest in this, though, was sparked by a comment by my fiancee - she walked into the room while I was playing this, looked at it for a few seconds, and called it 'strikingly pretty'. I immediately and instinctively went to disagree, and it took me a little bit of thinking to realise why.

The answer lies in the fact that Hellblade looks almost nothing like any of the games I consider beautiful, and has much more in common with the ones I find ugly. I gravitate toward games that are colourful, imaginative, vivid, and that look like an art director was involved from the outset and given creative input: things like the hand-drawn, homely Gorogoa, or the striking pop-art of Persona 5, or the lush nature-strikes-back greenery of The Last of Us, or the cozy stillness of country life captured in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Give me the vivid red and orange sunsets of Firewatch, the endless, sun-baked yellow deserts of Journey, the rich, deep blues of Ori and the Blind Forest, or hell, even the lush, velvety purple that's the visual calling card of Saints Row IV - each and every one of those is a game that establishes its own distinctive colour palette within a single screenshot. What I consider ugly is the beige, bland darkness that has been the default settings of so many self-serious big budget action-adventure games of the last two console generations. I've enjoyed quite a few games in that mould, but I'd never have described any of them as beautiful - not based on their appearance, anyway. Hellblade, at first glance, falls right into that category. Good chunks of the game are spent outdoors, but even there much screentime is given over to ruined building, to gnarled, dormant trees, to visibly cold, unwelcoming beaches littered with debris. 'Indoors' means caves and dungeons, dimly lit by flickering torches. Most games that look like this feel very po-faced to me, but this doesn't - and the game it may come closest to on this, ultimately, is The Cat Lady. That, while much more unusual in its appearance and made on a much lower budget, is also an uncompromisingly dark look at mental illness that crucially earns the right to its own darkness. I think that may be why the relentless seriousness and dour visuals of so many action-adventure games has put me off over the years; they're at odds with the gameplay and the message it's sending. These grimy colour schemes often feel like a token effort to acknowledge that war is hell while otherwise going out of the way to make it seem like great fun. Hellblade's concept of using a literal descent into literal hell(heim) to battle literal demons as an allegory for coping with mental illness might be a bit too on-the-nose on paper, but it allows awe, terror, weakness, and recrimination to seep into every part of the game. Being so dark that you frequently find yourself reaching for the brightness controls on your TV remote and/or turning off all the other light sources in the room isn't just a choice stumbled upon by default here - it's absolutely necessary.

So to summarise: Hellblade has a clear concept and vision that is executed to maximum effect, every single aspect of its design is carefully considered and that sense of care and attention to detail shines through repeatedly in the final product, it's capable of both being fiercely exciting and emotionally draining, it treats its themes (both psychosis and Norse mythology) with absolute respect, it feels pretty unique in its field, and it's the perfect length to boot, having the smarts not to outstay its welcome. This is one of those games that is likely to make people instinctively say 'I can see why people might not like it', but honestly, what's not to like?

If they ironed out the almost game-breaking bugs (doors not opening unless you look up, some sequences getting stuck in a loop) and improved the tightness of the combat this could've been a near-perfect and intense audio-visual storytelling experience. For now it's just merely very impressive and as a development story it's also a nice middle finger towards the games industry.

i really wanted to love this one, considering the innovative topic and all that debate about AA games making a comeback. Unfortunatly, while the game is good, it has too many flaws to be called great. First of, it feels like a game that should be a 1 hour long walking simulator that is stretched to 6 hours through repetitive puzzle and combat sections. The combat itselft is serviceable, doing the bare minimun in terms of enemy variety and combos, but the hits feel visceral, and at least early on it can be a tense experience. The puzzle sections however, are really dull, not smart and not rewarding at all to complete. Storywise i also couldnt really care much about senua and her struggle, even if the portrail of psychosis in the game is really well done in terms of audio. It really feels like an indie with extremely pretty visuals, instead of the real AA games we had during the ps2 era.