Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

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?