Voices that plague Senua are in a constant chatter, dancing around her head in creepy ways that feel as though you're never alone.
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Visually Hellblade is a gorgeous game to take in – sun-soaked rocky beaches, vividly distorted streaks of color and light, and deep darkness that strangles the screen, there's a variety of hues, saturation, and exposures that convey meaning in most areas. This variety is further improved when playing on the PS4 Pro, which makes use of an "enhanced resolution" or a smoother, more immersive 60 frames-per-second.
Its incredibly smart use of audio and visual distortion and trickery to convey the frightening effects of psychosis, hallucinations, and delusion, are married with the gameplay elements for an experience that rarely ever grapples over whether it’s a game or a story.
Hellblade revolves around Senua’s perception of her environment, drawing connections between her beliefs and the geometry of the world.
For example, in one section I guided Senua through a pitch-black area filled with shapeless hair-raising creatures that would lunge out when she got too close. These moments evoke the vibes of a horror game that are sparse enough to be shocking when I haplessly wandered into them, but effective enough that I worried for Senua's safety with that ever-present nagging of permanent death.
Yet most of Hellblade revolves around Senua’s perception of her environment, drawing connections between her beliefs and the geometry of the world. You’ll scour each area, lining up beams, or trees, so the shapes of the world around her take on significance and unlock the next door that blocks her progression. As new puzzle elements are slowly added – like fractured walkways and doors that require a precise viewing angle to be reassembled, or portals that force you to enter entirely different versions of the world – these puzzles take on new layers of depth, and meaning.These moments are profoundly rewarding when you uncover something new.
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Surprisingly, combat in Hellblade is more of a palate cleanser than a core element. It punctuates the story with wave-based enemies that block progress until defeated, making use of Senua's light attack, heavy attack, parry, dodge, and charge. Though these moves do combine together to create a varied enough skill set when facing the same half-dozen enemy types, progression feels stunted since new abilities only slightly modify the core of the combat, rather than redefine it.
The simple nature of the combat design struck me as obligatory for the sake of interactivity – giving you another way to interact with the world outside of perception – coupled with the fact a warrior should be defined by battle. But there were only a few fights where large groups of enemies were thrown at me that I ever felt threatened and it's only near the end of the journey when enemy numbers and difficulty spike unexpectedly that the combat depth eventually becomes more than the sum of its parts.And yet, like most of Hellblade, combat is still a tense experience knowing that dying too many times (in or out of combat) will cause your save to be deleted and you’ll be forced to start from the beginning. While that might sound draconian in execution, its tie-ins to the story are concrete, reinforcing a system where failure carries meaning rather than simply acting like a gimmick to artificially inflate difficulty. And though I don't think I ever got close to having my save data destroyed, every time I got close to dying carried much more weight and impact with this knowledge.
Verdict
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is a masterclass of atmosphere, storytelling, and the marriage of mechanical and conceptual design. While there are moments that feel shoehorned in to remind us we’re playing a video game, the care and attention Ninja Theory has clearly poured into Senua and her story has created something amazing. This is a game everyone should play, and I’m thankful for the opportunity to have lived inside the mind of Senua, however briefly.
