Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice - Overcoming the Voices

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice about a Celtic warrior named Senua who's on a journey to Helheim to retrieve the soul of her dead lover, Dillion. On the way, she'll be faced with tons of demons and puzzles that have it in for her. But the most anxiety-ridden element of this game doesn't have to do with the enemies or the mazes. It's the voices in Senua's head.

Senua suffers from psychosis and the developers wanted the player to feel like they were experiencing the world through Senua's point-of-view. The game instructs you to wear a pair of headphones in order to get the full effect of what Senua hears in her head. It was the first thing I noticed and was actually quite unsettling and uncomfortable at first. I found myself exclaiming for the voices to shut up and you know what? So was Senua.

So I think the only reason I played this game from start to finish is because it was apparent from the opening moments that I've never had an experience like this with any other games out there and I felt that I owed it to myself to experience it all the way.

I promise this game will make you shake and sweat.

After every battle, I exhaled with relief, wiped my hands, and ate more gummy worms.

When approached by enemies, you have no choice but to face them. The camera locks on to them automatically and you can't escape, only adding to the game's anxiety-ridden feeling. You have a fast attack, a heavy attack, and a melee attack. Senua can parry too and it feels so satisfying when you time it just right.

The game's combat isn't really all that complicated, but it's the fact that you have these voices in your head screaming at you, telling you that you're too weak, or that you can't do it, and that your enemies are too strong. This game MUST be experienced with headphones to get the full effect of what the developers were trying to go for. The fact that there's no HUD in this game makes the voices useful during combat when one of them shouts, "Behind you!" or tells you to focus.

So apart from the combat, there's the second portion of this game which is just walking around. When you're not fighting, you're walking around, solving puzzles.

Throughout the game, you're tasked with finding patterns within the world in order to progress but then the game starts adding in other things like illusions and darkness.

Darkness plays a huge part in Hellblade as it serves as an in-game antagonist but also in some of the game's defining moments. Sometimes, it'll be pitch black and all you have to rely on is the controller's rumble and the voices in the distance to guide you. I thought that was really cool.

If there's any criticisms I have with the game, it's probably to do with Senua's movement and control. Senua does not feel fluid at all but at the same time, I don't think the developers wanted her to be. To be in total control does not seem like something that the devs had in mind.

In a game that requires moving around a lot, I just couldn't help but wish Senua went beyond a light jog at times. But if I'm giving this game any credit, it's for telling a really effective story within a video game in a way I haven't quite seen before. This game came out in 2017 and I couldn't help but think that the most recent God of War took a lot of inspiration from the way this game plays and tells its story.

I think seeing Ninja Theory's Dev Diaries are really interesting and seeing how Juergens landed the roll as Senua. I hope to see her again in possibly a future Hellblade sequel...?

Anyways, I'm back in college now. It's the first week of my second semester and I've just been trying to get back into the groove of things. Now that I'm done with Senua's Sacrifice, I might finally tackle Spider-Man PS4's DLC... We'll see though.