Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice (PS4) - A Dark Road

When I first got my Playstation 3, one of the games I was very much excited for was Ninja Theory's action epic Heavenly Sword. The game was pretty short for the most part and drew many well deserved comparisons to God of War but all in all it was a pretty enjoyable experience. Sadly, there was no option to pick up a sequel.

But Ninja Theory did keep working on games like Enslaved and DmC, and a few years ago came a rumbling a new title they were working on. A shorter game trying to get AAA class production with a much smaller team and budget. The trailer originally had me think it was a Heavenly Sword sequel, but they denied that saying this was its own property. The trailers had me curious so for 30 bucks I took a swing at...

HELLBLADE: SENUA'S SACRIFICE(PS4)

The beginning of Hellblade, we follow Senua as she paddles through a darkened river on a hollowed out log. A quiet narration tells us this is her tale, and if we follow along perhaps we can have a part to play in it. Senua appears aware of this conversation, as she looks back directly at the camera. The narrator hushes us and quietly lets us know that she heard us.

Senua is a deeply troubled girl with a very tortured upbringing. As we play through the game we learn about her relationship with her father, mother, the people of her village, and one beacon of strength that shined through to her, a boy named Dillion. Her beloved Dillion has been taken from her, and she is off to try to bring him back.

It is a treacherous journey though as she is plagued by a "darkness" that follows her. She is cursed with a rot that continues to rise up her arm, and is constantly haunted, encouraged, berated by voices that antagonize her with every step, as well as visions that hound her and constantly distort her reality. Her only option is to confront the goddess Hela and plead her case, so she stomachs her resolve and presses forward.

So I'm not going to lie to you, Hellblade is a pretty fucking intense experience. If I had to describe it for a genre classification, I would say that it is very much a walking simulator first, with puzzles intermixed for most of the major set pieces, and occasionally intermixed with tightly focused combat as you play through. It would hesitate to call it an action game even though you can probably see it that way. Although the game is called Hellblade, combat is not the game's primary focus.

I lean to walking simulator because as you travel from set piece to set piece, you get more and more of the narrative from these surreal fade sequences Senua experiences. Constantly shifting from visions of her past and visions of a twisted surreal reality. With each step the voices that follow you are constantly chattering and heckling, whispering that she is going to die, she cant do it, yes she can, who does she think she is, etc, etc, etc. It goes on and on. The nature of how the sound projects, this feels like a game that should be played with a good surround system or a quality set of headphones.

Generally the flow of Hellblade follows a pretty simple path: Walk to your destination while experiencing the near psychotic break that Senua is having, reaching your objective, solving a puzzle or finding the necessary runes to open a door, and fight a wave of baddies. It's generally always these 3 things, although not always in that order.

Typically you will approach a locked door covered in the runes, and you need to wander around your environment while looking for the necessary symbols within the environment. Sometimes these can just be found painted on walls, but sometimes you might see is as shadows or light projected somewhere. Or in the latter stages, you need to stand somewhere else in the location so your surrounding environment actually forms the said shape. Think how you might rotate the map in Echochrome, for example.

The puzzles aren't exactly mind bending. Most of them present the solution right out the gate, you just need the right combo to make it all fit. Again, many of these are visual in nature so they aren't exceptionally difficult. Some just require some fast movement, but since the maps aren't overly complex I would say that overall the puzzles in this game were not very difficult. I think there was only one puzzle I got really hung up on and it's because I wasn't paying close enough attention to the cutscene prior.

And I suppose you couldn't really justify calling your game Hellblade if you didn't have some kind of sword combat in it. This was the aspect of the game that I was most worried about because when I saw the combat in action, it looked very fast paced and arcadey, weightless, as if there was no response to my swings. Happily, this was a grossly incorrect assumption on my part and combat actually ended up being way better than I expected.

It follows a pretty standard system: Light, Heavy, and Melee attacks with a dodge and block. It's pretty basic at its core but they add a bunch of little tricks to change up the combos to make them feel more skillful. For example, if you use your light attacks Senua just swings quickly with slashes. But if you use a light attack after say using a parry she has this jumping twist move to start the combo, I'm not sure if it's a stronger move but it looks cool as hell. In addition, if you dash towards a foe and use the same light attack, Senua does that jumping high stab I can only compare to Brad Pitt's Achilles' in the movie Troy. (A couple of games used this move).

The camera in battle stays high and tight in the 3rd person perspective but somehow doesn't feel disorienting. When enemies swing you can dodge away and dive back in for quick combos, or if you time your block correctly you can parry the strike for a unguarded retort. Sometimes there are multiple enemies, so while there is no lock on reticle, the camera will stay focused on the target you are fighting. but since the camera is so tight, you constantly need to continue to back up to make sure can see all the danger.

Generally the enemies are all variants of marauding northmen, but they evolve to have different weapons and moves. Some might have shields that force you to melee to break the guard before you can attack, some have heavy weapons that your guard will not hold up against. Some enemies fade to ethereal form and makes them invulnerable to attack. When this happens Senua can use her focus to bring them back to reality and slow time briefly to deal a lot of damage in a short time. But you have a limited number of uses so it's wise to save them for panic moments.

The combat excels when it uses the auditory clues from her psychosis to actually give you hints during the fight. Like while I was engaged in a fight with some hammer lugging troglodyte, the whispers started saying "Watch out! Look out! Behind you!" and I panicked and hit my dodge to the side. Sure enough just as Senua made her dashing sidestep, the sword of an enemy I didn't see came swinging down right where I was standing.

In one of the early boss fights, an enemy shifted into shadow and no matter what I did I couldn't seem to deal damage. I was blocking but it wasn't helping. But as he would ready his attack, the voices would start yelling at me to focus, or focus now. I originally thought it was because I was taking damage and were scared, but what it was actually doing was letting me know to use my focus to bring him back to a physical form. It was a very cool eureka moment and made me realize perhaps I can't just ignore the voices.

The visuals in this game are fucking stunning. I almost can't believe that it was done with just 20 people. The environments are all picturesque and gorgeous, with weather actually changing within the environment as you spend time there. The shifts to surreal hallucination are magical yet harrowing. There is a long segment in the late game that very much reminded me of the early stages of Dante's Inferno but with way more movie-like production value. Some of the voices in her head get visualizations done with live action, but they are filtered and blurred to the point where I can't confirm if they were digitally done or not.

But Senua herself? Holy shit.  I have been a big proponent of the use of motion capture in video games, because they give us stellar examples like Grand Theft Auto 5, Infamous: Second Son, and The Last of Us. But Ninja Theory might have set the new standard for how it's done. Using a single lighted head harness and some effects makeup they developed a system that basically captures a 1 to 1 recording of facial reactions that are animated in the game real time. It's fucking impressive.

And it's this that really makes Melina Juergens performance as Senua come to life. Senua's story is gutwrenching, and the ever present hysteria and agony in her voice, the constant fighting she is doing with the voices that berate her for the whole journey, being forced to constantly relive the tragedies of her life. It's fucking brutal, and Juergens' performance was crucial to really setting the tone. I had never heard of this actress before, so I did a little digging to find out she's actually the video editor for Ninja Theory, and this is one of her first actual acting roles. Holy shit, Melina. Bravo.

There is also and option to turn on a photo mod which I dabbled with a bit. It's pretty simple and intuitive to use, although admittedly it's a little tricky to time when you are trying to get it to freeze in an action shot. It let me know that the camera is set a certain way in combat because that's the way it looks best. When I'd try to spin the camera for a cool action shot it would never look as good as the behind the back look. Still, you can pull together some very gorgeous screens with this. All of the screenshots in this review are ones I did myself. This game is just fucking beautiful.

A lot of facial acting went into this game, and it really sells Senua as a character.

An absolutely stellar performance by Juergens.

Hellblade features a score you would expect for a story in this setting. Classic instruments performing that epic fantasy score. I can't say any one song jumped out to me but everything had a place. Much of the game didn't have music as I traveled from place to place, low melodies as Senua experienced some flashback or remembrance of conversation from her past. The other voices are well acted, and the narrator really deserves credit for framing the whole story. Like a grandmother whispering a sad story, she has a haunting presence that is felt from the very first lines of the game.

It's not a terribly long game to play. I think by the time I finished it I it had taken me maybe close to 7 or 8 hours. While that is short, the game is only 30 dollars and I have payed 60 for games that don't last that long. Ninja Theory's Heavenly Sword only ran about that long and that was a full priced game, so this didn't bother me terribly.

A lot of people are complaining that the combat in this game wasn't necessary. I understand that the walking simulator is becoming more and more prevalent and accepted as a genre these days, but I do feel that if you took out the combat, there will be very little left to hold the rest of Hellblade up. At that point it would just make more sense to cut things down and make it a movie. But if you did that I don't know if I would have felt as invested as I was. There are also story mechanics interwoven in the combat that wouldn't work otherwise if it wasn't there.

But with that in mind, I will say that for as good as the combat felt, it does get a little bit samey feeling after a while. Yes the enemies evolve a little bit to require more tricks to actually put them down, but after a while they just start sending more and more waves of them at you. Some of these are for story effect but if this was say a 60 hour epic, it would probably grow tiresome to continue to do.

There were a handful of glitches that are probably already being patched out. Mainly with the subtitles. There are a number of grammatical inconsistency (something I would know nothing about because I am a flawless writer) and timing issues on the subtitles.  There was one glitch where I tried to climb up a ledge, and instead climbed down through the floor that left me falling in limbo forever till I restarted the game. There is also the "head turn" thing that happens when you spin the camera around Senua where she whips her head from side to side to look at what the camera is on instead of posing like I'm trying to get her to do. She always has this kind of open mouth gape of an expression too in resting moments that is not very photogenic either.

And while I praise the absolutely exceptional acting done in this game, a little more volume on the narration would have been appreciated. I know it's going for a specific tone and effect with the soft spoken whisper, but I had that sound effects and music dropped well under 70% and maxed out vocals, and there are still lines of dialogue I can't hear. This is even worse when compounded with the off timed subtitles.

This game could be an easy platinum trophy for you collectors out there. I got all of them but one in a single play through because apparently I missed one of the way-stones that explain the Norse lore throughout the game. It was the only achievement I missed and if I got it, it would have been platinum'd so it's certainly possible to do in one go. (I am pissed I missed it, honestly)

I certainly had more reservations and expectations when I first started seeing live gameplay footage of Hellblade but I was very happy to see that not only did it exceed my expectations, but I was left thoroughly impressed. It's certainly not a perfect video game experience, but Ninja Theory proved that they could can produce a high quality title for a lower price and smaller budget. I find myself wondering how fast they could have pumped this out if they had a slightly larger team to work on it.

I very much enjoyed my time with Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Everything was done to properly fit its length. Any little annoyance I could really come up is effected rounded out by the fact the game isn't long enough for them to become a persistent problem. If they can reduce the development time, I would be ok with more of these shorter games at half cost. Hellblade isn't a game you will probably play over and over and over again, but it's certainly a game that's worth getting through once for the experience.

Problem is, thanks to this game now I question if I'm actually schizophrenic.
Shut up, No we're not.
You shut up.
Tsch, asshole.