I do recommend Hellblade, but with quite a few caveats. I myself was not even sure that I was going to recommend it as I was playing through it. The story and character are quite engaging, but My main issues with the game are the pacing and repetitiveness - both in combat and puzzles.

Every fight is generally the same, and with that comes monotony. It just feels cheap. You enter an arena, and random dudes poof into existence. Though I will add the combat itself feels pretty good.

Otherwise, The puzzles fair a bit better. They generally have some unique elements, but they generally just boil down to walk to a fairly obvious spot and look around. The main issue with that is the really slow walking speed makes it sometimes feel frustrating.

What makes Hellblade standout though is the atmosphere and characters. I found myself getting engrossed in the environment, and the great acting of the main character. I also appreciate what it is trying to do in terms of representing mental illness truthfully. So, feel free to check it out if it still interests you with those caveats.

Normalmente defiendo que las obras se comprometan con sus ideas, pero en el caso de Hellblade, hacer que todo orbite alrededor de la enfermedad mental de Senua juega en su contra.

Cada partícula que conforma el juego está estrechamente relacionada a la condición psicótica de la protagonista. Las condiciones físicas del escenario cambian según su estado de crisis. Luchamos contra enemigos que encarnan sus miedos. Vemos formas dibujadas en el escenario como una persona que padece psicosis ve rostros en las paredes.

Esto, que no es negativo per sé, está apuntalado por un despliegue técnico abrumador. Uno utilizado completamente para comunicar y no para adornar.

Por momentos Senua's Sacriface consigue transmitir toda su documentación y trabajo previos a través de su apartado gráfico y su sonido 3D, dejando secuencias de angustia sobrecogedora. Tanto, que me han hecho dudar a lo largo de toda la aventura si terminaría perdonando que durante la mayoría del tiempo se dedique a traducir la psicosis en ejercicios ramplones para continuar avanzando.

Idea que se cae cuando se es consciente de que por mucha tensión y angustia que experimente el jugador, jamás se acercará a las sensaciones de un paciente real. Ni siquiera la polémica decisión de resetear la partida si se muere demasiado, que valoro como uno de los puntos más acertados de la obra, consigue llegar a comunicar miedo a la pérdida real. Haciendo que en la balanza pese más el hecho de haber utilizado una enfermedad mental como herramienta y no el intento de dar a conocer y sensibilizar.

El horrendo final del juego acaba dejando claro que esto es simple mal gusto. Ni desconocimiento ni banalización, simplemente incompetencia a la hora de traducir el delicado tema de la psicosis (enfermedad mental) a un videojuego por falta de sensibilidad artística. Si Hellblade no tratase abiertamente sobre esta enfermedad, sería un juego de terror psicológico más o menos decente. Pero acaba siendo exposición de un tema delicado envuelto en un videojuego (y su connotación lúdica) por conveniencia.

I have issues with this game taking what would just be a mythology based dark fantasy story, and deciding to say it was actually about psychosis and presenting that as good representation. It seems exploitative to me. With the trailer for Project MARA out now, and this game becoming a franchise, it seems like this is just going to be Ninja Theory's thing now. I made a post a while back that basically sums up my thoughts:

Developer: We're gonna set our game in mythology and have our protagonist traverse hell and solve puzzles and do sword fights.

Audience: Alright, cool.

Developer: But is that all!? Or was it psychosis!?

Audience: Oooooooh we're all woke now!!! Games for IMPACT!!! Take the awards!!!

I'm conflicted. I think this game is a technical marvel in every department, and the subject matter it's dealing with is valiant, and done very well. I like the combat (most of the time) but controlling senua outside of combat feels like going through mud, and the story pacing leaves a lot to be desired.

For my own personal enjoyment, I couldn't find any in senua because it made me anxious to the point of nasua. It's depiction of senua's mental illness is incredibly powerful and accurate.

I admire this game enough to give it an overall positive score, but I can't finish this, and it's noticably flawed

So what do you get when you mix barebones allegory for Mental Illness, a bland as fuck protag, obnoxious enemy design, near zero enemy variety, with serviceable combat and repetitive puzzles?

You get Ninja Theory's good honest try at being mature.

Anything to make people not hate them after DmC I guess.

Mechanically dull, visually pretty but filled with generic locations and interpretations of areas of Norse mythology and, by extension, with generic stories of legends to find. Senua's depicted life revolves around her mental illness and pain, offers no room for nuance in its depiction only the light of perfect seeming dead boyfriend and contrasted by a traumatized, confused, and tortured Senua in past and present that give you no reason to care about any aspect of the world and little reason to care about her. A poor finale with an ending and certain lines of dialogue falling more into ableism in its depiction of mental illness or utter stupidity. And for a game focused on mental illness or disability it offers extremely poor options to cater to players that would have difficulty with its focus on poorly subtitled near constant voices that are difficult to hear without wearing a headset that act as a major part of the game. A slog to get through even with its short length, likely not helped with its odd voice-over design that usually requires you to stand around to hear the story from a rune as continuing on will cause voices to play over each other, cut lines out, or drop to such a low volume that you will be unable to hear at all.

Alla fine nonostante i difetti posso dire che mi è piaciuto, è un gioco coraggioso perchè spesso mette il gameplay al servizio della narrazione sacrificandone in parte la godibilità, il tutto credo allo scopo di calarti nella dimensione allucinata della protagonista.
Ad un gameplay in fondo poco piacevole però fa da contraltare un comparto artistico veramente originale, che riesce a creare un'esperienza più unica che rara nel panorama videoludico attuale, da questo punto di vista il gioco è assolutamente riuscito e gli si possono fare veramente poche critiche, la recitazione di Senua poi è senza dubbio tra le più impressionanti viste in un videogioco.
Quindi alla fine il bilancio è positivo per quanto mi riguarda, al di la di tutto poi non si può non apprezzare il coraggio di portare un soggetto così difficile e insolito.
Va detto però che mantenere la stessa formula anche nel sequel credo che stancherebbe e non so quanti la vorrebbero, secondo me sarebbe meglio rendere il tutto più convenzionale a favore di un gameplay un po' più strutturato e vario.

Beautiful and unique but boring and uninspiring to play.

Hellblade is an interesting game and one i'm struggling to actually review. The idea is pretty fascinating and I tilt my hat to the developer Ninja Theory for the attempt. It focuses on a young pict warrior called Senua on a journey to take her husbands head to Helheim to save his soul. Senua however is suffering from psychosis both hearing voices as well as hallucinating which obviously makes her journey a lot more....complicated.

The voices Senua hears are excellent and disconcerting. They come from different directions (I, and the game, recommend earphones for best effect) with completely different tones, some shout warnings while other laugh when Senua gets hurt. I rather liked it and they are really unsettling and really help you get into Senua's head. Unfortunately the way her psychosis is used for the game part of video game doesn't quite work as well as the cinematic part.

The game plays as a fairly linear adventure mixed with puzzles and combat, both of which have fairly big issues. The puzzles are...mostly exactly the same, having a locked door that Senua needs to find a matching shaped rune out of objects in the nearby environment to unlock it by visualizing it. This has you wandering around trying to find the right spot and then angle for items to line up. It's not particularly interesting as puzzles go and there are loads of them with some doors requiring two or three runes to pass. It feels like they thought they needed something to have the player do and tried to tie it in to the mythology of the world but it's not actually fun and would be better off without.

On the combat side things are better but still have big issues, they mostly seem to be foes Senua is hallucinating but are no less dangerous to her because of it as she believes them to be real. There are several enemy types from sword wielding barbarians to axe wielding ones and erm...shield wielding ones. Ok so there aren't that many and you will see them a reasonable amount in the 7-8 hour adventure. During combat Senua can light attack, heavy attack, block, dodge and parry. The camera is honestly...terrible, one on one fights it is fine but once there are multiple enemies in becomes unwieldly to fight and you will get hit in the back. The voices sometimes shout out "behind you" giving warning to block (really neat idea) but they don't always and the enemies often come in waves sometimes spawning behind you for cheap hits. The combat is functional but it's just not really all that great. I feel one on one battles against more unique foes would have been a lot more satisfying. Lastly, Hellblade has a move called focus that allows Senua to slow down time. I found out by accident hitting the wrong button as the game never actually explains this. I had the voices shouting at me during a boss fight to "focus" which came across as insulting, not a tutorial for a newly unlocked ability.

So although the gameplay lacks polish the presentation is polished to high heaven. The graphics are amazing, especially for a small published title. Easily rivaling games like Horizon Zero Dawn or God of War in places. Senua looks especially impressive, her face and clothes are so detailed and the environments are gorgeous with stunning skyboxes and environment design, it really is a looker. The audio design as mentioned earlier is also top notch. The voice acting is perfect to immerse you inside Senua's head with several characters on top of the normal voices Senua hears like flashbacks. The music is also excellent and often melancholy setting the atmosphere.

As mentioned previously, the game is around 7 hours long. It doesn't have much replay value outside of some audio logs found through examining runestones hidden around the environments. but at it's smaller price it's still fairly good value for money considering it's production values I feel.

So to sum up, it's an interesting experiment trying to put the player in the shoes of someone suffering from a mental illness and in that aspect I feel the game really succeeds. It's also an absolute gorgeous looker and sounds superb but it doesn't nail the gameplay aspect of the game. I feel like it doesn't hit it's full potential in some important areas which is a real pity.

+ The voices and attempt to put the player in Senua's shoes are excellent.
+ The presentation is amazing, the game is beautiful.

- The puzzles are a incredibly tedious and repetitive.
- The combat is clunky, boring and repetitive, especially when fighting groups.

If you turn your back on death you will only see the shadow it casts. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice takes you onto the true and pure madness, if you believe Senua's reality is twisted, you must also accept yours might be too.

Hellblade will not have mercy and its crushing atmosphere will haunt you in a never-ending chain of despair, suffering and torment. Those nameless warriors who are keen to dwell into Senua's mind, can only hope to not lose theirselves.

No gods. No kings. Only darkness.

This game was absolutely beautiful in every way. I can't say I've ever played another game that truly gives this comprehensive look into a mental illness as deep and complex like psychosis. It took me two playthroughs to fully understand it, honestly.

The little feature documentary that came with the game was a very interesting watch too. Ninja Theory really dug deep and took their time crafting this experience. The fact they actually went the extra mile and worked alongside patients who suffer from the illness and doctors who specialize in that field just proved how much this project meant to them.

From a purely narrative perspective this game is a masterpiece. From a gameplay and replay value perspective it's just ok because once you've experienced the story and know everything that's going to happen you really don't need to play again (Unless you want to get all the lorestones for the platinum, like I did) and while I liked how the combat fit the narrative and Senua's character because how frantic it was, it was still a very basic combat system and got stale pretty quick. That being said, just for the story narrative and how deep the game gets into the depiction of mental illness and makes it so realistic and human I would highly recommend almost everyone to playthrough this game at least once in their life. It's truly an artistic, one of a kind experience, that's for sure.

I'm not really a fantasy guy but this was a game that peaked my interest for it's depiction of mental health. Since the sequel was coming I figured why not give it a look? I grabbed a pair of headphones and from there, I was hooked into this.

The sound design in this is incredible and regardless of whether or not it's a game you'd be into, it's something that has to be commended. The voices that travel across your ears does a fantastic job of making you feel uneasy in yourself. The game's difficulty is actually quite difficult yet it feels like it's part of the story. It's immensely satisfying to beat a boss and move on to the next area but it also feels surprisingly emotional? Senua doesn't talk that much yet you feel her every emotion. The pain, the fear, the anguish and the loss is all brilliantly demonstrated by Melina Juergens. The game runs about 6 or 7 hours so it's a pretty nice short investment as well. The game is quick to tell it's story and get you immersed in this universe without going overboard with side objectives. There's collectables to find that offer more insight but they're not needed to still get something out of this story.

I was blown away by Hellblade. It's an utter masterpiece of a game and it's depiction of mental health in this timeframe is especially impressive. It feels like it was heavily researched and treated with a massive amount of respect that helps really drive the emotion of this game. If you have game pass, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

Hellblade é uma experiência bem diferente de qualquer outro tipo de jogo. Seu objetivo é fazer você sentir a angustia e as alucinações que a personagem principal vê e sente, e faz isso com maestria. Apesar de ter um baixo orçamento o jogo é muito bonito e polido, e não possui quase nenhum bug ou crash. Porém possui um combate bem simplório e longas cutscenes que talvez não possa agradar a todos. E a câmera do combate também me incomodou um pouco, além dos puzzles repetitivos. Mas na sua grande maioria é uma experiência incrível e diferenciada. Vale muito a pena.👍

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.

It has a cool concept, the presentation is super impressive and it has some amazing environments.
But the gameplay has only a few interesting ideas and it repeats itself a lot. Feels like the game could be half as long, given the lack of ideas.
The "puzzles" aren't really puzzles as they require no brain power but usually just eyeing around for shapes and things.
The fight "scenes" carry that cinematic effect that the game pulls off but quickly get pretty repetitive.
The story tries hard to sound epic and deep but I often didn't feel immersed, and you get fed a bunch of norse mythology which isn't really relevant.
Oh, and the end credits song is an absolute cringe.

All in all, I still would recommend "experiencing" it to appreciate some of the scenarios, but it's not a great game. Maybe the sequel can be better if they have more interesting ideas on what to do while also going through a better story.