This is one of those games that I really want to like. I’ve tried nearly a dozen times to get it to “click” and it never does.

I always bounce off of it and I’ve never entirely understand why.

Sure, the platforming is precision machined but maybe the fact that the game is too forgiving with its checkpoints leads to a lack of stakes or tension for someone like me that isn’t going to go for every strawberry.

I also think the levels might be too long and that the game forces you to spend too much time in individual biomes.

The story’s presentation, at least early on, may also be a bit too sappy and not engaging.

Idk. I know people really love this game and what I’ve played of it is fine. But it’s lacking something crucial.

Good OST, though.

"The hardest battles are fought in the mind, not the sword."

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is a uniquely horrifying game in which you play as Senua, a Celtic warrior with Psychosis who goes on a journey to save the soul of her deceased lover Dillion from the Goddess Hela. Throughout this journey Senua must endure death and the challenges her condition places in front of her so she may be reunited with her lover.

Where Hellblade excels most is within its sound design and atmosphere. From the very beginning the game tells you to play with headphones, and for good reason, as throughout the games nearly 8 hour long story you are placed within Senua's head and get to hear the voices in her head as they surround your ears to either act as her guide or tormentor. The atmosphere is brilliantly designed as well, each surface is filled to the brim with detail, and does a phenomenal job at setting the tone, especially in areas like the labyrinths and villages.

While the combat in Hellblade does certainly take a backseat for most of the game, it is by far one of the most fun and satisfying combat systems I've had the pleasure of experiencing. While being very simple and only consisting of light attacks, heavy attacks, and a punch/kick attack used for breaking shields, achieving combos and hitting a perfect parry feels unbelievably good. The combat especially becomes even more fun and rewarding as you develop the "Focus" meter, in which time slows down for your enemies and you get to go nuts and beat the hell out of every enemy in your sight.

Hellblade's narrative is an exceptional one. As stated previously you play as Senua who must face the challenges her Psychosis throws at her as well as challenge the Gods as she aims to save the soul of her lover. From the very beginning you realize that YOU are now one of the voices in Senua's head, as the voice that acts as the narrator begins to speak to you, and even in some cases Senua herself will talk directly to you. The stakes are immediately raised for the player after the combat tutorial ends, in which we are told that if Senua is killed too many times, the curse of darkness she possesses will spread to her head and we will be forced to restart the entire game. This threat however is empty, or at least I believe it is, as in most cases in the game it's harder to die in a battle than it is to win it, which I won't complain about. As the story progresses however, I felt as if it began to lose itself as it tries to confuse the player more than explain itself. I especially began to feel more iffy on the plot as I reached the ending, which felt very anticlimactic and felt to be a huge and sudden 180 from the tone the rest of the story had.

A few other minor gripes I had were with the puzzles and the backtracking. In Hellblade, the puzzles typically consist of finding a locked door with runes on it, and to unlock the doors you must find the listed rune within your environment. I will give credit where credit is due, a good many of these puzzles have very unique solutions in which you have to line up two objects in the horizon perfectly to create the rune, which was very cool to me. However the awe I felt from these unique solutions faded quickly due to the repetitive nature of these puzzles, especially toward the end of the game I found myself asking "Why can't I just keep going through instead of having to solve these puzzles after every little bit of progression?". The backtracking this game throws at you can also at times be completely absurd, especially in the beginning of the game. After defeating bosses like Valravyn and Surtr, you have to then go ALL the way back to the beginning room, which can take several minutes, and when every path looks identical it can be very hard to tell if you are going the right way, ESPECIALLY due to the lack of a map.

Overall, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice provides a unique look at how Psychosis affects the minds of those who have it and the obstacles they face, while also providing fun combat, a banging OST, outstanding sound design and atmosphere, and intriguing characters. However these positives come at the cost of repetitive puzzles, unenjoyable backtracking, and sometimes a less than satisfying narrative, with incredibly high highs, and low lows. I'm eagerly awaiting Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 now, and with better puzzle design, less backtracking, and a more stable narrative, I could easily see the sequel becoming an all time great.

Oh man, where do I even begin with this game? I'll preface by saying that Final Fantasy VII Remake is one of my favorite games in the series. It was a title that understood how to create a humanist experience that genuinely makes you care about its world and inhabitants with excellent narrative, character writing, and world-building through its side quests.

It was also a tight and focused experience that culminated in an ending so staggeringly ambitious that I still think about it often.

So, it's no surprise that I was looking forward to the follow-up, especially since it has most of the same cooks behind the sauce of Remake.

However, after finally finishing Rebirth after what seems like an eternity, I'm left confused and ambivalent.

The big red flag for me was when, during an interview, one of the game's directors highlighted the Horizon as an inspiration for the game's approach to open-world design.

Man, they weren't lying.

Rebirth begins with a linear, story-focused segment that lasts a few hours before thrusting you into one of the most insufferably prescriptive open-worlds I've ever played in a video game.

You spend around 15-20 hours doing the most fucking pea-brained busywork imaginable for Chadley, who has to berate and interrupt your progression at every possible moment. It's built upon the most mind-numbing tasks imaginable such as "activate tower," "kill a group of enemies," and "interact with a McGuffin and play a minigame where you either play Simon Says for morons or time a button press."

The world is absolutely bursting with these menial activities, and they take a fucking Mossberg to the game's narrative pacing. I shit you not: there was a good 15-hour block of this game's early hours where not a single piece of narrative occurred.

Maybe this would have been easier to stomach if the characters had interacted when navigating the open-world, but they aren't even there outside of an occasional comment. This issue is especially true for characters that are outside your active party. I legitimately forgot some of them existed even though they added the "backline" into the game's combat system, where non-active characters still stand at the edge of a combat encounter doing what I assume to be chip damage.

When I finally completed my Chadley Chores, I progressed to one of the game's more linear segments where some goddamn plot finally happened and was reminded of why I was still playing this in the first place. In these segments, characters feel alive with interactions heightened by curated moments, a complete 180 from the dozen or so hours prior.

However, it wasn't too long before I was shoved into another open-world area filled with the most boring fucking slop imaginable. I know the original Final Fantasy VII had a decent chunk of minigames, but Rebirth takes this to an unimaginable extreme.

It feels like there is a new minigame around every corner, and these things range in quality from pretty fun to complete dogshit. And look, I can appreciate a shitty minigame here and there if there is some rhyme or reason to its existence. I liked playing frisbee with the dog in Gravity Rush 2. I may as well be a shitty minigame connoisseur, for fuck's sake.

I think the biggest issue is that there is just too fucking much. Full stop. Too much side content. Too many fucking minigames. This game is just the most padded fucking experience I have ever had, and most of the content fucking sucks ass.

I usually try to keep a flow of thought in my writing, but I don't know where to put this, so it's going here. Let me tell you about this motherfucker Chadley. I've never hated a character in a video game as much as I do Chadley. Not only is he an intolerable, passive-aggressive, and holier-than-thou little Young Sheldon ripoff, but his mere existence is a manifestation of all my problems with the game. He's going to pop up on your stupid ass little cellphone, stop you in your tracks, and mansplain the most basic shit ever to you like you've never played a fucking video game before.

I honestly think I would rather individually pluck each one of my ass hairs out with tweezers than have to listen to Chadley flap his fucking gums at me. Sometimes, I think the developers are aware of how bad he is. For instance, during one of the game's better moments, the Queens Blade tournament, Chadley becomes one of the later opponents. After taking the fattest fucking dump on him—I'm talking like shutting him out and dropping 120+ on him and giving me an overwhelming feeling of catharsis—I spoke to a couple of other people about it. They all managed to crush him similarly, which makes me think the balancing is tilted heavily in your favor for the Chadley battle, which kind of rules.

If you have enough brain rot to still be reading my semi-coherent rambling about this game, you're probably asking yourself, "Man, why the hell is this dipshit still playing a game he clearly hates?"

That's because interspersed throughout all of this dogshit are genuine moments of excellence. Everyone is going to mention how good the Bow Wow sidequest—where you escort a dog accompanied by an insanely catchy song while Barret lets his emotional walls down to vent about how worried he is about Marlene's future and his role as her father—is and they should because it's fantastic.

These are things that Remake had consistently and in spades, and it's a testament to how great this cast of characters is and how great the writing can be when the bloat doesn't get in its way.

By the time I had completed all of the open-world monotony—like 100 hours into the game, lol—I could finally enjoy something close to my experience with Remake. I could approach sidequests that were still good despite rarely reaching the highs of the previous game without worrying about the mundane busy work.

But even then, this game just can't fucking help itself. After hours of Protorelic quests that teased Gilgamesh, ranging in quality from excellent to alright, I thought I was finally about to confront the goofy wandering swordsman. Lol, fat chance; enjoy four boss fights of insane difficulty that require you to grind levels because you are too weak. Get fucked nerd.

I won't say much about the combat because it's as excellent as Remake's. However, this time, there is more focus on encounters as puzzles with specific solutions, which I enjoy but don't necessarily prefer. But it's still an often frantic and satisfying mix of ATB and real-time combat that rewards strategic party composition and setups. I ended up settling on Cloud, Tifa, and Cait Sith as my main party because they could max out the stagger modifier and crit chance, resulting in jolting amounts of damage.

The last two chapters of the game did solidify the reason I persisted through this bipolar experience. Once you reach the game's point of no return, you're treated to about four to five hours of pure joy, and the game ends on an incredibly high note that brings out the best in its cast and writing.

There’s plenty of fantastic stuff in this game, you just have to climb a mountain of shit to get to it.

For the first time in my life, I genuinely don't know how I feel about a game. I beat this last week, and I've been thinking about it with mixed emotions since then. It's one of the most maddeningly polarizing pieces of media I've ever experienced, and I can't tell you if it's bad or good.

I can’t even give this thing a score because I literally do not know how to quantify my opinion of this game.

I usually do some pretty heavy editing to my in-depth assessments of games that I've played, cutting out plenty of sections that don't fit, but I'm just going to say fuck it and post this just like Square Enix did when they released this shit.

Have some fucking self-control for the next game. Either way, I’m only playing that shit if you let me crucify Chadley.

Also, if you made it this far, check yourself into a psyche ward because you're just as insane as I am for finishing this game.

Alas, people won't make all the right choices in their lifetime... Though luck always seems like it's on your side.

You will keep winning, having never lost before. But why you? Why... must it be you?

If all your luck is built on the pain of someone you love, on the loss of dozens more - if these windfalls, these jackpots aren't a gift from Gaiathra- if all they are is a long string of meaningless deaths...