I'm not giving this a low rating to be contrarian or whatever. Genuinely think this is a bad video game.

It starts out really strong then immediately nosedives into a corridor shooter, and soon nosedives once again as the narrative pivots to just terrible territory.

Absolutely dreadful by the end.

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.

“An American tragedy. An odyssey of debt, of grief, of broken promises, of hope. A painful, melancholic fable composed of fables and more fables, spreading out and weaving in and out of itself. A dream ebbing back and forth between memory and fantasy. A plea for you to care about something.”

...This was my original review for Kentucky Route Zero. I still think it’s a good description. But on consideration, I feel as though I need to be bold and say it: Kentucky Route Zero is not only one of my favorite games, but one of my favorite things ever made.

This is not an assessment of quality. I am not telling you what to feel. I am telling you how I feel. And Kentucky Route Zero makes me feel a way.

I specifically say “Favorite Thing”, because Kentucky Route Zero doesn’t affect me like a game. When I think about many of my favorite games, I often think of them as games. They are full of mechanics, of challenges, of systems. That’s certainly not all games are, and games can be many things, but in the capacity that they affect me, enchant me, or fascinate me, it is often within this vague category of “game”. But Kentucky Route Zero is different. To call it “my favorite game” and leave it at that misses something. It’s certainly a game, but it doesn’t make me feel the way games usually make me feel. First and foremost, Kentucky Route Zero is a story. It’s unlike most. The main body of this story is a game, but it’s also a multimedia saga. There’s something quintessential permeating my experience of Kentucky Route Zero that transcends that category.

It is a hauntological melancholy. It conjures a world more like a memory than a reality. Kentucky Route Zero tells the story of people who seem familiar but you’ve never met, with jobs that were never really secure, in situations that could never happen, in a version of Kentucky that has never existed. Magical realism constructs a vision not of reality, but of memory, of a sensate fabric that you swear could have been but never was. Americana is a mythic entity made visible, standing in front of me within Kentucky Route Zero, and it’s on its last breaths.

It’s a hopeful story. That doesn’t mean it’s happy. The world around you is a wasteland. Everyone is dying. Everyone is suffering. Everything is weighed down by debt, pulled deep down into pools of darkness. To live is to work, work, and die. But there are other ways to live. There always have been. Should we move on? I think the answer is clear. But that doesn’t make the pain go away. We have to be willing to feel both grief and hope in the same breath.

All of its blemishes are dismissable. Fleeting problems with UI, incidentally clunky writing, weird mechanical tangents, overwhelming scope, these melt away when I take a moment to remember what Kentucky Route Zero is and feel the frisson travel up and down my skin. I'm trying to not be too longwinded here, but it's hard. I can't get into specifics. So I wax poetic instead. I could write thousands of words on every minute I spent with Kentucky Route Zero and still feel like I was forgetting to say something. It is a multitudinous masterpiece, refracting and reflecting endlessly, timelessly, quietly.

Kentucky Route Zero is one of my favorite things.