It's surprising to me that this really quite excellent cyberpunk-noir title sold so poorly outside of Japan, but I think there were two factors behind this: its potent cocktail of gore, violence, and mature themes significantly reduced the demographic of gamers who would buy it, and it seemingly is one of the first (if not the first) visual novels to be released outside of Japan, into a playerbase that is more accustomed to point-and-click adventure games.

In a way, my initial experience with this game probably mirrored that of the West in general - this might be my first visual novel, and I was baffled at first by the linearity, the lack of difficulty, and the lack of... gameplay, really. But I warmed up to it quickly enough - the genre's laserlike focus on telling a story made the experience like reading a book but with extra interactivity, and the ability to take things at my own pace. Gillian Seed, who was investigating the menace of the Snatchers (humanoid robots who kill people and take their place), could either be played as a no-nonsense straight-laced agent, or a talented goof-off who flirts with anything that moves and drinks booze on the government's dime, or anything in-between. With each new area and next stage of the investigation, I could either rush through with urgency or spend time interacting with everything and soaking up the impressive tapestry of lore, and I enjoyed the freedom that this genre afforded me. And, of course, Hideo Kojima being Hideo Kojima, the game made very clever use of the medium to pull of some clever tricks that books can't; in a very early example of this, your companion hears a faint noise and rather than outright telling you what it is, prompts you to turn the volume up so you can hear it yourself.

Of course, an interactive book is only any good if the story itself is good, and Snatcher definitely delivers on that! A lot of the plot elements seem derivative, especially today, but that doesn't take away from how well-crafted the world is, how cool some of the plot twists are, and how this story about synthetic life forms replacing people contains a heart and humanity that I associate with Kojima's best works. The pacing and storytelling is generally good too, though it suffers slightly from a need to over-recap key plot points, and several jumpscares or genuinely tense moments lose some of that thrill due to being overly-telegraphed.

This is an easy recommend to anyone - a patchwork of cinematic influences and inspirations that contains the seeds of Kojima's later work, easy enough to play to completion, both streamlined and compelling enough to never wear out its welcome.

i hate this game so much, i have beat it two times and I will beat it again. i hate it.
i hate it
its terrible, its absolutely fucked.
i will continue playing it

I hate shadow tower with every inch of my body.

Worse than TCM, mostly because it's just not fun. TCM at least has a short bit of fun trying to go for a high score and avoid obstacles. Halloween on the other hand, is not a fun experience all around. Avoiding Myers is unbelievably easy to the point that you can just move a pixel up and he won't hit you. Saving the kids is annoying because you have to find your way back through identical rooms to the area that they're in and sometimes they're in a spot that you just can't reach. The game plays and looks terrible. Skip.

I don't fault anyone for coming into Hellblade saying that they found the gameplay lacking. Coming off of Hollow Knight, I was quite bored with the parry-spam inducing combat. However, Hellblade exceeds in other areas so hard that I found it to be a worthwhile experience.

Lets expand on the combat first. It is very one-note for the lack of a better word. Enemy variety is not great and you're mostly mixing in some different attacks for specific enemies and generally not very difficult (I think I died twice the whole game with combat difficulty set to Hard). However, I do find the bosses to be much better! Using a different set of movesets and designed with strong folk horror twinge, I really loved fighting these larger encounters.

The design and atmosphere goes well into the narrative and art/environment design as well. I really appreciated Hellblade as a very personal story about Senua coming to grips with her trauma during the course of this journey. Yes, the non-combat gameplay is largely dependent on puzzles involving finding runes in the environment but I thought it made sense thematically on Senua as a character. On top of the gritty and frankly horrifying environments is a thick coating of psychological horror that really plays into Senua's mental state.

Ultimately, I think the way that Hellblade talks through its narrative about mental health and stigma around it is the strongest part of it. Most of this is really expanded upon using the binaural audio that they captured to simulate auditory hallucination to be almost overwhelming at times (But thats the point right?). Watching the docs on how the game was made really gave me an additional appreciation of the care that Ninja Theory took to tackle this specific subject matter.

As I played through this game, I came to really appreciated folks like Ninja Theory and Remedy that takes video games as a medium to new interesting directions. While some of the gameplay (both combat and non-combat) can be found lacking, I found the story this game told to be worth the time I spent going on this journey. I hope they knock it out of the park again with the sequel.