During it’s inception, Ninja Theory thought of this game as an experiment - to see if it was possible to develop a “AAA-game” with a small headcount while also tackling a topic hardly discussed in games. What came out is a dogshit imitation and implementation of both.

There is a funny interpretation to be found in Ninja Theory’s understanding of a AAA-game, as Hellblade is just a collage of high-fidelity rocks and motion capture performances funneled into a repeating on-rails flowchart of walking/dialogue/looking-at-rocks → Obligatory Puzzle → Obligatory Combat (because its a “AAA-game” of course it has to have Combat!), repeating and recycling in on itself til the credits roll. Nothing like doing Combat-Encounter #8 and you have to fight Enemy Variation 1 AND 2 in three waves after the puzzle mechanics haunt the game’s narrative: FIND THE RUNES, ENTER THE PORTALS, all padded somehow into 7 hours of playtime!? Give me a break. The Binaural audio sure is swag and all and the very tiny few moments Hellblade's Budget gets used to create harrowing and captivating imagery show glimpses of a reality where Hellblade was a 3 hour epic of just fugged up & cool shit and that would have probably been a lot better with what we got it here. It’s in its pacing and structure that Hellblade frustrate me the most: The gaming equivalent of reading a Game Design Document: it’s too rigid, too constrained by it’s listing off of 3 puzzle designs and 5 enemy types while padding you out for another 3-4 hours more than necessary. For such a nuanced topic and possibility to experience it, why did they choose to create go about it in the safest and conventional way possible rather than try SOMETHING eccentric in anything?

You can have all the professional-consultation and interviews of anecdotal retelling you want if you don’t follow up and do much with it! It really feels like they interviewed a person who said "I felt like I started seeing pattern and connections to things that weren't" and them immediately following and implementing the first thing that popped up in their heads ("RUNES BAYBEE")

It just irks me even more that it was exactly this angle they focused on entirely in their marketing and subsequent postmortem appearances - of how they depicted the most accurate example of mental-illness in vibeo jams. Fuck off.

I hope Hellblade 2 is better, hopefully with Tameem Antoniades apparently leaving the company last year.