If authors want to use video games to tell a story that lives from its orhestration and intensity, they often have to critically examine the limits or requirements of the medium: David Cage and his 'film games', in which there is little more to do than making decisions, have been accused of not being real games since Heavy Rain. With Telltale's Walking Dead, that was an even more present accusation, and in this case not entirely unjustified. In other cases, an intense storytelling experience is only topped off by subtle gameplay, just look at examples like Journey, To the Moon or Yume Nikki. Then there are other story-top tiers which dare to be a full-blown hybrid of gameplay and sequences, and lose quality through the former. Last of Us should be mentioned here. Still, Last of Us puts itself in the spotlight as the best game of the PS3 generation, and while the gameplay wasn't ideal, it was enough for a good standard. Hellblade is also one of those games that maybe should have done it as consistently as David Cage and simply delete almost every trace of gameplay from the experience. Unlike The Last of Us, the acclaimed and award-winning game destroys itself completely with its gameplay-aspects and leaves a sad sigh at the failed task of embedding the fantastic story in an appealing way.
Hellblade was published in 2017 and soon after its release, both the critics and the players raised it to Valhalla as the 'big, new insider tip'. Scale-setting graphics, an eye-opening dramaturgy, the rare subject of depression and a powerful fighting system became the blockbuster-indie -Hybrids common strengths. Hellblade is said to be a must play and is declared a masterpiece by not merely a few. There’s already a successor in development.
A friend gave me the game as a gift a few months ago, so I was finally able to get started with a lot of anticipation. After only one or two game sessions of a few hours this was gone. The game didn't appeal to me, I really had to force myself to pick up the controller again. After more than a month of half-hearted tormenting, I threw in the towel and went on to watch the rest of the game as a walkthrough on Youtube - only to find that I had only made it through 1/3 of the story.
Hellblade is a truly exemplary staged film game, which with its cutscenes, its lifelike facial expressions, the excellent voice actors and the all in all so amazingly authentically successful depiction of depression, mental illness in general and abuse, is a breaker in terms of audio-visual video game experience.
Unfortunately, this Valkyrie of success is brought down from the sky by the mountain troll of gameplay. The gameplay-aspects of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice invite you to all sorts of puns:
Pure hell. The gameplay makes me depressed. Yoraiko's Sacrifice.
To call the experience mixed wouldn’t do justice to the problem. Perhaps apart from the battles, all gameplay in Hellblade is a strenuous and not very entertaining affair, which becomes very repetitive very quickly due to overambitious puzzles and ill-considered repetition and destroys the flow of the actually so captivating and immersive narrative over and over again in the most sensitive way.
This concludes my preliminary conclusion.
Recommendation: Do not play it yourself. Watch a walkthrough. You really don't miss a lot. And now let's go a little deeper.
Rightly praised:
graphics, presentation, subject
Hellblade has gotten a lot of exuberant praise and a lot of it rightly. The most obvious pro is the graphic design, which was implemented with the Unreal Engine 4 and which sometimes strikes you speechless with its incredibly impressive level of detail and reality. Whenever you think that outstanding graphic-standards can no longer be topped, there is a new top dog again. At least that's what Hellblade was until Last of Us 2 was released these days. Oh well.
How Senua's inner struggle, her insecurity, her illness and her fears, how all her inner life is reflected on her face down to the last wrinkle during her delusions, is simply sensational. Everyone understands, everyone can see what is going on in Senua. You really have to gradually ask yourself how long we can still distinguish polygon figures from humans. Video game inexperienced people like my own mother lost that ability with titles like Detroit: Become Human.
The surroundings in Hellblade are designed to match the depressing journey, empty, dead and desolate, but imaginative and often pleasantly extraordinary. The Nordic setting is quite accessible by the player, which is also thanks to the many stories about Ragnarök and other Nordic myths.
If you talk about the production, you can't avoid a special gimmick: The voices in Senua's head. Five or six different Senua's, all with different personalities, who talk to her almost without a break the entire game, either support or mock her in fights and puzzles, express their feelings and thoughts or talk to us as players to a certain extent. The game doesn't advise playing Hellblade with headphones for nothing: I have BAD headphones and even I realized how incredibly immersive it is to hear these voices around your own head. This is a fantastically successful, dramaturgical element that is particularly effective when the voices overlap with the thoughts of the player:
A fight is apparently unfair, difficult and frustrating, you are just getting knocked down. Senua's voices comment 'He's too strong!', 'She CAN'T do it!', 'Don't give up!', 'It's so frustrating ...'
You feel understood by the game. It's similar with puzzles: If you walk around aimlessly for a while, the voices, just like your own thoughts, start to doubt whether you really know what you are doing and whether this makes any sense at all. In addition, the voices support you directly, be it through small clues or warnings in combat when a fatal blow is imminent. I've never seen an element like this in video games, and it enhances the experience immensely.
Senua is depressed. Since such a condition was not very welcome at the time and culture of the Vikings, we experience this disease in Hellblade as 'The Darkness', which is obvious and also perfectly implemented.
I come from a phase of my life in which severe depression was my companion for months and years, as well as isolation and rampant insecurity. I certainly do not want to claim that I am the height of wisdom when it comes to these topics, but at least I can identify with many aspects of Senua's inner strife and the sensitively written dialogues. I consider the symptoms in Hellblade as impressive and painfully aptly implemented, and supplemented profitably by Senua's delusional, monstrous visions.
Few video games even dare to venture into the risky minefield of gloomy depression processing, and as probably the best-known title with this orientation to date, Hellblade is convincing in terms of authenticity across the board. You suffer with Senua and recognize your own worries in her. For this reason alone, Hellblade can be clearly distinguished from conventional games.
The fights are basically decent too. The combat system with sword and physical use, reminiscent of Dark Souls, is powerful, violent and, depending on the context, often dramatic. In a direct comparison, Hellblade is more stiff and less flexible, so that the fights, especially against overwhelming opponents, can often appear slow and latent. The focus option, which is relevant for puzzles in the rest of the game, can be used to break the defenses of enemies and immobilize them while they are being beaten. I didn't really understand this function, because at least for me it didn't seem to have any limitation and thus amounted to an invincibility cheat. But maybe I wasn't paying attention and the focus had to recharge. The combat system can stand for itself, even if there are some balancing problems in the last third, which I will discuss in a moment. It's a shame that there are rarely fights in the first 2/3 of the game.
Too little criticism:
Gameplay, Puzzles, Dead Ends
These were all more or less positive aspects that make Hellblade a fantastic game. Could. If it weren't for the fact that it's not a TV-Show but a video game that has to do with more (?) than decent battles. And which gameplay do you choose for your mental illness-based Viking game with a dead world and a dense atmosphere? Of course - puzzles.
I have to admit, of course, that I'm a special case - I fervently hate puzzles and riddles of any kind in video games that don't have them as an explicit genre, and could shit out half my kidneys every time I'm forced to complete them. Because they show me how stupid I am. Nevertheless, I think the puzzles in Hellblade are generally disgusting and completely out of place.
80% of the gameplay in this game consists of the following bucket list:
- Arrive in an area
- Find a locked gate with runes on it, or a path where you cannot go any further
- Find these rune shapes in the area to open the gate, or put together a path from a certain perspective.
Sounds easy? Then go look for two hours in a burned down village for a rune shape that only works from a certain position and with exactly the right camera perspective and HOPE that the focus will recognize it as correct. And that exact procedure every ten minutes for the entire game. Often the problem arises that you as a player don't know what to do right now. Runes or broken bridges don't always block the way, but you still get stuck. Then the voices, just like with previous problems, give comments and little hints, but of course that’s about it because they are Senua's thoughts.
Here, a wonderful example. Especially the R at 5:30.
In other words: You are FORCED to solve these terrible rune puzzles, otherwise you will not get any further in the game. The dramaturgy and the story depend on the fact that you have to solve perspective puzzles that are far too complicated and horrendous for my taste, which have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the game and add no value to the story. They are there because the developers needed a gameplay filler, and they are constantly bothersome, tearing you out of every sequence and every last bit of atmosphere, because you first have to run around in circles for an hour before you decide to look again on YouTube to see where under every video hundreds of people are just as exasperated by the superfluous puzzles as you are. Makes me want to shoot down a freakin’ Pegasus, and I’m vegan.
Later there are jokes like a dark endless labyrinth in which you have to choose the right path because otherwise you run in circles, or funny switch puzzles that you have to turn on and off. None of that was necessary. Pulls you right out of immersion. The voices give small hints which are mostly of little help, and after a while they start to mock you or despair as we do. But then, nothing more. No assistance if a player is stuck.
The really tragic thing about this disparity is the fact that it shatters the entire game. I had to encourage myself to play for a few minutes over and over again for over a month, only to, after a short period of running around and looking for runes, put a game in my playstation again that I don't find unbearable. The story and the atmosphere pulled me in completely, but they are not wholesome for the faint of heart. Combining this bitter dish with terrible try and error hidden object gameplay is an almost sure guarantee of phenomenal failure.
And while that is not the case for the masses, Hellblade has therefore lost the right to the title 'Fantastic Game' for me and sinks deep, down into mediocrity. I would have much rather just prefered running around with Senua. Would have lived through her visions and explored the extinct 'Hel'. There is no need for gameplay in such a story. And if there is, the battles would have been enough. It's a pity.
The battles themselves also aren’t flawless: All in all, and apart from a few bosses, these hardly change at all, but instead throw the same, slow opponents at Senua over and over again in steadily increasing numbers. That gets repetitive very quickly within the game.
The finale of the trip eventually overdoes it with absurd masses of opponents who make the experience not more difficult but only more tedious. Nevertheless, it has to be said that the finale is more than convincing with a few good ideas, cinematic audiovisual design and a damn boat full of drama.
Big minus point: The last scene is so obviously trimmed on
"SEQUEL!!!" that you immediately want to go back to the darkness. And the sequel has already been announced, surprise. Thanks, I am not interested.
The savestate lie deserves a mention. At the beginning of the game you are told that you would lose your savestate if you lose too many fights. While Hellblade would have sunken itself into the rating-abyss with this because not even a handful of players would bear this torture twice, I find it just as questionable that this was just outright lying: The decay on Senua's arm is getting worse because of the story, not through lost battles.
The thought of punishing us as players with the same fear and uncertainty as Senua feels it, was behind that, but in my opinion it didn't work and will stay in my memory as ‘insolent’.
Conclusion
Games like those from QuanticDream feel at home where they are: In the cinematic Hollywood-production, popcorn entertainment with little gameplay that requires only a few actions. It works and it rolls. Last of Us succeeds in one thing better than the other, but is forgiven because of its exorbitantly high quality. Journey correctly implemented how to adequately build minimalist gameplay into an experience.
Hellblade achieved a 999-combo on the rating-scale with its topic and the implementation, but fell right back into the lavatory in view of its perplexed and clumsy gameplay. They didn't know how to properly fill the game, and that's why they built in runic puzzles that were far too difficult and NOT AVOIDABLE if you want to continue playing. There is no help and no solutions, so it's best to play Hellblade with YouTube on your smartphone. Due to this bulkiness, the supposed hit will probably still lose many players and tarnish its actually flawless product.
A modern day tragedy and something that really makes me depressed. Well, not really.
Bad luck, Ninja Theory. That was nothing. Maybe next time.
4 out of 10 Fire Titans for Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
- Yoraiko
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