Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is one of those games where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. There really isn’t any one part of the game that’s incredible.. okay, one area: the sound design. This isn’t really a surprise though, the game won a shit ton of awards when it came out due to the way it uses audio to simulate symptoms of mental illness. It’s that sound design that really drives the game.
The graphics are great, no doubt, but if we’re being honest, the environments are pretty similar, as the game setting only really takes place in a small area. The combat is great, but doesn’t change at all over the course of the game, and the handful of enemies get repetitive pretty quick. The reason I’m mentioning this is that despite these drawbacks, the overall game is excellent.
The combat can be stressful at times though, and what really relegated this game to the backlog was a particularly long fight near the end that was just handing me my ass. The problem is, the more you die, the closer the darkness gets to taking over Senua’s body. Once that happens, the game save is deleted and you must start all over. I really didn’t want to do that, but the trick was that once I set the game down for a bit, there was a little bit of a learning curve coming back. That learning curve would result in a death or two, pushing Senua close to her deletion. So I would put the game back down again.
I finally picked it up again for the Backlog Bingo and finished it off, and I’m really glad I did. It was one of those games that I knew was great, and it was almost a discredit to myself as a gamer that I hadn’t finished it yet.
But alas, it’s done, and the ending was cool. There’s not much else to say about the game that hasn’t already been said. It had quite the 15 minutes, and there are a lot of write-ups out there on the interwebs breaking down the thematic elements and anaylizing the shit out of it.
At least it didn’t fall victim to the shotgun round, which is coming up here pretty quick.
