Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is absolutely phenomenal. It blends intense combat, clever environmental puzzles, breathtaking visuals & music, a deeply moving story, and even a dash of horror together to form an experience that completely immerses you into the unique world of its title character.


Hellblade's combat controls are relatively simple (three types of attacks, an evade, a block, and later a special slo-mo ability), to the point that you aren't even given a tutorial beyond a quick look at the keybinds when you first start up the game, but they're designed in such a way that getting the hang of them takes mere seconds, and as you experiment you'll discover that they actually have quite a bit of nuance. On numerous occasions I'd try to do actions in combination with one-another, and every time it'd result in a special action that made sense given what actions I'd combined, and discovering these extra moves was both very satisfying and added some significant depth to the combat system. As examples, evading multiple times in a row causes you to perform a roll instead of just multiple quicksteps, attacking while sprinting will have Senua use a special leaping strike, and light/heavy/unarmed attacks can be chained together in just about any combination, often resulting in moves not seen in the default attack strings. Overall, your abilities flow together incredibly naturally, lending an organic feel to the combat & controls that few other games manage to pull off anywhere near as well.

Beyond the tight controls, possibly the most impressive aspect of the combat is how the voices Senua hallucinates are integrated into it. Voices will shout "Watch out!" from a specific headphone or "Behind you!" if an attack is about to land from outside the camera's view, will frantically tell you to "get up! get out of the way!" to hint at how you can mash the evade button to recover from your death animation, and even teach you how to use unlockable moves in lieu of immersion-breaking tutorial popups (by saying stuff like "hold your sword high!" to indicate you now have a charge attack, or etc). There's a bunch of other examples I could list, and on top of just being a really cool addition to the fight system, they do an amazing job at even further enhancing the immersion that the voices provide the overall narrative.

There are 6 or so enemy types that are gradually introduced over the first 2/3rds of the game, and they have a solid amount of variety to their designs and movesets, especially considering they're all humanoid when most other fantasy-type games tend to get variety out of their rosters through monsters, demons, robots, or etc. As the game progresses you'll see all of the types used in combination with one another in ever-increasing numbers, forming an expertly balanced difficulty curve that'll result in plenty of intensely close brushes with death, without any of the frustration that comes from dying a bunch to the same encounter, especially if you use the Auto difficulty to help the game more closely scale to your personal skill level. There's also three bosses who provide that nice bit of extra spice to the enemy pool, each of whom have some really fun fights that add some extra challenge at the end of their respective sections.


Hellblade's main puzzle type involves finding various runes in the environment around you to unlock a door (e.g. some sticks forming the rune when looked at from a particular angle, a shadow cast by a torch, a chunk of missing wall forming the outline of one, or etc), and on top of these already having clever solutions that strike a solid balance between being fun to find without being too cryptic, the game makes sure to consistently mix them up with fresh new mechanics for manipulating the environment around you. One area has you passing through gates that cause walls, stairs, or etc visible through them to start/stop existing, another has you swapping between drastically different "light" and "dark" versions of a mansion, and etc. The game makes sure to properly expand on each of these special mechanics as you advance through their areas, and some of them even get brought back alongside new mechanics in later zones, so despite sticking to the same core mechanic of rune-finding they never get old.

The game even makes sure to mix things up near its mid-point, introducing some areas that have special puzzles that either don't involve any rune-finding, or use the runes more along the lines of being plainly-visible keys, where the challenge is reaching them rather than finding them. These areas dip far more heavily into the game's horror themes, forming some genuinely pulse-pounding experiences as you avoid creatures pulled straight out of vividly-realized nightmares, and I found them to be some of the game's most memorable moments, both from a gameplay perspective and from the ways they tied in with the story and Senua's character development.


On the surface, Hellblade is the story of a Celtic warrior braving her way through her nightmares given life in Norse Hell to save the soul of her dead lover, which is a line I just paraphrased from the store description. Already that's a pretty captivating premise, and though it's hard to talk much about it without spoilers, especially given how much more powerfully this game's message lands when you play it blind, deeper down it's -so- much more than that. Hellblade's core themes focus on what it's like living with psychosis-inducing mental illness, how how others stigmatize and other people for their illnesses can only exacerbate already-debilitating symptoms, and the self-acceptance that's absolutely essential for someone to start their recovery, and it handles all of these topics with an expertise that most game studios will only ever dream of accomplishing.

The tale of Senua growing up under a dreadful shroud of abuse and self-loathing, finding her ray of hope within a world of darkness only to have it violently taken away from her, her journey of trying to recapture it again all while blaming herself for her tragedies, finally culminating in a series of big realizations about herself, her illness, her family, and a whole host of other stuff is told beautifully, and you'll have to be one stone-cold ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to not be moved quite a ways by it all.


Graphically the game is fantastic, from its oppressively terrifying enemy designs, breathtaking shores & shipwrecks, or Senua's mocapp'd face animations that perfectly show the spiral of emotions she goes through over the course of the game. The sound design, especially the voices Senua hears, is phenomenal, and the Norse chanting present throughout the battle music lends an incredibly epic vibe to the game's already intense fights.


Quite often, I find that the genre-blended games I'd describe as "more of an -experience- than just a game" tend to lean more towards being unfailable walking-simulator types that just happen to have a heftier chunk of interactivity, so Hellblade really stands out as being one of my first of that sort that still has challenging & engaging gameplay. Every aspect of this game flawlessly blends together to form a tale that would've never been as impactful were it told in another medium, and if you're looking for a poster-child for winning a "Games are art!" argument (or if, y'know, you just wanna play a -really- great game) then I couldn't recommend anything else more highly.

10/10, Silver Star for being extra-hella-dopesauce.

Follow my Curator to be kept up on all my reviews, including stuff I ghost-write through Family Share!

Check out the discussions on my Group if you wanna see my reviews of non-steam games or suggest what I should play next!

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is absolutely phenomenal. It blends intense combat, clever environmental puzzles, breathtaking visuals & music, a deeply moving story, and even a dash of horror together to form an experience that completely immerses you into the unique world of its title character. [h1]Combat Design[/h1] Hellblade's combat controls are relatively simple (three types of attacks, an evade, a block, and later a special slo-mo ability), to the point that you aren't even given a tutorial beyond a quick look at the keybinds when you first start up the game, but they're designed in such a way that getting the hang of them takes mere seconds, and as you experiment you'll discover that they actually have quite a bit of nuance. On numerous occasions I'd try to do actions in combination with one-another, and every time it'd result in a special action that made sense given what actions I'd combined, and discovering these extra moves was both very satisfying and added some significant depth to the combat system. As examples, evading multiple times in a row causes you to perform a roll instead of just multiple quicksteps, attacking while sprinting will have Senua use a special leaping strike, and light/heavy/unarmed attacks can be chained together in just about any combination, often resulting in moves not seen in the default attack strings. Overall, your abilities flow together incredibly naturally, lending an organic feel to the combat & controls that few other games manage to pull off anywhere near as well. Beyond the tight controls, possibly the most impressive aspect of the combat is how the voices Senua hallucinates are integrated into it. Voices will shout "Watch out!" from a specific headphone or "Behind you!" if an attack is about to land from outside the camera's view, will frantically tell you to "get up! get out of the way!" to hint at how you can mash the evade button to recover from your death animation, and even teach you how to use unlockable moves in lieu of immersion-breaking tutorial popups (by saying stuff like "hold your sword high!" to indicate you now have a charge attack, or etc). There's a bunch of other examples I could list, and on top of just being a really cool addition to the fight system, they do an amazing job at even further enhancing the immersion that the voices provide the overall narrative. There are 6 or so enemy types that are gradually introduced over the first 2/3rds of the game, and they have a solid amount of variety to their designs and movesets, especially considering they're all humanoid when most other fantasy-type games tend to get variety out of their rosters through monsters, demons, robots, or etc. As the game progresses you'll see all of the types used in combination with one another in ever-increasing numbers, forming an expertly balanced difficulty curve that'll result in plenty of intensely close brushes with death, without any of the frustration that comes from dying a bunch to the same encounter, especially if you use the Auto difficulty to help the game more closely scale to your personal skill level. There's also three bosses who provide that nice bit of extra spice to the enemy pool, each of whom have some really fun fights that add some extra challenge at the end of their respective sections. [h1]Puzzle Design[/h1] Hellblade's main puzzle type involves finding various runes in the environment around you to unlock a door (e.g. some sticks forming the rune when looked at from a particular angle, a shadow cast by a torch, a chunk of missing wall forming the outline of one, or etc), and on top of these already having clever solutions that strike a solid balance between being fun to find without being too cryptic, the game makes sure to consistently mix them up with fresh new mechanics for manipulating the environment around you. One area has you passing through gates that cause walls, stairs, or etc visible through them to start/stop existing, another has you swapping between drastically different "light" and "dark" versions of a mansion, and etc. The game makes sure to properly expand on each of these special mechanics as you advance through their areas, and some of them even get brought back alongside new mechanics in later zones, so despite sticking to the same core mechanic of rune-finding they never get old. The game even makes sure to mix things up near its mid-point, introducing some areas that have special puzzles that either don't involve any rune-finding, or use the runes more along the lines of being plainly-visible keys, where the challenge is reaching them rather than finding them. These areas dip far more heavily into the game's horror themes, forming some genuinely pulse-pounding experiences as you avoid creatures pulled straight out of vividly-realized nightmares, and I found them to be some of the game's most memorable moments, both from a gameplay perspective and from the ways they tied in with the story and Senua's character development. [h1]Story[/h1] On the surface, Hellblade is the story of a Celtic warrior braving her way through her nightmares given life in Norse Hell to save the soul of her dead lover, which is a line I just paraphrased from the store description. Already that's a pretty captivating premise, and though it's hard to talk much about it without spoilers, especially given how much more powerfully this game's message lands when you play it blind, deeper down it's -so- much more than that. Hellblade's core themes focus on what it's like living with psychosis-inducing mental illness, how how others stigmatize and other people for their illnesses can only exacerbate already-debilitating symptoms, and the self-acceptance that's absolutely essential for someone to start their recovery, and it handles all of these topics with an expertise that most game studios will only ever dream of accomplishing. The tale of Senua growing up under a dreadful shroud of abuse and self-loathing, finding her ray of hope within a world of darkness only to have it violently taken away from her, her journey of trying to recapture it again all while blaming herself for her tragedies, finally culminating in a series of big realizations about herself, her illness, her family, and a whole host of other stuff is told beautifully, and you'll have to be one stone-cold sonofabitch to not be moved quite a ways by it all. [h1]Presentation[/h1] Graphically the game is fantastic, from its oppressively terrifying enemy designs, breathtaking shores & shipwrecks, or Senua's mocapp'd face animations that perfectly show the spiral of emotions she goes through over the course of the game. The sound design, especially the voices Senua hears, is phenomenal, and the Norse chanting present throughout the battle music lends an incredibly epic vibe to the game's already intense fights. [h1]In Closing[/h1] Quite often, I find that the genre-blended games I'd describe as "more of an -experience- than just a game" tend to lean more towards being unfailable walking-simulator types that just happen to have a heftier chunk of interactivity, so Hellblade really stands out as being one of my first of that sort that still has challenging & engaging gameplay. Every aspect of this game flawlessly blends together to form a tale that would've never been as impactful were it told in another medium, and if you're looking for a poster-child for winning a "Games are art!" argument (or if, y'know, you just wanna play a -really- great game) then I couldn't recommend anything else more highly. 10/10, Silver Star for being extra-hella-dopesauce. Follow my [url=http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31984244/]Curator[/url] to be kept up on all my reviews, including stuff I ghost-write through Family Share! Check out the discussions on my [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/xorphreviewsthings]Group[/url] if you wanna see my reviews of non-steam games or suggest what I should play next!