Considering Hellblade threatens you early on with permadeath should Senua fall too many times, their panic is well founded.ĭoes Hellblade really delete your save file and banish you back to the start if you’re killed too many times? Probably not, but it’s just one of many ways Ninja Theory goes out of their way to make your gaming experience uncomfortable. The more panicked and desperate they become, the closer she is to death. They’ll warn Senua of incoming strikes, provide in-battle hints at toppling her most challenging foes, and act as a pseudo health bar. They’re included naturally in many of the game’s mechanics, serving as a fourth-wall breaking narrator, or an integral part of combat. Voices can come from behind her, or as if they’re moving past her in mid-sentence. The voices in her head are presented at the forefront of the experience, captured with binaural recording to give them a sense of direction. Hellblade takes this mental illness and metaphorically manifests it as the world Senua explores. It drives her further and further into herself. Throughout the game, Senua will see flashbacks of her treatment at his hands, of her enforced isolation and her constant berating. Her father, a senior religious figure, believes her infested with a darkness that he seeks to keep the world safe from. Senua suffers from psychosis in a period of history where mental health was often diagnosed superstitiously, and the voices she hears in her everyday life have caused her to be ostracized. While suggested to be the denizens of Helheim tormenting the girl, under the surface there’s a real world issue being explored. Some seem to want her to succeed some revel in her failures. These voices are constant, whispering just loud enough to be heard or talking loud enough to try and drown each other out. Telling her how she needs to push on while telling her she’s going the wrong way and she’s bound to fail. Telling her she’s doing great while telling her she’s bound to fail. Senua hears them throughout, constantly talking over and contradicting each other. She arrives at the shores of Hel and is immediately greeted by the disembodied voices of the furies that reside there, who take up permanent residence in her head. On the surface, Hellblade is the tale of a young Pict warrior delving into the Nordic underworld to recover the soul of her lost love. ![]() ![]() It could be that, or It could be that all of the horror that she sees isn’t really there. Maybe her fear of being abandoned and alone trumps that of the hellscape that surrounds her. Maybe because she’s more scared of failing her quest than she is of her gruesome surroundings. The world is built on the backs of charred corpses and decorated in skinless cadavers that hang from the ceilings, so it’s a pretty macabre place. ![]() It earns its psychological horror tag by focusing hard on the psychological and dabbling with the horror. It’s not designed to be fun it’s designed specifically to exhaust you, to grind you down and stress you out. Can you survive the following statement: Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice isn’t so much a traditional video game as it is more of an experience. Here’s a good way of discovering if you’d be interested in playing Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. "Hel hath several furies – and they’re all in your head"
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