The story follows Senua going into hell to save the soul of her lover Dillion. That's it, that's the entire plot. There's a bunch of other shit going on with Senua's "mental illness" that I'll talk about later, about her being blamed for a plague and abuses from her father but as far as plot objectives go, the only thing to do is go to hell and save the soul of Dillion and bring his ass back to the world of living.
Game play wise Hellblade is an absolute snorefest. Most of the game revolves around "match the shape" puzzles usually in the form of locked doors but sometimes taking the form of broken stairways or bridges. In the first form you come to a locked door with some runes on them, you study the runes and then walk around the environment until an outline of that rune appears in the middle of the screen. When that happens you hold down R2 and pan the camera around until you line up something in the environment with the shape of the rune, rinse and repeat 2 or 3 times and then you go through the door and do it all again. The second type is exactly the same but you just have to look at weird floating bits of debris from a certain angle so the thing you need to cross looks repaired and then it magically repairs itself. I am not joking by the way when I say that this is EVERY. PUZZLE. IN. THE. GAME. When you aren't doing that, you are holding up on the joystick and listening to stupid dialogue as Senua walks or jogs VERY SLOWLY around.
Sometimes though things are broken up by a little bit of combat and while the combat has a sort of heavy, satisfying feel to it, ultimately it's extremely boring. The best way to imagine Hellblade combat is to first imagine the combat from Punch Out on the NES, adding a half assed dodge roll mechanic and then removing every single enemy special attack, that about sums it up. Enemies will walk slowly towards you and then attack, you can dodge literally every attack by mashing the dodge button, no timing required. After they whiff, you make a couple of light or heavy hits and you repeat this process until they fall over. After fighting the crow dude you get a mirror that lets you "focus" which slows down the enemies and lets you go on a big killing spree until it's over. If you do manage to take a few hits, you can also use focus to fully recover and thin out enemy numbers. The first few encounters are sort of fun but by the time you've killed the first major boss you'll probably be begging for some combat variety and you definitely aren't getting any.
But the real reason I hate this game isn't the lackluster game play or the crap plot, but for the fact that it's incredibly dishonest.
After the first main combat encounter the game tells you "every time you fall in combat the curse will creep up Senua's arm, and when it reaches her head, all progress will be lost", meaning that if you die too often, the game is going to delete your save file. Well guess what? It's not fucking true. You can die as many times as you damn well like in Hellblade and sure as shit, the curse on her arm WILL creep up towards her head but it will never get there. It gets about as high as her shoulder and then just....stops. You're in no real danger at all. I've heard people try to justify this with "but it's a game about mental illness and it's supposed to make you feel some of the anxiety she does blah blah blah I'm a huge dipshit that takes PR talk 100% seriously" It didn't make me FEEL anything, I don't play games with the intention of letting the enemies or environmental hazards kill me. You don't need to LIE to me to try and create some fake-tension, there would have been plenty of that naturally if you'd just made a competent game, but ya didn't, so all I got was boredom and anger from that stupid warning.
Leading me finally into the theme of "mental illness", a touchy and very serious subject for sure and something that should be treated with respect. A subject matter that, if done well, may shine some light on what it's like for sufferers of mental illness for people like me who have never really struggled with it. Well they didn't do that and I think the best thing to illustrate that was that I had a few people in my chat, people I know personally, people who I know HAVE had some kind of mental health problem and do you know how they described the depiction of mental health in Hellblade? "Insulting"
The game makes such a huge deal of how much effort went into the research and depiction of mental health for the game with a big warning at the start and the credit for the "Mental Health Advisor" being the first credit you see at the start of the game. Well even an uninformed idiot like me can tell that it's a shitty depiction of mental health because what happens near the end of the game is that Senua goes down a hole to get Dillion's skull that she dropped, finds Garm, the Norse guardian of Hell's gate, kills him and then just sort of gets over it all. I guess not fully but all the "psychosis" that plagues Senua throughout the game is just gone, poof, just like that, after the Garm fight. Like I said I'm not expert on mental health issues but I'm pretty sure they don't just recover like that because you killed a big dog. It's not the fucking flu or a mystic curse that just goes away with a magic spell, it's deep seated trauma and it just vanishes because she put a big glowy blue sword in a dogs face.
Personally, and this is just a theory (A GAME THE..no sorry), that Ninja Theory put the mental health aspect of the plot at the forefront of the game in order to deflect criticism. You've seen it before with other media, I think the most famous example of which being the new Ghostbusters movie. "You can't hate the new Ghostbusters film otherwise you're a sexist". This is just "This games about mental health so you can't hate it or you're being grossly ableist(?)" A shit ploy to sway peoples opinions, a way of stopping people saying anything bad about your boring, walking simulator-esque shit fest for fear of being seen as looking down on the mentally ill. Maybe I'm being cynical, or maybe Ninja Theory are a bunch of pathetic fucks who haven't made anything better than a 6/10 their entire lives.
Cynical or not, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is an AWFUL game. Don't let the pretty Unreal Engine graphics fool you into thinking it's an experience worth having because it isn't. It's a big turd. A very polished and pretty turd, but still a turd nonetheless
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