Surprisingly, I noticed that the threat of growing the rot didn’t apply to boss fights, but did for environmental deaths. It’s a cruel and unforgiving mechanic, and it was successful at adding a thick, heavy layer of tension and hesitation into everything I did. When it reaches her head, she will really die, and all progress will be lost. In fact, the game provides you with only one prompt: Every time you die, rot progresses up Senua’s arm. It doesn’t help that there is no combat tutorial of any kind, and no HUD to speak of.
Even equipped with a sword, I still felt vulnerable when exploring a new area. Hellblade does a thorough job at saturating other mundane moments with anxiety. The game is absolutely masterful at tapping into the childlike fear of what might be hiding in the dark. I was far more disturbed at what I was hearing than what I was seeing. A deep layering of inhuman growling signaled that there was something else in the darkness with me. Echoing footsteps somehow transformed into something more sinister. I was required to only use my sense of hearing to navigate through to the end. At one point, Senua undergoes a trial where she gropes in the darkness for 10 minutes. Ninja Theory is absolutely masterful at tapping into the childlike fear of what might be hiding in the darkĬlever use of sound plays a greater part elsewhere in the game as well. As the voices came at me from all sides, I felt myself slipping out of my bedroom and into Senua’s world, one where there is no quiet or rest. I was cheered on, degraded, laughed at, cautioned and questioned to no end. Several voices are present almost all the time with no real sense of identity, including the narrator’s. Hellblade’s 3D binaural sound is easily the best - and scariest - part of the game. Suddenly, the whispers are all around you, and it’s impossible to tell how many people are speaking all at once. They get progressively louder, creeping into your left ear and then through to your right.
Throughout the entirety of Hellblade, she carries his skull wrapped in cloth, unwavering in her quest to bargain with the Norse goddess of death, Hela.Īs the opening credits roll, Senua paddles past burned and staked corpses. After discovering that her lover was sacrificed to Norse gods, she embarks on a vision quest to retrieve his soul from them. The game opens with Senua, a Celtic warrior with severe psychotic mental illness, returning to her village following a Viking raid.
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