Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

A genuinely disturbing portrayal of mental illness is dampened by the vanilla combat and ho-hum puzzles. A sense of dread and a phenomenal performance from the lead actress may be enough for you to see the end.

Playing this with a 5.1 sound system was a privilege.

Interesting experience. Gameplay, especially combat, isn't particularly interesting, but the production value is really high, with great visual and audio presentation.

Points for originality, but the execution could be better. I played on PC, where the performance is so-so; the framerate is kind of jerky, and in a game that's asking you to do parries that's just not a good experience. Also the puzzle design can be obtuse. Needs more signposting and some better playtesting.

as boring as beautiful

Excellent soundscape, unconventional story. Unfortunately marred by uninspired puzzle design.

Excellent from an artistic perspective, decent from a gameplay perspective. The combat is extremely repetitive and the puzzles are boring, too easy, and take too long with Senua's slow walk/jog speed. The threat to erase all your progress if the infection reaches her head is a good motivator to stay alive, but it made it feel extra cheap when Senua keeled over and died once while literally walking down an empty path, no enemies around or anything, just a random glitch death.

some great stuff, coulda been 90+ if more like rpg and less annoying puzzles, some were still great, and the combat could be too overwhelming which made it fun when you start getting OP. then starts getting overwhelming again but they were on the right track. i like how the game didnt teach you a lot. the first time she said "behind you" or whatever lool. those voices stopped having the same effect too.

Hellblade is just a boring game to me. Nothing about its design, presentation, gameplay or story is inherently offensive to my sensibilities; I just never find myself wanting to get back into it. It's primarily a puzzle game, and I generally have 0 patience for puzzles. It also has some very lacklustre combat moments. Its theme around mental illness, a topic that usually interests me, has done nothing to intrigue me, so I reckon the story here isn't terribly well written. VR mode is sick, though

I don't really like the whole Norse mythology being taken super seriously thing so I wish they had told a story about psychosis using basically any other genre but the sound design is SO good and it's remarkable that this was made by such a small team

Something special, love the setting and soundtrack. Would like to see more of this.

It's an important game to play because of the way it treats mental illness. It has excellent sound and artistic design, so from a purely artistic standpoint it is a triumph. It's just that the combat is repetitive and shallow while the core puzzle solving is boring.