Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice explores Senua’s past and psychosis; it is a narrative focused game set in the Norse-world. The game requires you to be immersed in the game to have a good experience, and if you manage to properly immerse yourself I think the experience will be quite unique. You want to sit in a dark room, with closed headphones without interruption. You also need a powerful computer to run the game with ray-tracing as the visuals are pretty dull without them; the game is not super well optimised.
Senua’s Sacrifice is a dark and grotesque game that has horror elements, it is played as a third person fighting game with some puzzles and a lot of transversal through the world. I struggled somewhat to get through the game due to motion sickness, loud noises and flashing bright lights. This review will be from the perspective of someone who had sensory issues playing the game with an open headsets in an bright room. Your experience might be vastly different.
The narrative
The narrative is the strongest aspect of the game by far, and is the reason you would play the game. Senua’s psychosis means that she hears voices in her head. The game uses this in a fabulous way to tell Senua’s story, and the story of her “darkness”. It is a very unique story telling device that I have not experienced in this manner before, and I thought it was quite clever and mostly well implemented.
I don’t think the game sets up the world and setting properly in order to sell the psychosis. I don’t know if what she (the player) sees is in her mind or actually exist in her world. It is all very confusing and nonsensical, which might be the intent. I don’t understand what Senua’s goal is and it took me half the game to even get a basic understanding of that goal. I might not have paid attention to the story and voices well enough.
Presentation & Technical
The first thing you will notice about the games presentation is that it uses unreal engine 4. The ray-tracing, lighting and weather system heavily carries the visual experience of the game. The environmental textures and details are very flat and dull to the point that they frequently broke the immersion. They really stand out in contrast to Senua’s own model alongside the other graphical features of unreal engine 4.
The sound and voice acting is overall pretty good, especially the voices in Senua’s head. The game relies on the player playing with a headset, and it is not worth playing without one. The directional sound is among the best I have experience, and is the shining star of the game. I do however find that the sound range is not properly tuned for me with my sound sensitivities, the sound is often too loud or too low and I have had a hard time finding a middle ground that I enjoyed. The game also uses to much voice modulation for my own tastes.
The game is not super well optimised. The frames per second is not good enough compared to the visual fidelity the game offers. Ray-tracing is especially heavy, but the game needs it so badly for the visuals to work. Even with a reasonably powerful computer there are sections in this game that drops below 10 FPS (consistent and not a single frame dip) due to ray-tracing and poor performance.
Gameplay
The gameplay is the weakest aspect of the game by far, and one that made me question on a consistent basis why they made a game and not a movie. There are few games that I feel have gameplay that detracts from the overall experience as heavily as Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice does.
The game features a variation of environmental puzzles which only serve to pad out the game or slow the pace of the narrative. They are usually very easy and simple, but sometimes very frustrating and inconsistent in how they work. They get very repetitive and tedious very quickly.
Then there is the combat in the game, with the standard light, heavy, dodge and block. It looks reasonable and is a nice change of pace occasionally. It works fine for a narrative driven game when there is only one enemy. The problem with the combat is its camera and the auto lock-on feature, it often locks onto an enemy you don’t want. This leads to you constantly being attacked from behind by a newly spawned enemy, or trying to dodge around in a weird pattern as you are being attacked by an enemy that is not the one you are locked on to and can’t get to. This combat ruined several of the narrative beats in the later stages of the game.
Overall
I really enjoyed a lot of the voices and thought it was a very clever implementation of sound. Having completed the game I am still unsure why they created a game and not an animated movie. The vast majority of the flaws comes from the poor pacing, poor textures, poor camera work, repetitive gameplay loops and poor optimisation. All of these are mostly removed when they can have total control of the narrative pacing, camera angle and pre-renders.
I find Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice to be a game that has an interesting idea and concept that is executed in a mediocre way. It requires far to much of the player to get to the vision and experience offered.
| Playtime | 6.5 Hours |
| Game release date | 8 August 2017 |
| Review release date | 30 July 2024 |
| Light sensitivity | No issues |
| Sound sensitivity | The voice range is to large for me causing uncomfortable sound levels |
| Motion sickness | No issues |
| Steam | Metacritic – Metascore (83 PC) |