Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (NZGAMER.COM Review)

I’ve played my share of difficult games. Most are only difficult in a mechanical sense by way of tangible obstacles. I don’t regularly play emotionally difficult games. Creating such a game is itself difficult. The design elements must be fully committed to whatever premise the game is going for to be truly affecting. This is where cutscenes don’t work. This is where interactivity must be used to tether our actions with personal burden. This is where Hellblade is brilliant.

Hellblade is not coy about exploring psychosis. The start-up screen makes that candidly clear. Senua’s journey into the Norse underworld to find her lover is disturbing as it is dubious. The blatant nature of the subject matter makes you inherently doubt everything you’re seeing. For all you know, Senua’s simply traversing old ruins on the way to see her lover’s grave, not challenging the goddess of Hel.

Hellblade’s intention is to make you empathise with people who suffer from psychosis by exposing you to the same emotions. In the normal spectrum of gaming this would be a problem. While you can have nightmarish apparitions attack the player, they’re no real threat to the person playing – they only exist in the game. A sort of ludo-narrative dissonance if you will.

So Hellblade does something a different. Each death develops a rot up Senua’s arm. Upon reaching her head the game deletes your save.

Fights and dangerous situations now take on a new meaning. You become anxious, paranoid, and the illusions which were no more threatening than the average video game foe, you now take with a deadly seriousness.

Just like someone with psychosis.

The point is not the permadeath itself, the point is how it makes you feel. To languish with the ever-present fear of being enveloped by something you know can’t hurt you, but can’t help but take seriously anyway.

People with this condition must be extraordinary brave to face this all the time. They should be awarded for their courage, which would probably explain why Hellblade is so lavishly generous with trophies. I’d only been playing for fifteen minutes and had already been given a gold trophy, and all I’d done was walk into a courtyard. By game’s end I had 8 gold trophies and 5 silver ones. Why? Because I deserved them, and so does anyone else.

I tried playing for long bouts, because a person with psychosis doesn’t have the option of running away. Even when I wasn’t playing the game I continuously felt nervous at the thought of going back, exposing myself to an oppressive experience which threatened to overrun me could I not stay above it and keep the challenges at bay.

Just like someone with psychosis.

This is one of the many special thing about Hellblade. Despite being tumultuously hard, the game also celebrates the courage needed to face psychosis. Ninja theory are subverting the action genre by taking the tenants we’re familiar with, and using them to create something terrifying, to illustrate just how difficult the real journey is. It shows how heroic people with psychosis are by taking us through an experience we’ve been down so many times, in a language we understand, so that we might understand somebody else.

Take the puzzles for instance. Illusory challenges that task Senua with finding a particular pattern in her environment by changing her point of view until the shape is found. The game forces us to see normal objects in a different light. What’s most interesting about these puzzles is Senua is actually using her ability to see the world differently to solve problems. Instead of dismissing these fantastical patterns as illusory hindrances, Hellblade suggests that even something horrifying can sometimes be of value.

Regardless of what she’s doing, Senua is privy to a whole entourage of voices speaking both her inner doubts and hopes. They also work as a clever method by which to narrate the story, and the action. They’ll drop hints when a foe is behind you, or give you little nudges when you’re stuck. Their helpfulness is wildly inconsistent. At times you’ll be grateful for them. At other times you’ll wish they’d just go away.

All considering, I must admit this game is not for everyone. A prospect which saddens me, but one I must unfortunately accept. I play games for all kinds of reasons, not just for fun, and Hellblade is not fun – it’s emotionally brutal. While the permadeath frames this entire game and the experience it’s trying to share, not everyone will appreciate that experience. There’s even some debate as to how the permadeath works, and whether there’s really any at all. Some seem to confirm there is, while some seem to confirm there isn’t. 

But even if there weren’t, it means I was under the spell of a false idea – afraid of something I thought could hurt me, but actually couldn’t. A delusion I believed wholeheartedly.

Just like someone with psychosis.

Lamplight City (Gameplanet Review)

I miss point-and-click adventures. You can give viagra to an old and flaccid elephant so he can boink his partner with such quakerous force it shatters the landslide blocking your path. Even better than their loony solutions was the dialogue. They had some of the most razor-tonged writing you’d see anywhere. They had to. Conversation to adventure games is like upgrade trees to RPGs. There was so much – it had to be impeccable.

You don’t see that so much nowadays. The hegemonic genres tend to craft their bullets before their banter, as they rightfully should. But if anything has ever been loved, you can bet there are people dedicated to keeping it alive. Such is what Steam has given the point-and-clicks – a commemorative sanctuary where the old guard can live on quietly.

Lamplight City is very much a commemorative work. The writing is made of sarcasm. You’ll point at things and click on them too. It even emulates the pixel art of 90s adventure games. What it doesn’t have, is normal progression, because this is a detective story that doesn’t drag you along the linear path of perfectionati logic it has predestined. It is quite literally a case-by-case story where you can accuse the wrong person, because doing so accidentally takes a few schools short of an education. Adventure games were infamous for stopping you in your tracks until you worked out you were meant to use your partner as a literal slingshot. Lamplight City mostly avoids that problem because you can simply cut the case short with a half-assed accusation against the wrong person. 

For a while I didn’t even think the game had many repercussions, just a juicy newspaper item for the convicted. However, midway through I had to accuse someone I knew wasn’t guilty. I’d pointed the shit out of everything for zero leads, and this game hadn’t even released, and so couldn’t consult the holy walkthrough. I had my suspicions the game had mistakenly blocked off the correct pathway (enough cause perhaps to suspect my education). A few cases later, I was invited to attend the same woman’s trial, presumably so I could be justifiably shamed for the wrongful accusation. I went to question somebody else before I went, only to find the trial was already over when I returned, and I was never going to see the production.

‘Being in the wrong place at the wrong time’, had somehow gone both ways.

This is a detective game, and that usually means a partner, but because you accidentally shot yours at game’s beginning, it means a dead partner. One who haunts you with sarcasm and observations about everything. And since you don’t have the luxury of a smarmy anthropomorphic sidekick, it’s a clever alternative to prevent your character gormlessly talking to himself.

Lamplight City doesn’t adhere to the push-pull-look-use-talk system point-and-clicks are known for. You simply click on an object or person, and Miles does whatever’s relevant at the time – even if that’s listening to his partner’s opinion on a wardrobe. Sounds kinda simple when I say it – but the game is relatively open – letting you chase leads in the order you wish. When someone tips you with a suspect’s name, it’s your job to consider the best course of action. In this case, going back to the station to look for their file. ‘Cause for the most part, this game doesn’t give you a lot of hints. The game just kinda says, ‘Well you’re a detective, figure it out’.

Unfortunately Lamplight City points out one glaringly obvious problem – narratives in many games nowadays ain’t what they used to be. Every now and again you’ll get a Mass Effect or a Witcher, but for every one of those you get many Tomb Raiders and Destinies with over-earnest dialogue and manufactured drama. So if you’re tired of all that grand-standing, might I suggest visiting one of the genres of old. Lamplight City wouldn’t be a bad place to begin.