The Instruments of Her Pain – On Hellblade 1
Does not contain story spoilers.
Hellblade is a very different kind of game. The auditory hallucinations of a schizophrenic Celtic warrior woman constantly commenting on everything around you, and questioning every action you take, is at times an overwhelming cacophony of sounds and thoughts and emotions. Think of the little metaphorical voice in your head that is anxiety, telling you that you just simply can't do something or that you have to do a different thing, but now it's an actual sound you hear. It is a kind of horror I have never experienced before.
Combat in this game is quite well done. The difficulty was a bit too easy for me on hard, but then again my reflexes are abnormally good. In one section of the game, there is a scripted fight that only ends if you lose, and I actually kept it going for an entire hour on the hardest difficulty before I realized something was wrong. It was really fun, ok? Combat complexity is good with there being light/heavy attack, dodge, parry, shield break, and a recovery mechanism. The basics. The dodge is fine, but the parry is exceptional. Not too easy, not punishingly hard. The knowledge-to-reflexes ratio leans mostly into the reflexes' territory. The weapon feel of the sword is pretty solid with a good damage feedback and audio queues. Even then, Hellblade makes even the most basic enemy encounter feel exhilarating because some voices yell at how bad you are when you do well and others tell you about how capable you are when you are failing. Truly, an absolute wreck of adrenaline and emotional manipulation. Fascinating. Death in this game has permanent consequences, which I will elaborate on later.
Enemy variety is fairly limited, but their behavior and combat logic make them consistently fun to fight. Variety wise, I only recall there being about 3~ enemy types in the game. Light, Heavy, Shield. The enemy logic is pretty good, and it definitely has good attack telegraphing, unit attack queuing, and circling behaviors.
The bosses in this game are very competently designed for combat, even if their designs blend in with the drab environment. They are strong narrative climaxes in Senua’s journey through making up with her traumas, such as the god of fire being a metaphor for a village that was important to her having been burnt down by the invaders, and her having to finally come to terms with it.
Speaking of art, the art style of this game is leaning heavily into a muted realism. It is very much a game attempting graphics over style, but as usual that makes the game feel hopelessly generic in a sea of Unreal Engine 4/5 games that look exactly the same. However, the grounded design of the world contributes to the suffocating, oppressive tone of the narrative and helps put focus on the audio design first and foremost.
The soundtrack of the game is slow to medium and is incredibly tonally consistent for the dark wild-lands of the setting, and the combat tracks are amazing. Although certainly not an album I’d listen to sans hellblade.
In terms of UI, there simply is none. It does well to peel away anything that could distract you from actually listening. There's nothing to keep track of other than health, and that is taken care of by the voices yelling at you during combat and the black rot creeping up your body as you lose health.
The cut scenes are really well directed, though I am a bit conflicted about how I feel about the occasional inclusion of video of real life actors in some of them. Very uncomfortable, although I feel that is exactly what they are supposed to make you feel. They are your thoughts, torturing you, just a little more.
Performance in this game was perfect. Assume competent hardware, so the review is about the quality of the software with no hardware bottlenecks. I don't recall any dips below 60. No unusual internal resolutions or latency problems. Antialiasing is done through forced TAA (unforgivable) and optional secondary FXAA. A sad offering for modern games. The optional upscaling is FSR 1 and DLSS 2.1, which serve almost entirely to turn your screen into a blurry, indecipherable mess. Only use them if you absolutely have no other options. I’m not against upscaling techniques, but those early versions of the Nvidia and AMD tech are borderline unusable.
No bugs to find, no anti-cheat to hold back your performance, and the Linux compatibility is out of the box with no performance loss. Unreal Engine 4 really was the golden age, huh?
The world of Hellblade is that of broken pocket realms, full of danger at every corner. The environmental variety here is pretty good, with every stage being very clearly that specific stage. It does a great job with sense of direction with final-fantasy-esque gigantic landmarks and every stage tells a story with all the elements littered around. From burnt down villages, to forests with eyes, to shores with ship wrecks as far as the horizon. Level design wise they are pockets of puzzles between on rails hallways with not much of an open world for the kind of getting-lost exploration of grander RPG's. The puzzles are very simple, as in not complex, although hard because sometimes finding the exact angle you need for that one thing is like finding a needle in a haystack. Collectibles are relatively few and hard to miss. Each one giving you a voice acted lore dump about mythology and the surrounding characters.
In terms of replayability, there is no post game, new game plus, or mod support to make up for it. Achievements are nearly all unmissable, with the lone exception being the collectibles' completion one. One thing I would like to note is that the achievements are scripted way too early. In most levels where you are being chased by something or escaping a burning forest where tension and anxiety is a necessity, the achievement will trigger the absolute second you are technically safe and well before the ending cutscene triggers. And since you cannot miss almost any of them, they serve almost entirely to ruin any sense of tension near the end of every level or boss fight. Turn your achievement notifications off for this game.
Story wise, it is told not through physical characters speaking to you but by the anxiety induced schizophrenic cacophony of voices attempting to convince you simultaneously that you should, shouldn't, can, and can't do something. And a ton of environmental storytelling, which gets better or worse or just different depending on how anxious or stressed Senua is. The mental health nature of this game blends exceptionally well with the story of this game, as it is simultaneously about her coming to terms with her experiences. Senua's quest is to bring back her dead husband from Norse Hel or Helheim. The story is that similar of Orpheus bringing back Eurydice from Greek Hades (hell). In order to get to Hel, she has to travel first to lands invaded by the Norse, to get to the Norse mythological afterlife where her husband went to, and then through magic gates into mythology itself. The nonlinear story and the overwhelming nature of the voices makes the story hard to follow at times, even if really well written. They are good at getting you emotionally invested because many systems and aspects of the game depend directly on Senua's emotions.
Unlike many other works of fiction, the names of the characters do not spoil the story if you just happen to know enough history and mythology. A rare sight, truly. The voice acting in this game is objectively better than perfect to such a degree that along with the sound design and techniques, it makes the entire game. It being almost singularly obsessed with focusing on the audio. This is the game that got me into ASMR. I'm not kidding.
The game goes the length of extending Senua's stress and anxiety to the player by threatening that every time you die, the black rot will climb your character's body and force you to restart your journey. How many times? Well, there's the fun part, it doesn't tell you. Good luck. And remember there is a difficulty slider, although I do suggest leaving it on auto. Trust me.
Most voices are just nondescript female voices like that of Senua's own, but many are unique and have personalities and some even names. Due to the mythological nature of the world, you are constantly questioning even whether the voices are of your own mind or other entities speaking into to you. Almost the entire time the voices are things Senua can see, read, or has heard earlier in life, so it makes sense for the voices to have that information. But sometimes the voices do more. They warn you of enemies off-screen about to attack you, about what is through a door you have never been through before, about an obstacle you’ve never heard of.
It has you at times questioning; Where does Senua end and the world begin?
9/10, an unforgettable audio experience.
My suggestions for this game are: – Turn achievement notifications off, they spoil too many things – Disable TAA antialiasing. Add into “scalability.ini”: [AntiAliasingQuality@3] r.PostProcessAAQuality=0 – Enable FXAA antialiasing ONLY if you disabled TAA in the previous step.