I love hellblade and think it's great, but like Until Dawn it's not for everyone. This game is great when you don't necessarily need great or many gameplay to enjoy a game and you can really value that story and immersion are the pillars on which this game thrives. I think it's daring for a company to make a mentally ill protagonist and you experience hellblade towards her eyes and mind. I also love the photo mode and the scenery looks really fantastic especially when you walk trough water and you see the ribbles. Ground textures and plants are also really well executed. Just a shame HDR isn't yet included, the skintone outfit and everything about Sensual also look and feel natural as done her facial expressions and animations. Which is of great importance for games who rely a great deal on immersion. So great work team ninja and I hope they make more AA games like this.

See this is the issue that I have with the way people often critique this game: they're often basically just rejecting it based on its genre because they don't think story-driven games have any merit or potential. Okay. That's your opinion. You can have your preferred genres of course. But I would urge people not to be so narrow as to contend that no one should appreciate this or that game genre.

That said, I can see the merits in some of your criticisms, Spemanig, particularly regarding the ending. But I also observe that you seem to expect something that is very, very difficult to make work: on the one hand, you ask for especially challenging combat and puzzles and on the other a better narrative flow. Don't you see how these atmospheric exploration type of games are kind of meant to be on the easier side? Otherwise constant deaths and whatnot can really disrupt the flow of the narrative and the sense of immersion in a way that it doesn't in this game! Yes, Hellblade could've been better made, but the way I see it is that the flow of things might've been improved not by upping the traditional game play challenge, but by embracing the type of philosophy you see in games like Gone Home more fully by just rejecting the idea of traditional "gamey" challenges altogether and allowing the player to simply immerse themselves in the mood(s) of the game, letting that be the full draw and appeal.

All that said, it's my personal opinion that Hellblade did a better job of tackling its subject matter than you're necessarily giving it credit for. And considering its lack of competition in addressing the subject of psychosis, what are you comparing it to to say that it does an awful job? Awful relative to what alternative? I'm not saying it's my favorite game of the year or anything. (My favorites so far are Night in the Woods, Pyre, and What Remains of Edith Finch.) But it's genuinely good! I enjoyed it a lot.

It is as much a walking simulator as Legend of Dragoon is a poor man's Final Fantasy.

Wait wait wait, maybe I wasn't clear. My problem with the combat is not that its easy, it's that it's not good and has no tension. There's no depth or complexity to it, and it is completely at odds with the scenarios you're placed in. The entire point of these games is to be immersive. When I'm in the combat, I'm not immersed because all i can think about is how monotinous it is. I'm not thinking critically about the combat because none of the situations are ever complex enough to require that. I'm just button mashing the entire time.

This matters because the game warns of permadeath at the beginning. Clearly these fights are supposed to act as narrative obstacles with stakes, but they never feel like anything more than an unwanted chore. I may not like the story, but that's the only reason I had to finish the game, and the hack-kneed, Chrono Trigger way enemies are thrown at you just screams of the developers having absolutely no idea how to organically place enemies into a game like this in a way that gels with its atmosphere and intent.

You have no control of your camera, and at times you can be fighting against like 8 enemies coming behind you. The idea, obviously, is to allow for the voices to alert Senua when she is in danger, but the result is that you're constantly fighting the camera instead of being immersed in the fight itself. Even the lock on has issues with clarity, and having enemies just appear randomly instead of having them be organically integrated into the level design removes so much potential for atmosphere and makes the whole experience feel very curated, which again is immersion breaking.

Not so immersion shattering as the stupid puzzles, though. When you hear complaints of something being "too gamey," it's because of stuff like this. Match the symbol puzzles are literally just padding that add absolutely nothing to the game. They don't flesh out the world and they literally could not exist in any context other than in games. The devs needed to give players something to do, and instead of doing something creative and natural to the games world, they chose incredibly simple gamey puzzles.

I don't buy the "these games should be easy" argument at all. Diffuculty is not at odds with narrative. It's purpose should be to enhance narrative. A narrative like this with such high stakes is completely at odd with its gameplay that has no stakes.

I'm going to bring up the game no one wants to bring up, but Bloodborne does this way better. People just think of those games as hard games, but they aren't difficult for no reason and they arent difficult with no thought as to how. Enemies are organically placed to complement the level design and give each area a sense of place and tension. In Bloodborne, you're nervous to go anywhere because you're afraid that at any moment an unseen enemy will creep up on you, which holds real weight because an enemy can actually kill you in this game. And that makes sense with the mood of the setting you're in. Yarnam is a dreadful place with dreadful people and what you're doing there is unpleasant. There are no stupid immersion-breaking puzzles that are the antithesis of that mood just to pad out the game.

Now look at Hellblade. Can you honestly say that you were ever tense walking around any area in that game? Of course not, because enemies weren't placed, they were spawned at random and with no warning and after long stretches of quiet. And when they did come, they were incredibly easy to dispatch. Which makes no sense when the entire mood of the story is effected by psychosis. The game should be absolutely dreadful and incoherent to navigate, not serene. Matching a magical "M" to a giant shadow of an "M" doesn't make you understand psychosis better or understand norse myth better or immerse you in the setting more. It's padding, and frankly so is the combat. They had a story and had no idea how to make a cheap game out of it. This is the result.

You asked what I'm comparing this game to. I'm looking at how the game uses mechanics to communicate psychosis. Like the voices. The idea is that the voices are supposed to make you feel out of touch with reality and anxious all of the time. It's supposed to communicate how it feels like to actually have psychosis. But the kinds of things the voices say are incredibly shallow and tame and again, very gamey. When a voice tells you that there's someone behind you, and they're always right, that stops feeling like a mental illness and starts feeling like a super-power. The voices are also used to guide the player, which means that to some degree they lack the chaoticism I suspect people with actual psychosis actually go through. Senua, and the player, are always at their functional peak despite these voices, where as people with psychosis can find it difficult to function because of it. These voices are merely a nuissance. They say mean, easily ignorable things the entire game. That's it.

I don't believe that anything is binarily good or bad, so i can imagine that there are isolated cases where psychosis can offer clarity, but the voices in hellblade are literally never at odds with Senua's funtional duties. If Senua has to solve a puzzle, they will never effectively impede her or lead her astray. If Senua needs to reach a destination, they will never make the game difficult to navigate. If Senua is in a combat scenario, they will never make victory more difficult because of the constant chatter. The player never suffers from a lack of focus or clarity due to these voices, so the connection to Senua's mental illness is shallow. They're only there for set dressing. To look like mental illness.

But the advantage games have over film is to make you feel by putting you in someones shoes. Making a game that actually mechanically tackled mental illness wouldn't make for a fun game, because mental illness isn't fun. Psychosis isn't fun. But it would be effective. Right now, Hellblade is all spectacle and no substance. It's shallow, frankly due to the devs having no idea how to communicate what their research found through mechanics. So instead, they did the bog standard thing of just having the player walk around discovering story via exposition dumps and solve puzzles/fight baddies in the middle so they don't (hopefully) get bored. Which doesn't make for a good game.

I can't say much yet, but play Observer. Much better game of a similar ilk.

Will play this eventually after I get thru some of my backlog. Excited for it!

Finally finished it a couple of hours ago. Brilliant and the most immersive experience I've had in a game in 2017. Hope there's a sequel.

With headphones (switched from surround sound), this game was unreal. I may never play it again but while it lasted, it was unforgettable.

Alright, I've had the opportunity to play through Observer now and I can see what you mean about the two games having certain thematic similarities, but I'm afraid I would disagree with the notion that Observer is a better game than Hellblade. The voice acting for Daniel in Observer is terrible. I mean these are supposed to be games that revolve thematically around inviting the player to experience the lead character's journey through their emotional struggles with mental illness, yet Daniel displays so little emotion in the course of his journey that it just doesn't connect with me. Melina Juergens' acting and voice acting both as Senua, by contrast, comes off to me as raw and heartfelt. It's there and it has an authentic air to it. That makes a big difference when it comes to my ability to get absorbed into their respective inner worlds.