Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice uses everything in its arsenal to perpetuate feelings of dread, anxiety and fear: camera perspective, light, sound, visuals, combat. There are no scary monsters, no jump scares, none of the traditional horror fare. Instead, it taps into something infinitely more terrifying: human psychology. And it is wildly successful.
The game opens with Senua, a Celtic warrior with severe psychotic mental illness, returning to her village following a Viking raid. After discovering that her lover was sacrificed to Norse gods, she embarks on a vision quest to retrieve his soul from them. Throughout the entirety of Hellblade, she carries his skull wrapped in cloth, unwavering in her quest to bargain with the Norse goddess of death, Hela.
Hellblade’s 3D binaural sound is easily the best — and scariest — part of the game. Several voices are present almost all the time with no real sense of identity, including the narrator’s. I was cheered on, degraded, laughed at, cautioned and questioned to no end. As the voices came at me from all sides, I felt myself slipping out of my bedroom and into Senua’s world, one where there is no quiet or rest.
Hellblade does a thorough job at saturating other mundane moments with anxiety. Even equipped with a sword, I still felt vulnerable when exploring a new area. It doesn’t help that there is no combat tutorial of any kind, and no HUD to speak of. In fact, the game provides you with only one prompt: Every time you die, rot progresses up Senua’s arm. When it reaches her head, she will really die, and all progress will be lost. It’s a cruel and unforgiving mechanic, and it was successful at adding a thick, heavy layer of tension and hesitation into everything I did.
Hellblade is not an Orphean quest to retrieve a dead lover from the underworld. It’s not some epic tale of revenge. It’s an education and contextualization of being psychologically different in the time of Vikings and Celts. Nearly every facet of the game — whether it’s combat, puzzles or exploration — is deliberate, pointing back to the overarching theme of what people called “cursed” during that time. Hellblade successfully weaves metaphors of grief and loss into fundamental game mechanics and rich folklore, and through these I felt like I truly was able to understand how someone else sees the world.
Box Art
Developer: Ninja Theory
Publisher: Ninja Theory
Available for: PS4, PC
Release date: 2017-08-08
