Hellblade has puzzles, but they are of the "Where's Waldo?" variety. Runes start appearing once you are in the general vicinity of the pattern you have to focus on. Easy. I know that the game is supposed to be about the mind (Hah!) and that some people pay more attention to patterns in their world (I used to obsess over that stuff when I was a kid.), but it shows a lack of thought. What I mean is that they designed the level, then put the patterns in after. They could have been placed anywhere. Why would you give them high scores for skipping the work, which would be designing the level as a puzzle? Remember that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy takes the leap of faith and then the camera turns to reveal he is walking on a kind of optical illusion? There is some of that in here too. You have to look at the illusion from the right angle for bridges to solidify. It's a little cleverer than the "Where's Waldo?" stuff.
Playing on Hard combat difficulty (the highest available), I only died once against regular enemies, very early on when I was still figuring out the system, and maybe three times against one later boss. It's a really basic and forgiving system. Her hit points regenerate in combat. She is an averaged-sized woman, maybe five feet four inches, fighting men four times as big as her. I'm supposed to believe that she could stun lock these hulking giants (almost nine feet tall) by throwing straight forward kicks? That she could break through their solid parries or parry the attacks they deliver with arms thick as logs head on? For a game this grim and visually realistic, the fighting is absurd. It doesn't matter if they are phantoms and figments of her mind. The problem with that excuse is that before she came to this place she was taught to fight like men, against enemies who would be bigger and stronger than her. Viking warriors with much more mass, powered by testosterone. She learned to fight, at least initially, by watching her love. If he cared for her, he would have helped her to realize how limited she physically was and taught her to make up for her smaller size and weaker power by using her wits and building her other attributes up more, perhaps making her more of a sneaky, resourceful runner. Or at least put her in a place where she might figure those things out for herself. If these demonic warriors are her fears corporealized, then think about how comically delusional she must be to imagine herself beating them down like little boys, wiping the floor with them, even when it's three or four giants against her. That is what I did through almost the entire game: I wiped the floor with almost everything this hell threw at me, dodging most attacks (dodging physically THROUGH their attacks), my enemies constantly staggered by her unlimited stamina before they could deliver a blow. The voices always told me when the enemies who were not in the overly cramped field of view fixed on her back were about to strike. Once you get the mirror ability that slows them in time, forget about it! THIS is supposed to be her hell? Owning all? It's difficult to think of how she would take them on with any credibility. If we make her taller and significantly more muscular than the vast majority of women, then that just concedes the real problem: men and women aren't the same; a man will almost always win in physical combat. But that makes you wonder why every cinematic story-driven game has to be about defeating hordes, waves, armies of enemies anyway, and it brings me back to the alternative I proposed before. Why can't she instead hide, flee, defend, and only take on the enemy directly when an opportunity that disadvantages one presents itself? The player could have activated events and interacted with objects in the environment that gradually disadvantaged him. For the sake of the intended story, she would still have been a warrior, with agility, stamina and strength, but one who understood and heeded her physical limitations and used the tools available to her. When the enemy did take her on directly while at his best, she would have suffered and might have only gotten away by stabbing/jabbing repeatedly or biting or kicking while in his grasp. I would have increased the field of view and not fixed the camera behind her back for this mix of mechanics. Again, the overwhelming focus on shooting and hitting in nearly all of these types of action-adventure games is tiresome anyway.
The storytelling reminds me of Gone Home, that walking game from a few years ago that for some reason received all those rave reviews, in that without other people anywhere, with only memories of things that already happened, or in the case of Hellblade, spirits and voices in the head to speak to, you don't feel that invested in what is actually going on. None of the characters are tangible. I'm supposed to care because the voices tell me to as I have to watch Senua scream and suffer, on and on. (Why did the creators think that was an entertaining idea for a story? If it was nightmarish horror, then maybe, but this developer only makes action games with a high emphasis on melee combat. They don't know fear.) As if nightmares don't have people in them and the road to hell shouldn't have characters. It's a lot of audio-only exposition for a story-driven game this long. I don't really care about how inaccurate the psychological aspect is, but it's pretty embarrassing that the developers gave that medical notice in the opening when all their research amounted to finding patterns, being belittled and discouraged by the voices, and swordfighting.
The promise of 3D audio felt like false advertising. I put on my headphones, but it only ever sounded like stereo, the left and right. "Binaural recording," they called it, the same technology used for that impressive barbershop demo on YouTube, where the scissors appear to go all around you. Trying the game out with speakers, I found that the internal voices never or barely appeared in the surround speakers and the environment didn't use multichannel audio well. The game is best with headphones, but not what was promised in that configuration. I turned off the chromatic abberation with the files. Tried increasing the field of view as well with those files, but it looked weird. It created a fish eye effect because of where the camera was fixed. Did not find a way to turn off the dumb permanent screen dirt/moisture.
What do you see in this game?
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