Hellblade was a fantastic experience overall but with a couple very big issues. One major issue with it was was the puzzles. I despised the many puzzles where you had to find a specific rune shape hidden somewhere in the near area. This doesn’t sound bad but it is extremely frustrating when you have found this shape and are focusing on it but the game refuses to recognize this until you move an inch or two to the right or left to get lined up just how they want it. That and sometimes the shape would not be a static image but you would have to stand in such a way that a couple tree branches form the shape. I was in an angry state by the end as these make up the bulk of the game’s puzzles. The combat itself is fairly good for the most part with the exception of the fact that the game would auto focus on a specific enemy and would switch target when it deemed it best which leaves you open to attack from other sides easier. You can manually switch which enemy you are targeting but I would have preferred that I just have a free camera to attack who I want and am facing. The combat was similar to The Witcher 2 in that you will be dodging and evading a lot of attacks along with parrying and having light and heavy attacks to alternate between. I find this ironic because I hated the combat in The Witcher 2 but didn’t mind the combat in Hellblade. I think it was the lack of magic spells and traps which I didn’t enjoy in Witcher 2. The overall presentation of Hellblade was simply amazing. The music was well used and always fit the mood well. The voice acting was superb by all involved. The facial expressions captured for Senua were the best I have ever seen. The graphics were fantastic, everything from the clothing detail; facial features; world detail; lighting; shadows; all was just top notch and had a great direction to it. In particular there is a scene where you’re supposed to be wading through a bloody river full of corpses in what I can imagine would be representative of “Hell” that was by far the creepiest version of Hell I have ever seen. There was one scene where the lip syncing was mistimed with the voice acting but it only lasted a minute or so. I would have also liked to see an option for a map added or some kind of direction identifier as some parts were very difficult to navigate. I will also say that the representations of auditory and visual hallucinations seemed authentic and well done. I don’t suffer from them myself but I can see why the game has gotten praise for their handling of mental illness. I can say that those I have known that have suffered from depression can relate to your own brain constantly insulting you and taunting you.
I played Hellblade on Linux. I used Lutris; Wine and DXVK. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any bugs or glitches during play. I did notice one small issue where when the game initially launches it doesn’t quite stretch to full-screen but you can just click the screen and it then does. The game uses Unreal Engine 4. The game auto saves and has no manual save option. For the most part this isn’t an issue but there are a few times I would have loved having a manual option. You can change the difficulty setting at any time during play. There are 7 different graphics options as well as a Vsync option. The game recognizes and supports higher refresh rates even though there is no official option. Performance wise the game was usually pretty good but there were frequent drops that were noticeable. The game could go from 144 FPS to 85; back up to 144; down to 18; up to 85; etc. It was stable sometimes but when it wasn’t it would cause some lag that would last 1-3 seconds. When it was stable it was usually in the 80’s. I played using version 1.03 of the game from GOG.
Disk Space Used: 22.9 GB
GPU Usage: 67-99 %
VRAM Usage: 2083-3822 MB
CPU Usage: 12-37 %
RAM Usage: 3.2-5.2 GB
Frame Rate: 2-144 FPS
While I didn’t enjoy the puzzles or the auto targeting in combat the rest of the game was so good that I still played through it and will recommend it. The story; atmosphere; voice acting; graphics; are all just worth playing and experiencing. I paid $11.29 CAD for Hellblade and feel that was a good price given my issues. Speaking about just the rest of the game though it was easily worth $50 had the puzzles been done differently. I finished the game in 8 hours 13 minutes on normal difficulty.
My Score: 7/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 5700 XT 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 20.0.4 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 19.0.2 | Mate 1.24 | Kernel 5.6.5-1-MANJARO | Lutris 0.5.6 | Wine 5.5 | DXVK 1.6