#mozillo

Because it’s really good.

Hellblade: Senua’a Sacrifice is a short, but intense, game that sees you travelling through beautiful landscapes, taking on Norse gods and even doing the odd puzzle all while dealing with the main character’s psychosis along the way. It’s an incredible experience that deals with some interesting subject matter and both expresses it tastefully and informatively, but also presents a gripping story and some intense gameplay.

Hellblade is a difficult game to try and describe without revealing too much of what makes it work. Even harder still given that it’s the sort of game that a lot of people will dislike, given the amount of walking and listening involved. At the same time, I’d say it shows some wonderful examples of design, going with the idea of say it, don’t plaster-your-game-with-UI it. There’s no UI at all, the closest thing you’ll ever get is the pause screen, and meanwhile everything else is in world and in the scenery, or within Senua’s own head.

If you hadn’t heard already, Senua, the game’s main character, suffers from psychosis. This manifests itself, at least most obviously to the player, as voices in her head. These voices are manifestations of people she may have dealt with in her life, such as the former slave, Druth, whom Senua found in the woods and who went on to teach her about the beliefs and culture of the Northmen, the Vikings who were raiding their lands. Others take the form of the Shadow which is an embodiment, of sorts, of the idea that Senua is cursed, tainted or worse, a thought you may see put upon her while growing up. There are also the Furies which are the general voices that will constantly plague Senua’s journey with their whispers and taunts “She’s going the wrong way” “She doesn’t know where she’s going” “Look at her, she’s scared” they’ll say as you pass through caves and forests.

These are the voices that act as the closest thing you’ll ever get to a UI or a tutorial while in the game. They whisper “Focus, you need to focus” as you approach some form of glyph or stone or perhaps they give a cursory warning about an attack from behind or even when an enemy is low on health and ready to be finished off. This is the main area of expert design that I so love in this game. The use of audio keeps you on your toes as you never fully know your surroundings or if what you’re doing is right, you can only see what’s in front of you. So the use of the voices as indicators of information means you have to always be listening out to them, even when they don’t help by creating fear within the player.

Hellblade does wonders to induce fear within the player and it’s rarely through any classical horror elements, or at least, classic video game horror elements. Basically nothing jumps at the screen and makes a loud gargling noise and in a lot of instances there isn’t actually any perceived threat. Instead the music builds up, the voices begin to flutter into a panic “They’re coming!” they’ll say with increased panic as the sky begins to turn black and the world distorts. You feel your heart begin to thump and your body become covered in a flop sweat that you thought only a snake could evoke (snakes are evil and scary), but you continue on, pressing onwards to save your beloved.

That’s ultimately the story though. Set during the Viking raids of northern Britain, Senua is a Pictish warrior who has set off to Helheim, the underworld of the Northmen, the Vikings, to save the soul of her beloved Dillion. Setting off from Orkney, after nearly all the Pictish folk were slaughtered during such a raid, Senua enters this fantasy land that reflects her understanding of the Northmen as well as their culture and gods. I say it’s a fantasy land, only because it’s nothing like what you’d find in the reality of you nor I, however to Senua it is very much real. There’s never the point in the game where they reveal that what Senua is actually fighting is a sheep in a field somewhere, instead it maintains that Senua’s reality is her reality whether it actually be real or not. While the areas you traverse reflect aspects of Senua’s life or those around her, an area of darkness where you’re pursued by a beast to reflect her childhood trapped indoors, or an area of mystic perception puzzles based around the god that the Viking raids were carried out in the name of, including their barbaric practices.

I can’t say that Hellblade is inherently fun, you can’t exactly smile your way through a beach covered in wrecked and abandoned ships or as you walk through a settlement that’s posted with flayed corpses left hung up to be feed for carrion. Everything is out to get Senua, including her own mind, so it’s very hard to ever feel safe and comforted during her quest, but this makes the whole thing ever more enthralling. The game remains fresh, for the most part, throughout the whole game both in setting and what it’ll have you do. The few constants within the game are the combat and the rune puzzles.

The latter involve trying to locate a Nordic rune within real life and this could be how some crossbeams line up to form a shape, maybe the flayed corpse lines up with another post to create another rune or even just the reflection of some driftwood to create another. These puzzles are simple, yes, but a lot of them are based around perspective and looking at objects in different angles, as well as acting as a wonderful way to get the player to actively look around this beautiful game and it is beautiful, there are lots of corpses everywhere but they look pretty, well, not pretty, but good. Well, not good, but you know, impressive? How do I word this without sounding like I’m attracted to flayed corpses? I guess there’s no way.

Combat! There’s combat in this game and it’s surprisingly satisfying for a lot of the game. Overall a simple system of heavy attack, light attack, block and dodge, and I guess there’s a kick as well, the spectacle of it comes from the nail biting manner of a lot of the combat. As you take on large groups of squid headed warriors the swapping between targets as you suddenly have to doge out of the way of an attack from behind can lead your heart to jump immediately to your mouth. When a voice in your head, almost literally so when using headphones, shouts “Look out!” or “Behind you!” the warning seems so much more real you feel the need to listen.

Combos may be simple, and the system is about as complex as being able to parry and riposte, but it works very well. It’s tight, whatever that means, and not overly complicated to muddy the whole system. The enemies are often just different enough that you can’t just walk around slamming the light attack button without a care in the world, as well as enemies willingly attacking you while your back is turned, which is something a lot of games seem to always struggle with. Sadly, where the combat often begins to fall down, you may have seen this is an issue, is that some combat sections tend to be very long and drawn out. With an adaptive difficulty that makes the game harder the better you play, if you want, you can find yourself fighting on a single bridge for well over thirty minutes as more and more angry shirtless men with shields, axes and even bigger axes just keep on coming.

It’s more a case of fatigue than anything. Having focused so harshly for so long it begins to wane and your reflexes drop making death an ever closer reality as you find yourself being knocked to the floor more and more. Then if you do find yourself finally falling in battle you might find that you’re back at the start of the bridge and stuck fighting the same dudes again, but maybe now with fewer enemies and they may not take a few hundred hits this time.

Death is possibly a permanent destiny in Hellblade. Within the opening area you’re given a haunting image of Senua falling to the floor, clasping to try and get away from the rot that crawls up her body, ultimately killing her for good, a chilling image of what may be. You’re informed that if you fall too many times, it may cause an absolute end to your journey. Whether this is true or not has yet to really be seen in a lot of circles that said the game is also very forgiving about death and whether or not it chooses to increase the rising rot. That said the sense of dread that comes with every near death encounter sets in that panic all the more.

Overall, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a fantastic game. There’s a lot of enjoyment to be had in getting completely overwhelmed by emotion, anxiety and fear, sort of. A lot of the game reminded me of my time in a mental health ward, as well as was reminiscent of my own personal experiences with the stuff. It’s the sort of game that had me almost quivering and trembling with anxiety and other trembling sensations, making me have to put the game down. However, during these brief stops I thought of little else but playing more Hellblade, and I had to go to work, and sell Hellblade to people.

Hoo boy, aren’t open world games everywhere these days? I hope I can’t be the only one who sees the latest open world game and almost immediately switch off from any interest in the thing. We’re reaching a critical mass of underwhelming, and rather simple, open world games that focus more on the fact that it’s an open world game than anything else, ultimately to their own downfall. While there are a few good open world games, there are a lot of bad ones as well, a flood of bad ones.

I used to like open world games, maybe it was because I was younger and had near limitless time on my hands and no major commitments outside of video gaming, sure there was school but I tended to sleep through that and just turn up to the exams at some point. All gloating aside, when you’re a wee lad of 15 or so the idea of spending an entire afternoon, from about 4:30pm until 3am, walking across a map meticulously picking up hundreds of icons on a map, slowly revealing the next chunk of the quilt and immediately preceding to mop up the clutter that lines it.

What appeals to you as a child, however, may not continue to cause a twitch in your nethers once you get older, except for Final Fantasy VII which will always cause me a stir somewhere upon my person. Now that I’m an old man at the disgustingly ripe age of somewhere in my 20s (I haven’t the time to remember or work out my age) I find myself with an actual job that I have to pretend to be good at to get money and thus eat for my own sustenance. Time has become rapidly precious and, while I may be currently playing through Persona 5 for a second time mere minutes after just finishing it, I don’t have the free time to disengage my brain and roll around an open world for the thrill that is map cleaning.

My main issue with open worlds doesn’t even necessarily descend from my lack of time in my life, instead they just tend to be so boring. Many open world games now rely heavily on padding out gameplay with increasingly cluttered maps and extra objectives, an ever increasing amount of Riddler Trophies, more Animus Fragments or Feathers than ever before, or just another hundred encampments to clear out, it’s all rather exciting, isn’t it?

There are definitely open world games that can really work, The Witcher 3 is a great example, but also things like Fallout 4. The games focus so much more on the quests that you come across that they drive your exploration of the world and point you in a direction to head to, maybe a dungeon or a building or just anything. The point is that someone put some thought into a quest chain, and they are generally chains, that may branch into more quests and you end up with a spider web of things to do. If you look at Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or Final Fantasy XV, two franchises that recently jumped into the open world pool, the quests are simple and forgettable. Normally someone tells you to get them something or kill monsters in a location and once you’ve returned with your simple and forgettable task completed you get a quick and hasty “thanks” and that’s the end of it.

Outside of the exploration itself the reasons to spend 20 minutes running out in the open wilderness rapidly run dry, one of my main criticisms of the latest additions to two of my favorite franchises were just that. The game focused more on the idea that the game is an open world than the idea of your game taking place IN an open world. I find a lot of open world games these days create an old world environment and think that’s the game, running around an open world, maybe with a few story quests scattered around, is enough to warrant the open world itself and it really isn’t.

The sandbox is an easy way to extend the length of your game quite substantially. Driving around fake LA in Grand Theft Auto from mission to mission can take literal minutes or more of your life, you’re not even really doing anything other than trying to drive in as straight a line as possible to make the journey quicker. What little I played of Ghost Recond: Wildlands was much to the same, driving through the vast and empty scenery is a boring chore and I’m quite glad the vehicles in that defied any form of physics as it made driving straight to the objective a lot easier as your truck scales an entire cliff face.

On that note, quick travel. That’s an admission of a problem already built straight into the actual game itself. Quick travel acknowledges that walking through the open world itself is already tedious and needs to be done once and only once, to unlock the locations to then fast travel to. As I stated in my video, if you took the actual structured content in an open world game and cut out all the open world walking bits the games would be a lot more engaging, to me at least. I guess that’s all that matters, that I personally have fun over everyone else.

Something that also tends to occur with open world games is the lack of player progression. It’s harder to enforce progression of your character, such as skills or equipment, without having to build large walls around entire areas of your map. You know how in older Zelda games if you had the hookshot, bombs or any other piece of equipment it’d unlock new routes and new areas? You can’t have that in an open world game as it just breaks the pacing of the open world, instead you often find yourself with everything you’re going to see within the first moments of the game itself.

In the case of games like GTA or Saints Row 3 (the only one I’ve played) you can find yourself with all the guns or equipment pretty rapidly, the games are almost designed around acquiring rocket launchers in unlikely places and then flying military jets around like it’s not a major national incident. In GTA it’s not too difficult to break into a military complex and steal said jet within the opening hours of the game, what else is the game ever going to show me? What new equipment am I likely to get that’ll change up the game more than the high tier military equipment? At that point progression is no longer something in the game, outside of the, normally, mediocre story.

Yes, this is a rather broad brush and it doesn’t apply to every game, but it falls, once again, to open world games that rely more on the game just being an open world as their major selling point than anything else. The quests in The Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 more than make up for the lack of equipment progression. The lack of this in GTA or Breath of the Wild leaves much to be desired as you find yourself doing the same objectives and actions time and time again.

Wait, wrong film. Sort of. I mean, the message still runs through the Lego Batman Movie, but then that’s almost the message of every U rated film. But hot damn, is it a good film. Also, this totally works to be posted here because there’s a Lego Batman Movie expansion in Lego Dimensions, so it is still related to games somehow, I’m not just desperately grasping at straws for excuses to talk about films.

Going to the cinema to see a U rated film is a sad reminder that children actually still exist. It was once we got into the trailers for upcoming films that I remembered the film was a U, as well as there being a loud and annoying 4 year old next to me who wouldn’t stop trying to offer me popcorn. I mean, The Boss Baby? Cinema truly is dead.

ANYWAY, The Lego Batman Movie is possibly the best Batman Movie that has ever existed. It’s self aware enough to repeatedly mock superhero movies and the comics themselves, making repeated references to previous iterations of Batman, hailing back to Adam West and his Bat-Shark Repellent. The number of small references to Batmans of the past are fast, numerous and wondrous. For me this was cemented in an interaction between The Joker and another character (I can’t fully remember) which made fun of Joker’s actions in The Dark Knight, saying how his LAST big plan was foiled so simply, as well as Bane.

Every single time that Bane spoke a line my friends and I burst out laughing. Why? They decided to keep his weird The Dark Knight Rises voice and it was magical. That’s one of the greatest strengths of The Lego Batman Movie. There’s enough Batman references and in-jokes that work on numerous levels allowing for anyone to understand and enjoy, unless you’re a child, in which you’ll just stick your hand in my side for about 10 minutes, as you have no control of your faculties and I don’t feel right moving his hand, as that’s a whole kettle of fish I don’t want to get into.

The jokes are numerous and works really well on just smuggling them in on off beats. Sometimes it’ll be a big picture of Batman’s nipple suit from Batman Forever that flashes up for a single second, if that, or just a small remark about surrogate fathers to Alfred. Because of these offbeat jokes, the film doesn’t feel overly fast paced and difficult to focus on, which I realise makes me sound like an old man. Instead, there are wonderfully slow and silent scenes that manage to put a point across almost perfectly.

The characterisation of Batman is near perfect, making him this nihilistic manchild who is too busy being awesome to mope around brooding about darkness or something. This level of arrogance works so well with Batman, as it makes so much sense as he’s near unbeatable anyway and in this universe he’s aware of it, much to the hatred of everyone else. When the advice to the new commissioner is “They just need to know how to press the Batsignal button”, it acts as a wonderful acknowledgement that Gotham City’s police force is near useless and just shouldn’t exist.

Generally, it’d be hard to mention every single moment I greatly enjoyed, as there are so many throughout the film, but I generally had a big grin on my face through the entire film.

Moments that I did find a struggle involved the fast moving action sequences, where the faux stop motion effects they put in place, as well as the sheer volume of “effect bricks” did lead to it just being a jumble of colours and bricks from time to time, but at the same time I’m sort of annoyed by just how well it worked. Small things like the gun noises all being essentially made through people saying “bang bang bang” as if it were a child’s play session worked surprisingly well. The level of detail was so good it annoyed me at times. On the lego people there was an ever so slight wearing around the edges of their body where the body decal didn’t go all the way to the corners, or the tiny little circle on their hand joints that honestly don’t need to be there in the film, but they are and that level of detail is incredible. As well as really annoying because of it, an annoyance of admiration.

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