I'm finding an evolving market for something akin to the adventure games of the 90's. I've played quite a few in the past few years. Grim Fandango Remastered was fun for what it was as well as a good primer for the modern adaptations of the genre. I've liked enough of these games to keep giving them a shot. Very rarely do I have mixed feelings when it comes to adventure games. Hellblade is one of those types of experiences that isn't quite like the others but shares enough similarities that I have to lump it in with more passive games like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter or Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Where it diverges from those games is probably its greatest fault.
Hellblade is a psychological adventure game steeped in Norse mythology. Adventure games thrive on storytelling and puzzles - so where Hellblade starts is promising. It appears in tune with itself and sucks you in immediately. Senua arrives on the shores of Helheim to search for a way to free her lover's soul. It presents a great introduction into Senua's character - a fragile, terrified, and troubled woman scarred deeply by the events that led to her partner's death. A turbulent mixture of voices in Senua's psyche debate her every move throughout the game. These voices taunt her, encourage her, and bicker between themselves. The voice acting is top notch and visuals staggering for a $30 game. The story sticks a landing early on and sustains that driving force for a good chunk of the game. And then something happens. The experience becomes unraveled in a way that lays out where it's going and how it intends to get there. By the time that happens, it just doesn't have enough to keep the themes it wrestles with afloat within the medium.
The biggest flaw for Hellblade is the cadence that it conforms to. On paper, it sounds like a nice compromise between action adventure and true adventure games. The main issue is how it presents all of these interactive parts and what it does (or doesn't do) with them. Take for example the combat. While it's simple and breaks up some of the monotony of advancing and solving a puzzle, they overuse it so much to the point that it becomes predictable and at times even contrived. You know when a combat segment is coming up before you even get there and eventually you'll know exactly what it entails. The difficulty also increases artificially. Instead of making the combat more complex by layering new skills or introducing substantial variations in foes, the game just throws more conservative iterations of enemies at you at the same time. The end result is an otherwise stylish one-on-one combat mechanic boiling down to a frustrating chore where you have to account for multiple attackers outside your peripheral. They lean more and more weight on the combat right up until the conclusion and every interaction with it becomes an increasingly tedious task.
You would hope the puzzles make up for the tedium though, right? Well, no, they don't. They suffer from most of the same criticisms. The first puzzle you encounter in the game may stump you for a few minutes. Once you figure out the solution and get beyond that first gate though, you'd be surprised to think that they'd dare to repeat that motif for the entirety of the game. That's exactly what they do and it's probably the most deflating realization. Puzzles should become increasingly complex in any game and should feel intuitive to the world. They shouldn't just feel like they're padding out an experience - but in Hellblade they regrettably do. Later down the road, instead of solving one of these types of puzzles, you'll now have to walk around a small area and solve two or three of the same type of environmental puzzle before you can advance. Once you solve the first puzzle in the game, you know exactly what to do for the next eight hours. The linearity of the game hampers the appeal of even doing these particular tasks. You understand the language of the game in the first thirty minutes, where an undeviating path and visual cues hint way too clearly at every solution. It feels more like paint by numbers than something like The Witness where you're overcome with consistently satisfactory moments of insight. If the puzzles were more diverse and interesting or the world was more open, there'd be something here to actually sink your teeth into. But there isn't. It's all just too shallow and it practically treats its audience like they're mindless.
Hellblade seems as if its trying way too hard to fit into the video game mold. It's as if the story began as a film script and they worked their way back to the channel they felt most familiar to tell it. It's punctuated enough in story paradigm that it could work as a movie, but then they chopped it up with elementary game mechanics. The writing starts solid but becomes increasingly overbearing as time goes on. That seems to be an ongoing complaint with this review. It starts at a high point with great art and sound design and gets burdened by too much of everything else after the player base has more than grasped it. There are times when they keep driving home a point so much that you can't help but roll your eyes. And sure, you could make the argument that the theme calls for burdening and oppressive writing, but I think it hits the nail so hard and so frequently in every facet of its form that the game becomes obnoxious.
I went into Hellblade with high hopes and ended up relieved when it was over. The song in the ending credits actually made me cringe. I know that sounds like hyperbole but it did. It perfectly summed up how I felt about this game as a whole. I've posted it below in the hopes that if my review doesn't get my point across, the song possibly will. It's a shame, because you can see a clear divergence between the love that went into making the world and the game design choices and unendurable writing that weighed it down. I may be in the unpopular vote here. It just wasn't for me at all. I think it would be way easier to forgive the missteps if I could sit back and just take in the story. It has to be judged as a game. It has to be judged as a story that justifies the reasoning to be a game. I don't think it hits either target.
Grade: D
