Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

I'm not going to write a review on the game, because that's what everyone is doing. Instead I want to give you my perspective on Senua' s Sacrifice and the amazing work they did to make this game, plus how it has slightly altered my full time job.

I will start off by saying that I am an EMT for my full time job. I mainly transport patients and I do not do 911 calls. But because I am transport I am steady shuffling people all over. Some of those people are psychiatric patients that may hear voices or hallucinate. And here is where Hellblade comes in. In Hellblade you play as Senua, a woman with psychosis who ventured into the woods to try to cure herself only to fail and return to her village and find it slaughtered. And as if that weren't bad enough her husband/lover was blood eagled. If you don't know what that is you can Google it or for a less graphic description we can just say brutally tortured to death. So she cracked. She has psychosis where she hallucinates. She hears voices. And they got worse.

I've never had a psychosis so I wouldn't be able to describe it to you from my perspective. The developers of Hellblade realized that too, so they scored two mental health professionals and interviews with several folks that have different psychosis to get points of view and functionality of life while dealing with alterations to interpreting life. And they worked long and hard to make represent the psychosis Senua experiences on the screen and in the audio. The work they did was phenomenal, and chilling quite frankly, in show casing a character with mental health issues as the main character.

Stairs and trees have silhouetted eyes that watch you move, faint voices tell you that you are going to fail or fall, the world around you ignites in fire that extinguishes once you run past a certain boundary. It is chilling to think of interpreting life in this manner all the time, and some people do.

The gameplay is immersive, and there is no tutorial. You have to learn quickly, look up the controls, and don't suck at playing. If you fail you begin growing "rot" on your right hand. The more you fail the more you rot. The rot will grow up your arm, and if you fail enough to allow the rot to claim your head your story is over. Because the head is the throne of the soul, and if it is claimed by rot you die.

Senua is attempting to venture into Hel to retrieve the soul of her husband from Hella herself. To do so she will have to find Nordic runes to unlock doors and defeat manifestations of northmen and representations of some of the gods the selves in order to progress into Hel. All while fighting her own madness. And you dont know what is real that you are fighting or not. How much of what Senua is seeing is real ia really up to your interpretation. I've only been able to play a few hours due to hanging out with my three month old who is all the adorable, but I do have to say what I have played has been amazing.

Check out my playthrough so far here. Be sure to follow if you haven't already.

/v/165415621?sr=a&t=7500s

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed! Steem on my friends!

On a side note it is great to be back writing on steemit. Life got a little busy, but it is good to be back.

Picture obtained from a Google search. Not my own screenshot. Just throwing that out there. Not claiming it as me.