The curious case of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
So for those living under a rock, Team Ninja released their latest video game entitled: “Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice” on the 8th of November. Along with a “statement” saying that if you die too many times in the game your save game gets erased. And of course, pretty much every single “video game journalist” and I use this term extremely loosely jumped on this and reported it as fact. Some of them even went as far to lower their review scores because of this. It also sparked the whole debate again about difficulty levels in games, we already know how these “video game journalist” feel about difficulty levels in video games.
Which I touched on in a previous article but that is a whole different discussion for another time. And while some journalists and gamers berated Ninja Theory for trolling people, I actually would have enjoyed such a mechanic in a video game as it would have definitely added a whole new aspect to the game. And very few games have dabbled in the permadeath mechanic. But that is beside the point, what I want to highlight here is video game journalists and reviewers. How can you report something as a fact irrespective if it was a clever troll that plays into themes and psychology of the game and main character, without actually testing and confirming that it is true?
The game was already released and reviews were coming out thick and fast. How easy would have been to just start up the game and test this? Even TotalBiscuit fell for it without doing proper research (He has since deleted the Tweet where he ranted about it), which is kind of ironic considering how pro consumer he is. And then people wonder I take most mainstream reviewers and review website with a grain of salt. If they actually played the game from start to finish and tested all its gameplay mechanics they would have immediately figured out that it wasn’t part of the gameplay mechanic. Especially considering the game is only eight hours in length.
[Editorial Note:] I am downloading Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice on PS4 this evening, so expect a review shortly.
Nice..following you for more. 👍
Interesting topic, but as I understand, the issue for reviewers was a combination of three things:
You know, these days, it's all about who gets the article out first - he gets the most revenue
The game had a review embargo, that ended with the games official release date and time
Not many review copies of Hellblade have been sent out and even those journalist who got the game code, did get it fairly close the to embargo time. Some said they got the review code like 8 hours before the embargo was lifted and remember, this is a 8 hour long game (+-).
This things combined meant the critics tried to go through the game quickly, not really having time to test little quirks of the game, just to get the review out fast. This specially applies to bigger sites that focus on written reviews.
Great post! Would you mind if I included it in today's "best of gaming"?
Won't mind at all go ahead. :) Thanks for the feedback!