Perfection in videogames is impossible. As well as it seems impossible to find a game in which there are only negative elements. In the middle of the paradox we find those kind of games whose only objective is to fight against the player, appearing as imprecise and frustrating for a narrative purpose. Games like Nier Automata or Drakengard, whose amount of endings is linked with the massive number of runs requiered to fully understand the story Yoko Taro has chosen to tell, are made in order to make people feel what some of the enemies of those stories were perceiving. Inside a medium as videogames, interactivity and storytelling moves both in the same direction. Expressions like "I would see a movie if I wanted to experience a story" doesn't work with the quoted productions, because the only way a person can really connect with the ideas of the creator, with the worldbuilding and all the iconic heroes, is playing that game, despite all the terrible and uncomfortable moments we will be forced to experience. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice follows this same direction, but fullfilling a different purpose.
Ninja Theory, with Hellblade, wanted to create a maximum expression of mental illness inside videogame medium. They wanted to grant us a way to comprehend what a person as Senua senses in her daily life, suffering from psychosis. We follow her journey through hell in order to save the love of her life, Dillion, with the help of the storyteller Druth while the shadows of the past of the protagonist seeks us in every moment. All this journey hides us more than what we see, because there are secrets we don't know and we notice this as soon as game mechaniques starts to repeat in a strange way, when a menancing annoucement of an hypotetical permadeath seems to never happens, when the obtainment of all the collectibles is essential to unlock a terrible secrets which changes our perspective of everything we have experienced and every character we have met. Hellblade tricks the gamer in a way not so different from what the northern myths has done to vikings. We discovers, going down inside this mad journey, that Hellblade wants to be a sort of encyclopedia of all the stories of vikings gods, ending to criticize them because they are nothing else than a way to calm fears and visions of those populations, justifing all the terrible and non-sensical acts they did, mostly for a cold search for power. Senua is a great warrior, and every fight is not so dangerous as it seems, also because she is helped by the voices she hears in her mind. At the same time what creates an unbalanced difficulty is the increasing amount of enemies and powerful figures we find, never truly defeating anyone. Because all the puzzles, all the mysterious dreams and memories we explore, every rune is nothing else than a way to escape from the past, with the final objective of making peace with it. Hellblade is an anti-game for all these reasons, but it is the strongest experience I have ever done in years of gaming.