Sights & Sounds
- When running well (more on that in a minute), the game looks gorgeous. The character modeling, animation, and texture work during cutscenes is particularly great
- The lack of a motion blur toggle was a bit annoying
- The music is haunting, foreboding, and sparse until the credits where it takes a dive for the cheesy

Story & Vibes
- The entire story is pretty depressingly bleak--up to and including the ending and the game's take-home message about letting go
- This is all compounded by the apparently realistically depicted auditory and visual symptoms of psychosis. As the title screen notice reports, the developers interviewed neuroscientists and people with psychotic symptoms in order to provide a window into that world, but I'm no mental health professional, so I can't comment on the accuracy
- Senua's backstory is revealed bit-by-bit, and every one of those bits is depressing. Particularly dour "highlights" include the fate of her mother, the cruelty of her father, and the story of her and her lover
- As good as the story is, it drags a bit in the middle
- Depending on how gripping you find the story and setting, I'd suggest going into the ending blind. The ending is so good and unexpected if it hasn't been spoiled for you

Playability & Replayability
- Despite the sub 9-hour run length, I'm not sure I'm going to revisit this one. Not because it's bad, but because it's taxing
- When I say "taxing" I mean both emotionally (if the story resonates with you) and in terms of the difficulty
- The first and most prominent element of the game's difficulty is the looming threat of permadeath. Dying causes a dark mark to creep a little further up your arm, and dying too many times causes it to eventually reach your head. When this happens, you have to start the game over
- That makes combat a bit more stressful. Resist the urge to button mash. The game rewards good dodge timing (few i-frames), parrying (though learn to recognize the differences between each enemy and boss's light vs. heavy attacks), and guard breaking (with your kick)
- You do get a pretty significant weapon upgrade about 3/4 of the way through the game, and it makes the combat feel way more fun. That said, the game drags in the middle half before you get that upgrade
- There's no shame in lowering your difficulty if you're worried about losing your progress. If you insist on keeping your difficulty on hard, do your best to save your deaths for combat and not the puzzles and stealth segments
- If you feel stuck on one of the puzzles, remember your focus key/button, especially on rune doors. I though I was progression-blocked at one point until I remembered to use it on one

Overall Impressions
- Take some time early on to tweak your settings. On my setup, I found just running it in 1080p was the quickest way to solve the graphical stuttering
- My setup isn't a world-beater by any means, but the game still seems poorly optimized to me. I've run other games with similar or higher graphical capabilities on their highest settings at a great framerate, but I just could not get this one to work perfectly. Compare your specs to mine to see if you'll have an better or worse time running this game

Final Verdict
- 8/10 The price is a little steep for the package. It's a great game that unfortunately gets bogged down a little bit due to how it drags in the middle (you're too weak and not enough of the plot is unveiled). Could be optimized a little better too. In any case, it's definitely worth it during a good sale