Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

The story seemed good and I wanted to make it to the end, but the game play is just soooo slow I just can't. You run in slow motion and everything is just drawn out. The puzzles are very simple, as is the combat system. I enjoyed the story and graphics, but the game play is just slow and boring.

Playing Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice I understood that it is a story about accepting loss, fighting against inner demons forced on somebody by his closest circle of people/loved ones, and finally finding the strength and courage to face it all and move on from the past into a new life free from them. I also learnt some cool facts about Norse mythology. And that's where the good part ends... Even from the first minutes it was formed in me the impression that this game, in its effort to narrate its story, would get annoyingly verbose and unfortunately -for me- I was not wrong. The atmosphere and the plains that Senua goes through are there to tell a really impressive story, giving the idea that everything is created by Senua's imagination based on her trauma itself. But then, when you want to just take a minute and enjoy or ponder over the environment you got at least one voice talking and talking...and talking... I know this is the idea of the game and a feature that even Senua gets annoyed of it finally. That's the point of it, I guess. I would just have liked some eerie silence added here and there to this unstoppable blabbering, that for me took away part of the atmosphere of what I was seeing, because I had to focus on what I was hearing. And finally here comes the all flashy but completely clunky and devoid of lively colors Unreal Engine, which feels like playing a bleach washed game with its sickly colors. Again, I understand that this color palette helps in complimenting the cold and pallid colors of the land of the dead, but there is something with Unreal Engine that feels to me...cheap. In conclusion I decided to finish the game as I knew it was not a long one and give it a chance to impress me in any way, but I can not say I would recommend spending those 10-12 hours on it, as there are better games with similar atmosphere out there. It felt clanky, at times overly dramatic, predictable and excessively focused on a story that the devs probably believed it was really special and unique, but to me personally, it fell quite short.