Why you shouldn’t play Hellblade.
Hellblade is a game that is designed to get inside your head. The audio design features binaural or “3D” sound recording for the voices Senua hears near-constantly in her head, so that the player also experiences her feelings of being surrounded on all sides, for good or ill. Visually, the environments frequently change without warning, leaving you struggling to work out what’s real within the game world. After the first combat section, the game issues you with a dire warning: with every defeat in combat, Senua succombs further to “the darkness”, and too many such defeats will wipe out the player’s progress.
This is all intense stuff if you’ve ever suffered from similar issues yourself. Having had some very mild personal experiences of auditory and visual hallucinations during periods of intense stress, I still found nothing but beauty and interest in the game’s sound and graphic design (with one exception I’ll get to in a minute); but the perma-death thing concerned me. One side-effect of my anxiety is that I’m not always the calmest person during combat sequences - I often need to take a long, long break from a game after getting caught in a combat-anxiety-death loop - so Hellblade started to look potentially unwinnable from my point of view. (Of course, then the rumour started circulating that this warning was in fact a fourth-wall-breaking example of Senua being an unreliable narrator. I refrain from spoilers, though I will say that I have now completed the game.)
Some reviewers have questioned the ethics of making a game that sensitively portrays mental health problems while rendering it potentially unplayable for people who are living with similar issues themselves. No endeavour like Hellblade will ever be above all criticism, because it’s tackling a set of problems that have no single, reliable solution, if any can be found at all. These concerns didn’t make me dislike the game, but all the same, I would be wary of recommending it to people who are going through a particularly difficult time, as it’s far more liable to induce stress than relieve it.
Personally, the only part of the game that I found uncomfortably stressful was the level called “Sea of Corpses”. As the name suggests, it’s not meant to come across as somewhere you’d like to go for a relaxing mini-break. It’s basically what it sounds like: an unrelenting squishy red quagmire made up of the loudly wailing reanimated corpses of the damned, and it also happens to be the arena for probably the biggest hack-and-slash wave-based combat section in the game. I had a panic attack while playing this level; I’m not sure whether this was due to the frustration of barely limping away from the endlessly reappearing bad guys, or just the unrelentingly distressing atmosphere. I mean, it was a stunning piece of level design, but as a veteran horror fan who doesn’t react much to gore I was overwhelmed by the sheer awfulness of it. It’s was amazingly well-done looking back on it, but how can I possibly recommend playing something that left me physically aching from the sheer weight of the psychological symptoms it induced?
Why you should play Hellblade.
Well, I’m going to tell you why I would - with a few caveats. As I mentioned earlier, this is not a game to play when you’re stressed. A recent survey conducted by Dave* showed that over half of gamers like to play in order to relieve their feelings of stress and tension. Please do not play Hellblade for that, unless you are feeling particularly emotionally robust and are a Zorro-level master of animated swordplay.
But Hellblade is an amazing game. I love it, and believe it deserves all the love it received at the BAFTAs. It is beautifully designed, and it teaches and reinforces so many important lessons about mental illness, such as:
- Mental illness is not a modern invention: Senua’s Sacrifice takes place in the 8th century, and yes, the designers really did their research into how people with mental illnesses were historically treated by their communities. Society may have changed beyond all recognition, but the essential humanity that makes it up has remained more constant than you might believe. (As a side-note: a medievalist by education, this is one of the most eye-opening lessons I took away from my Master’s degree, and I have been trying to convince people of it for so long!)
- Mental illness does not have to define your whole personality: Senua’s entire lived experience is seen through the lens of her psychosis, but that experience is more than just a list of symptoms. She has a career: excelling as a warrior thanks to her unusual perceptiveness (which some critics have attributed to an overly “magical” portrayal of psychosis, but I prefer to think of as just another quality she possesses as a whole, well-rounded character). She has been treated badly by her father and others in her village, but she has experienced intense and entirely reciprocated love: first from her mother, and again from her beloved Dillion, whose appreciation, patience, and understanding of her never wavers, and is never reduced to an act of charity. Senua and Dillion’s bond inspires both of them to greater things than they would have been capable of individually; and as Dillion supports Senua in managing her symptoms and continuing with her life, so Senua defends and helps Dillion with her deep reserves of strength, intelligence, and determination.
- If you suffer from a mental illness, you are not alone in your experience: Though my mental illness is not the same as Senua’s (to recap: she has psychosis, I have chronic anxiety), there were so many moments in this game that I recognised, and that moved me because of that. It’s easy to fall into a pattern of assuming that your symptoms would be inexplicable to other people, or else are so common that they’re not worth talking about at all. A running dialogue in your head between the part of yourself that feels confident and positive, and the part that despises you and is embarrassed that you would even try to succeed at something, is an experience I’m familiar with. It’s also not something you see much in fiction, outside of that part in a super-villain’s origin story right before they take the serum and turn into a sixty-foot-tall lizard to resolve their daddy issues (or whatever). Any heroic suffering is usually implied in the character’s actions, rather than explicitly portrayed from their own viewpoint. There still aren’t that many role models in fiction for people with mental health problems, despite the growing evidence that many (perhaps even most) people will suffer to some degree at some point in their lives. So Senua, who is portrayed positively yet with uncompromising honesty, does a great service to a huge number of people; as do her creators, by simply sharing a common type of experience that nevertheless isn’t often acknowledged.
So, to answer my original question, should you play Hellblade? Yes, absolutely. Just be sure to take care of yourself - take a break if you need to, try not to let the stress get on top of you. (I am still talking about playing the game, although if you can follow this advice in everyday life too... good for you.) Oh, and if for whatever reason you don’t make it to the end, do treat yourself anyway to the song “Just Like Sleep” by Passarella Death Squad that plays over the final level, because it is too awesome to miss out on.
* The TV channel, admittedly giving it only slightly more credibility than some random bloke called Dave; but reliable enough to be quoted at the BAFTAs, anyway.
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