HELLBLADE (PC/PS4): Remember what the dormouse said. FEED YOUR THREAD.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > HELLBLADE (PC/PS4): Remember what the dormouse said. FEED YOUR THREAD.

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exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

I just finished the game and it's quite beautiful how it all came together. I do think the whole permadeath thing was a bluff, but based on how the game resolves in its final moments, I think that was totally intentional on behalf of the developers.

I'm not sure if that's an experience I'd ever want to relive, but it's among the most unique and haunting games I've ever played. I'm glad that a title like Hellblade can exist.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2017 07:57

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 20:25

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Hellblade's plot isn't all that complex, so if you're expecting something with a lot of twists and turns then you'll be disappointed. Senua's journey into Hel to rescue the soul of her dead lover is just the framing device for learning about her character and adopting her own perception of the world. The story really isn't about what happens, but more thematically about feelings of grief, trauma, guilt, and acceptance. It's a very psychological game that concerns itself more with unraveling Senua's past than describing her present.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2017 08:49

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Keeping the game mechanically simple was I think a really smart design choice that contributes to the immersion of the experience. A skill tree where you level up and unlock Psycho Slash at Tier 3 would cheapen the storytelling and at worst stand in poor taste given the subject matter. Part of what makes Hellblade so unique is the constant subjectivity of Sensua's own perspective, and the appearance of any gamified conceits like a HUD or minimap would remove us from that uncertainty.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2017 14:00

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

The other thing is that Druth features pretty heavily in the Surt path and he more or less sets Senua off on her way after you kill the first two bosses, so doing Surt second seems like a more natural conclusion to his arc. Valravn's zone has a lot more to say about Senua's exile in the woods before she met Druth, but the puzzles there are quite a bit more complex.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2017 16:29

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

I was mostly just relieved when the combat was over since I really didn't like seeing Senua in danger. Her pained expressions whenever she gets hit or knocked down were a little too real for me. It's unclear from the story if she's ever encountered actual vikings in battle or if their appearance is just what she imagines them to be. I also thought it was ambiguous if Senua is purely fighting the demons in her own mind, or if she does actually murder a couple viking settlements and their clan leaders along the way.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2017 18:24

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Perestroika posted:

Assorted thoughts: The bit about "if the darkness reaches Senua's head it's game over" is almost definitely a bluff. I had it reach her shoulder during the Fenrir fight, die again, and then it just reset down to mid-forearm. Also, somehow I really liked how in the final area, instead of the usual cacophony of voices warning you about attacks from behind, there was just one single, calm voice left.

That message is kind of funny in retrospect since from a certain perspective, the darkness does eventually reach Senua's head, and her progress does end there, but it's because she finally learns to let go of fighting her grief and comes to terms with the loss of Dillion. The darkness that once manifested as a painful infection remains on Senua's body but she's now able to co-exist with it, in the same way her psychosis will forever be a part of her (though never the whole). That's what I got out of the ending, anyway.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2017 23:03

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

veni veni veni posted:

Alright guys I've been running around trying to figure out where to line up the birds in the area with hundreds of them for close to an hour. I'm about 5 minutes away from just deleting this game off my hard drive. Where the hell am I supposed to go? I've found all of the places the raven is standing walked through all of the gates except one that I still can't get to. It's the one on the structure that is to the left if you are facing the gate.

As I recall there's a gate you have to reset back after knocking down one of the bridges. When you walk under one of them they alter the environment, one of them should clear the path to the upper level.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2017 00:09

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

haveblue posted:

Question- When you enter the final portal to hell, the rim lights up with characters that seem to represent the story collectibles you've found. Does anything different happen if you have them all?

You get a hidden last monologue from Druth before you enter the portal.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2017 08:59

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Are any of the lorestones permanently missable? I think I already skipped one in Valravn's zone by mistake and I don't think I can get back until he's dead.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2017 14:12

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

If anybody is starting this game for the first time you can manually switch targets by using the right analog stick. There's no visual reticle like in Dark Souls, Senua just looks at them. I discovered this embarrassingly late into the game, like almost at the end.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2017 11:28

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Mr. Flunchy posted:

Can you help me out? I'm really hosed off with this game right now.

I'm in Helheim where I just got an 'R' rune and passed through a waterfall, which put my torch out. I ran forward to a pool of light, but it's autosaved and I can't get any further before the beast kills me (just before a balance beam). The walkthrough says to relight your torch, but I now don't have one.

Have died maybe 30-40 times here.

edit: Welp looks like I'm hosed. The game clearly thinks I'm holding a torch and is animating my character as if she is, but I can't light anything:

Was definitely in my top 5 of the year until now. gently caress.

That's unfortunate. Someone on reddit apparently has a save file prior to the torch sequence so you can properly light the brazier:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxREFzzMtV3teXlqWVl5bFVMUWc/view

You have to replace the file in C:\Users\XXXXX\AppData\Local\HellbladeGame\Saved\SaveGames

I have not tried this myself but it's worth a shot!

# ¿ Aug 12, 2017 13:44

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Other people have reported that you can still interact with the brazier even if the torch doesn't visibly display in Senua's hand, but you've probably tried that already. Ninja Theory posted yesterday that they're putting out a patch very shortly.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2017 13:47

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

^^ 6-8 hours.

Perestroika posted:

Yeah, even on my old as gently caress machine the game looked amazing with a really manageable performance impact. The art direction in this is stellar.

Anyway, it's a bit of an odd comparison, but somehow this game reminded me of Spec Ops: The Line quite a bit.

Both games essentially feature a journey into hell, one of them figuratively and the other quite literally. Both of them show a protagonist who is obsessed with their quest to save somebody or something, to the point of utter exhaustion and desperation. But they go at the same concept from different perspectives, to the point of essentially being mirrors of each other. In Hellblade, Senua's journey is transformative and healing. She begins as a deeply troubled and damaged person with only one single thing left to keep her going, but by facing her fears and confronting her memories she is able to claw her way back towards a semblance of peace. Her journey towards her obsession brings her very near to her breaking point, but in the end she is able to finally let go and move on, finally finding peace.

Meanwhile in Spec Ops, Walker begins as a reasonably healthy individual, but his journey is wholly destructive. At first he doesn't even care all that much about his goal, but as he goes in deeper and deeper he becomes ever more obsessed with finding some kind of resolution. And in doing so he becomes unhinged and damaged, and when he finally reaches his goal it turns out to be utterly hollow. The key difference, I would say, is that while both Walker and Senua start out with altruistic goals in mind, only Senua manages to hold on to her selflessness. Walker, on the other hand, becomes gradually more dismissive of the outside world and focused on himself, searching for a way to find a resolution for himself, revenge for the people he lost, searching for a way so that he could be the hero that saves Dubai.

Apart from that, there are also a handful of other more incidental similarities. Both games play a bit with the concept of the fourth wall, Spec Ops through its loading screen hints and Hellblade by literally looking the player in the eye. Both have a certain surreality with how the protagonists perceive their environments, though it's a bit more subtle in Spec Ops (e.g. the way your are always somehow moving downwards through the levels, deeper than what normal architecture should allow for). They also put a heavy emphasis on conveying a sense of attrition and fatigue suffered by their protagonists. Finally there's also a certain element of mental illness in Spec Ops, in the sense of shell shock and PTSD, though it doesn't really explore that part in nearly as much detail as Hellblade does.

I dunno where I'm going with this, I just found it neat that two so completely different games end up looking at quite similar themes, just from different angles. And they're kind of connected by default just by virtue of being fairly major titles that put a huge emphasis on their story, themes, and presentation.

While Hellblade shares a lot of similarities to SpecOps: The Line with its psychological perspective, the game it most resembled to me while playing it was Shadow of the Colossus. "A warrior enters a forbidden land to slay gods and bargain for the soul of their dead lover, gradually shedding their own humanity in the process." The dreamlike, almost storybook presentation and single-minded obsession of the main character were also thematically similar, although both are very unique games in their own right.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2017 16:07

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

I think Surt is an easier fight than Valravn but neither of them are particularly difficult.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2017 00:11

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

I was thinking earlier about the necessity for combat at all in Hellblade and concluded it was probably a purposeful decision to show how Senua's psychosis also makes her a skilled warrior. If she was just completely outmatched and beat down the entire game then her journey would be an even more dreadful experience than it already was. Instead it reinforces the theme that not all aspects of her darkness are weaknesses, and in fact her enhanced senses and ability to see patterns can work to her advantage even when squaring up against 10-foot tall demonic northmen.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2017 00:36

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

This is kind of an odd request but would someone happen to have a 100% lorestone savefile on Steam? I've been playing through the game again and I think I permanently missed one. Would that even work?

# ¿ Aug 13, 2017 21:28

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

veni veni veni posted:

So do you guys think Senoa is actually up in the North, fighting dudes she perceives as demons, or is she just sitting in a chair in a hut somewhere tripping balls?

Ultimately I think what the game wants us to conclude is that everything Senua experiences on her journey is real, because from her own perspective there's no difference between perception and reality.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2017 21:56

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

My personal take on it is following the massacre of her village, a Celtic warrior reforged the great Hellblade Gramr, fought to the gates of Helheim, and bargained for the soul of her dead lover Dillion in exchange for joining Hela's army at Ragnarok.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2017 22:04

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Zerilan posted:

I think closer to the former just because thinking of it as the latter would take away from how physically draining the ordeal is for her.

I guess you could say she was

Hela tired.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2017 00:53

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

I think any potential sequel would risk gamifying the various elements that all come together in Hellblade for the sake of pointless feature creep. People would expect a longer play time, more varied combat, more challenging puzzles, and at that point are you really trying to tell a story or turn Senua's psychosis into Detective Vision with voices? I think Ninja Theory for their part were very thoughtful in beating down any shred of video gameyness where it would normally arise. Even limiting the number and frequency of combat encounters was a purposeful decision. Senua has already lived a deeply tragic life, so setting her off on another psychotic episode so that we get to play Hellblade 2 seems petty and cruel. There will be no more stories after this one.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2017 10:05

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

I played through the game again to get all the lorestones. Here are some little touches I noticed the second time around:

- When Senua lights the sacrificial altars in Surt's area, you can see brief flashes of Galena burning at the stake.
- The ground in Surt's area pulses with Senua's breathing, slowing up or down with her heartrate.
- It's suggested that Senua was able to sense the plague in the water before all the other townspeople were infected.
- The Shadow is the element of Senua's psyche that represents her hatred and rage. She silences it during her self-exile in the woods but it returns upon seeing Dillion's corpse.
- Druth's secret monologue about a "man in black" betraying Senua's tribe to the Northmen might implicate Zynbel, her father.
- Every input after a perfect parry leads to a different attack from the normal animation. Light gives Senua a spinning attack that combos into any normal string, Heavy is an uppercut with a knockdown, and Melee leads into a cool-looking shoulder bash.
- In addition to breaking an opponent's guard, Senua's left hook melee is a good way to extend combos. An easy one for example is LL M HH.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2017 15:11

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

My wife gets severe migraines that can cause visual hallucinations, so I asked her to play a little of the game over the weekend to get her thoughts on it. After about an hour: "so she hears voices that say you suck and you're gonna die. Big deal, I get those all the time!"

# ¿ Aug 17, 2017 19:20

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

https://twitter.com/NinjaTheory/status/898825397441318913

I think Ninja Theory have mentioned they would need between 300k-400k copies sold to begin making a profit. Steamspy has them around ~110k after 10 days on PC, so if the usual ratios between PS4 + PC players hold they may have already crossed that benchmark. I do hope Hellblade ends up being a success and encourages more studios to strike out on their own with inventive concepts like this.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2017 11:47

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

strangemusic posted:

Fuuuuuuuuuuck this game was/is good.

I wanted more gods to fight, and there were definitely bits that got waaaay too disorienting in the dark, but it's just killer moment after killer moment. The story is incredible. The character performances are incredible.

So if I'm reading this right:

Senua's mother claimed to have a "sight" that her father resented that she passed down to her daughter, who was plagued by mental illness that became stigmatized as "being cursed." One day, a plague came and killed a lot of people that Senua may have had a premonition about because of her sight, so her father blames her curse for the plague and locks her indoors. She escapes his captivity and goes to live in the woods, becoming beset by darkness and insanity. She finds Dillion and falls in love after watching him train, but he and everybody else are killed when Vikings invade and burn their village. Senua's mother is burned by the Vikings [I may be wrong here - is the implication that she was killed by her husband?? The voices during the pyre sequence seem to suggest this] and Dillion is ritually sacrificed by the Vikings.

So, in the very first enemy encounter - we see her being cut down by a shadow enemy. It is stated that only the dead can enter Hell. Are we seeing a pure journey through the afterlife, in that case?

You have things a little out of order.

Senua's mom was burned at the stake by her father Zynbel when Senua was five years old. She repressed this memory and believes her mother killed herself to save Senua from her curse. Fearing his daughter has the same curse, Zynbel keeps Senua out of sight and rarely permits her to leave the house. As a teenager, Senua encounters Dillion training for the warrior trials. The two enlist together and fall in love. Dillion's support gives Senua the strength to ultimately leave her father. A few years later, a plague sets upon the town killing many people, including Dillion's own father. Zynbel publicly blames Senua for bringing this curse upon the village, and Senua believes it herself. She sets out into the woods in hopes to cure her darkness. While living in exile she encounters a badly burned man named Druth, who tells her stories of the Northmen and his own darkness before succumbing to his wounds. Senua returns to her village only to find its inhabitants massacred, and Dillion displayed in a gruesome Blood Eagle formation. This is what triggers Senua's full psychotic breakdown. Informed by Druth's stories, she concludes that Dillion has been sacrificed the Hela, the Viking god of the dead. Believing the head to be the seat of the soul, Senua takes Dillion's skull and travels to Helheim to bargain for his immortal life. It's suggested that Senua can enter Hel because she can see the world of both the living and the dead, or what Druth calls the Sight.

As for "what if it was all a dream / she was dead the whole time?!" speculation, I think the game would rather us conclude that everything Senua experiences is indeed real, because to her there is no difference between objective and subjective reality. Everything we see and do is from the viewpoint of Senua's own mind, and since we are never allowed to see it from any other perspective, it's probably safest to take everything at face value.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2017 03:39

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Mindblast posted:

From what I understand (endgame spoiler) without Druth everything would have been different for Senua. Her culture is quite different, if it werent for Druth she would not have that information on northern mythology. Not only did it provide a form and fuel for her psychosis, it also gave her the illusion of an objective to chase. She was glad she met Druth but in the long run it ended up being detrimental.

While I think you could make that argument, I would say that Druth's stories help to give Senua a sense of purpose in the depths of her despair. In many ways it's Senua's own fantastical thinking that allows her to order her reality into some achievable quest, even if it's one that she eventually must abandon in order to move on. I think Senua's Sacrifice strikes at the heart of why we have myths in the first place. They imbue a greater cosmic purpose to a chaotic and uncaring universe where bad things happen without reason. By mythologizing her own grief, Senua can externalize her fractured psyche into an enemy that she can fight, and ultimately triumph over. The end of Hellblade was reminiscent of the proposition in The Life of Pi. You can believe a grieving woman suffers a psychotic breakdown with the death of the only man who ever loved her, or you can believe a warrior fights to the gates of hell to save her lover's immortal soul. Both realities might be true, but which would you prefer?

# ¿ Aug 22, 2017 13:39

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Over There posted:

I missed one of the runes. Do I need to go back?

Do you mean the lorestones? They're totally optional, the only thing that unlocks with 100% of them is an achievement and a 30-second cutscene that doesn't affect the main story.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2017 16:05

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

I can't say anything more without spoiling it for you, but what people interpreted as a permadeath message is not what it seems.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2017 12:48

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

SirSamVimes posted:

I like to imagine that all the stuff about going to Helheim actually literally happened. Senua is a warrior in a world of myth and magic, but also suffers from psychosis so you get this blend of genuinely fantastical things along with her mental illness making them even weirder.

The psychologist Julian Jaynes famously proposed a theory in the 1970s that suggested before ~1000 BCE, humans did not have an internalized consciousness, that is to say their brains were compartmentalized into one section that spoke and another that obeyed. Schizophrenic behavior would therefore have been commonplace in the ancient world, as most or all people would have heard voices outside their own commanding them to do things, so it's not hard to imagine interpreting those voices as God or a pantheon of gods in the case of Norse mythology. It's easy to see the parallels between psychotic behavior and the mythological sort of thinking that gives us our folklore and religion. In this sense, Senua's mental illness is her way of ordering an unjust and cruel world into a purposeful quest.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2017 10:58

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

The developer diaries are fun to watch. In earlier versions of the game the combat had directional guards like For Honor and Senua could send doubles of herself to attack enemies. Also when they hired Melina Juergens to play Senua for realsies she had six weeks to get into shape for the role and ended up liking it so much that she took up MMA as a hobby.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2017 14:24

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

It's sold over 160k copies on Steam and has been the top digital-only download on the PSN store for almost three weeks now, 3rd overall behind Sonic Mania and GTAV. Ninja Theory has said they only need to sell between 300k-400k copies for the game to be profitable, and given the breakdown between PS4/PC users, it's probably already surpassed that.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2017 22:28

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Well we know Senua herself is from Orkney, and the Vikings were living in Norway during the 8th and 9th centuries. If you take Druth's directions to Helheim as gospel, then Senua would have sailed east across the sea and north, putting Helheim somewhere along the western coast of Norway.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2017 15:34

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

Somebody on reddit kind of lifehacked that anyway if you're interested in replaying certain sections, it's a whole folder with each save point in the game with notations for the most memorable segements.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8PZrx453IhiUlJmY0dHTXNEM2s/view

# ¿ Aug 31, 2017 08:17

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

The interpretation I'm most comfortable with is that what "actually" happened is ultimately irrelevant, since everything Senua experienced was real to her, and the ambiguity is interesting in and of itself. Given the choice though I tend to favor a more mythological reading of events because a warrior woman yanking a godslaying sword out of a burning tree and battling to the gates of hell to save the soul of her dead lover is metal af.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2017 15:35

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

MeatwadIsGod posted:

I'm guessing Zinbel is a druid of the local tribe - at least he dresses like one - and thought that sacrificing her would be beneficial to the community since he would be purging her "darkness," but apparently if you collect all the runestones you get a secret conversation from Druth implying Zinbel could have been a quisling for the Norsemen so who knows what his real motives were.

Zynbel killed Galena at a much earlier point though, when Senua was only five years old. My take is that being a community leader he was probably embarrassed and felt his social status was threatened by Galena's psychotic episodes. He believed her to be cursed by the Gods, at a time back when being a woman with opinions was already enough of a case to be burned at the stake.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2017 15:47

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

These are pretty neat. Somebody made mock-up movie posters using the game's photo mode.

https://twitter.com/duncanbirnie/status/903625534353133568

# ¿ Sep 2, 2017 17:20

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

veni veni veni posted:

While I don't disagree with you, it's logical to speculate what really happened. It's a question that won't get answered, but it doesn't need to be shut down either.

Read my post again. I'm not shutting down the discussion, rather I said the ambiguity is what makes the game interesting. And precisely because it is subjective, the question of what is real and what is not is ultimately irrelevant. Everything was real to Senua.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2017 22:14

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

It's the same kind of situation as asking if Rick Deckard was really a Replicant, or who among MacReady and Childs was still human at the end of the Thing. The presence of the question is more interesting than providing an answer.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2017 22:48

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

precision posted:

I usually don't get mad at Yahtzee's reviews but he gets actual facts wrong (the permadeath thing, for starters) and the whole tone of it was like "punching downwards". Like yeah, it's his gimmick to hate, but I can think of dozens of reviews this year where he talked about how good the game was while criticizing the few things it got wrong. Dumping so hard on a $30 passion project that at least tries some cool stuff is just lame. I expected him to at least praise the fact the game has no HUD and teaches you everything about how to play it without text boxes saying "press button to parry!" etc.

Yahtzee's entire gimmick for years has been willfully misunderstanding even the most basic conventions of video games, which for a game like Hellblade that tells you nothing about how to play it must have been a field day. He's the living embodiment of the too cool gamer stereotype who doesn't need any of that handholding while failing to grasp even tutorial level-like mechanics, either out of a tired allegiance to his perennial games r bad tone or because he's a tremendous idiot. Also unsurprisingly, the type of viewer who is still into ZP videos in 2017 has already decided that Hellblade is an SJW game for feminists because it has an empathetic female protagonist who isn't even that hot.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2017 10:01

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

In case you were hoping this game did well, Hellblade was the most downloaded PSN store game in August for Europe and second only to Madden in the US. It's currently hovering around 150k copies sold on Steam, and Ninja Theory themselves have said they'd need to sell somewhere between 300-400k total to break even. I really hope their example will lead to more games like this in the future. Short, narrative-driven games with high production values that aren't cheap pixel art pieces of crap are extremely my thing.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2017 10:27

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 20:25

exquisite tea: Apr 21, 2007; Carly shook her glass, willing the ice to melt. "You still haven't told me what the mission is."

She leaned forward. "We are going to assassinate the bad men of Hollywood."

I'll get around to playing it eventually but Divinity: Original Sin II is coming up soon and that's going to be a mega-time waster.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2017 18:05

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > HELLBLADE (PC/PS4): Remember what the dormouse said. FEED YOUR THREAD.

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