Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice - A Descent into Madness

Hellblade: Senau's Sacrifice, created by Ninja Theory, is a dark psychological action adventure that follows the journey of the titular Senua.

I want to address up front that what I am going to write about will be dealing with spoilers and I strongly recommend if you have an interest to play the game and have not completed it to not read past a point I will mark which will deal with the themes that I enjoyed.

The game starts out fairly innocuous, it is a journey to bury the remains of her dearly departed, however things soon unravel and once supernatural elements are spoken about; it is soon thereafter experienced. It becomes a race to finish your task before it is too late.

That is because soon after starting her journey, Senua is beset upon by a curse, which grows in strength each time she fails. If it should reach her head then she will have failed her quest.

Voices first thought of as traditional narration, come into question, and over time one hears more and they are not all the same.

The foes she faces become ever more mystical and the puzzles she must solve have an air of over-complication in service of some grander scheme.

This all plays in service of her going on a journey through hell and it soon becomes apparent it is a journey of personal redemption and forgiveness.

From here on is SPOILER!!! territory, so please be aware

Hellblade, without the illusion is really a journey of looking through the lens of someone suffering with psychosis and is a character dealing with a lot of emotions that they never had a chance to allow for it to be properly processed. It is something that one learns over the course of the game as her condition was most likely passed down from her mother as her memories and interpretations show that she also has the "gift".

It is an interesting exploration how a culture long ago perceived mental illness and how it was "treated". Senua's Journey is as much an exploration of self as much as a journey to achieve a physical goal. It takes awhile to fully manifest, but the pointers are there and the more desperate and downtrodden she feels the stronger her beliefs in things become, which eventually leads to more vivid and detailed memories and perceptions of danger

Everything she does is all her interpretation of things, the fighting, the puzzles, the voices -  all these things, they are not real but to her they are very real and those obstacles and challenges act as as a physical block she must break through to find meaning and peace in a world that has shattered her perceptions of self and reality.

She has gone through some truly traumatic experiences and in spite of all the bad things she had endured, she found solace in someone who was able to keep the worst aspects of her condition at bay. It is when this person is killed does she lose her anchor and meaning which from that point work at and unravel the vestiges of her mental state, which was at a precariously point before.

At the start of the game, she seems appears normal and in control, displaying, as I interpret it, as showing a mental state of focus and purpose, however when confronted with thoughts of her past her mental state starts to show cracks and her memories slowly erode this sense of self. This "negative energy" eventually manifests as the "curse". This is something that with every failure slowly erodes her sense of self and is the physical representation of the strong belief that if she fails too much that she will unable to accomplish what she has set out to do.

Her journey is, unknowingly to her, to confront her dark past, to look at the demons that haunt her, confront them and eventually overcome them. She has convinced herself of what her objectives are and until she can prove this to herself she cannot progress further and be able to considered herself worthy of putting her love to rest.

In doing the narrative in this roundabout method does it eventually leads to key confrontations that provides one first-hand experience of what she believes in and how she interprets what has happened to her life. She is targeting the people she believes is responsible for her pain directly, targeting the problem and expecting a solution to arrive once it is no longer there to haunt her.

Her troubles start off very broadly painted as also an allusion to her trying to frame events in a broader less personal scale in an attempt to impersonalise her trauma but over the course of the travels, the instances become more specific and abstraction is more intense, which in my interpretation, is her journey to really look at her problems and those deep seeded and hidden insecurities. 

These moments is like watching someone attempting to come up with a way to solve very difficult problems and experiences, at first, in an detached way but eventually leads to her being more honest with themselves by starting to look and confronting parts of themselves they really do not want to deal with. I can only assume that these feelings are only amplified with someone that experiences psychosis as these untreated and raw emotions and interpretations must feel very real and inhabit a physical space in one's life.

Going deeper into this personal mental prison, which she struggles with and having difficulty defining what is real and what is not; is to me enduring and an eye-opening view into both the trauma she must have gone through and the suffering she must have endured with an undiagnosed mental condition that for all she knows is a "gift" which she is incapable of controlling.

These deep and dark feels eventually build to a point and in her darkest moments she almost loses herself to the overwhelming emotions of perceived failure and even then she somehow still finds it in herself to dig into what mental fortitude she has left and confronts this as well.

From the point of overcoming one of the strongest darkest in herself, this fills her with a powerful drive to complete her journey. Eventually Senua is confronted with her end goal in sight with a strong determination to succeed.

This final battle is with death itself, she is determined to best it and overcome it to bring her long journey to an end.

One soon finds out that it is a battle that she cannot win though, I found this as a nod to acknowledge that with all her accomplishments, that through all her journey of confronting and overcoming her past that in the end her most powerful and final battle is one of letting go and accepting the truth for what it is.

It is through her seeing what bound her so fiercely and hounded her so strongly throughout not only the game experience but her life as well, accepting it for what it is, relenting to what "fate has decreed" and deciding to make peace with it.

Senua's Sacrifice is her past and when she finally finds acceptance; so to does she experience a windfall moment of clarity. Even though she might not be completely over what has happened to her, she is able to find some semblance of calmness being able to finally accept some of her deepest and darkest regrets and failings with finding some personal motivation to attempt to move on with her life.

The game does not shy away from the ugliness that she must have endured and explores a lot of mature elements that have clearly haunted her with the associated trauma that the player experiences along side her, however Senua does confront her demons and finds a moment of happiness and closure in her life that even if short lived gives her freedom to try make something better of herself.

Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice is a game that is not often made, I for one am happy that it was, that really tries to "put you in the shoes" of the character and conveys its message well through this medium in its visual and audio story telling. It is a great effort in video game form to build awareness for those that suffer from things most people would not understand and does it in a way that doesn't shy away from trying to explore the concept by exposing elements on how bad it can be while still offering a message of hope of one is able to "get through it" as one sees Senua go through her troubles and helping her see her light.

Images Source:

IGDB Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice

Hellblade Official Website Gallery

Video Source:

Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice Enhanced for PC Trailer