YMMV / Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

• Awesome Boss:
  • Garmr, Guardian of Hel. Not only is the actual fight praised as one of the best in the game, the sheer horror of his design combined with the absolute terror the fight itself invokes leads to one very memorable battle.
  • And the final boss of the game — shades of Garmr, Sutr, and Valravn all come back to team up against Senua as she nears Hela herself.
• Awesome Music:
  • The original soundtrack composed by Andy LePlegua and David Garcia Diaz is properly evocative, transitioning between heartbreaking, empowering, warm and terrifying throughout the game to reflect Senua's mental state.
  • The two licensed tracks the game uses are just as awesome: Just Like Sleep, the track used in the trailers and in remixed form during the final boss fight, and the credits has Illusion by VNV Nation.
  • From the trailer for "Senua's Saga", we have a much more badass-looking Senua roaring along to Heilung's "In Maidjan", specifically the lyrics "Tawol Athodu: Ek Erilaz Owlthuthewaz Niwaremariz Saawilagar Hateka Harja" (in English - "For this prayer: I, the runemaster, Odin's servant, call upon the one of the sun to aid our armies").
• Complete Monster: Zynbel is a fanatical Druid who had his mentally ill wife burned alive. Zynbel would then horrifically abuse Senua, his daughter suffering a similar illness, for years, whether by subjecting Senua to beatings and torturous rituals or keeping her imprisoned in his pit for days. After Senua leaves him, Zynbel guided the Northmen to his village in Orkney, letting them kill everyone there on the condition that they spare him.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • While Senua's "darkness" is never explicitly identified given the game's pre-psychiatry setting, it is likely a form of psychosis and schizophrenia which she has lived with her whole life and was passed down by her mother, Galena. The game explicitly credits experts of psychosis in the beginning of the opening credits. Auditory and visual Hallucinations and Hearing Voices are shown to be the two primary symptoms.
  • In the game, "the darkness" seems to be treated as a pre-modern term for "mental illness". In the narration, it's mentioned that Druth had his own darkness. The dialogue that immediately follows suggests that he suffered from some form of PTSD due to his experiences with the Northmen.
  Druth: I can still smell it. The sweet sickly smell of burning human flesh. And I still hear their cries carried in the wind. Do you hear them too, Senua?
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: While the game got a lot of praise for its story, its combat and the "find the runes" mechanics were criticized for being boring and repetitive.
• Nightmare Fuel: Has a page. Very deservedly.
• Polished Port: The Nintendo Switch version holds up surprisingly well in terms of visuals and performance compared to other platforms despite the obvious graphical sacrifices needed to get the game running on mobile hardware in the first place. While many of the cutscenes in the Switch version are FMVs as opposed to being rendered in-engine, the transitions between them and actual gameplay are so seamless that most players would barely notice, particularly in handheld mode.
• She Really Can Act: Melina Juergens was just a video editor at Ninja Theory and was merely meant to be a stand-in mocap actress for a real actress. That clearly did not pan out, as she gave such an emotional and well-received performance for her role that Ninja Theory used her as the lead actress instead. So impressive was her actress's performance that her first role helped win her a freaking BAFTA Award for Best Performer, and was agreed by critics to be one of the best parts of the game. Not bad at all for somebody who literally never acted before!
• Special Effect Failure: The game is graphically gorgeous, but certain sound effects are very compressed, such as the sound of footsteps and wind, which the player will likely be hearing more than any other sound. The game recommends wearing headphones, which only makes this more apparent. Whenever the game goes quiet, hearing Dillian's voice also makes it apparent that his voice actor had background noise during recording.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Some people have compared this game positively to Valhalla Rising.
• Tearjerker:
  • The final sequence, where Senua remembers that her father had killed her mother, flying into a murderous rage... only to be brought down just before reaching Hela herself. She then offers to trade her soul for Dillion's before sadly saying:
    Senua: But if you won't, you will have to kill me, because I have nothing left. No fear. No hate. No quest. Nothing.
  • Senua tragically letting go of Dillion's skull, having finally accepted that she will never get him back. Her body movements (both as herself and as Hela), the cinematography, lighting and background music all contribute to the scene's effectiveness, but what really hits hardest is Melina Juergens' delivery of this line:
    Senua: (In tears) Good-bye, my love.
  • The ending credits song, Illusion by VNV Nation is incredibly hard-hitting, both due to its soft beat and piano melody, and its lyrics which seem to be about grief and loss, psychological trauma, the challenge of trying to determine what's real and what's not, and confronting one's inner demons. It really serves to emphasize the core themes of the game and gives a perfect sense of finality to Senua's journey.
    I know it's hard to tell how mixed up you feel
    Hoping what you need is behind every door
    Each time you get hurt, I don't want you to change
    Because everyone has hopes, you're human after all
    The feeling sometimes, wishing you were someone else
    Feeling as though you never belong
    This feeling is not sadness, this feeling is not joy
    I truly understand. Please, don't cry now

    Please don't go, I want you to stay
    I'm begging you please, please don't leave here
    I don't want you to hate;
    For all the hurt that you feel,
    The world is just illusion, trying to change you
• That One Boss: Garmr, Guardian of Hel. At later stages of the fight you are completely unable to see the boss, which means the only way to dodge his attacks is to mash buttons frantically, hoping you won't get hit and turning the entire battle into a slog that would make Bed of Chaos proud. There are two ways to predict it at this stage — have a set of headphones on and keep the noise "in front" of you, and you'll be able to see him start his leap, or when using a controller, keep facing in the direction that triggers vibration.
• That One Level: Good luck on the fire maze of the Swamp Shard Trial. Senua must find three runes while being pursued by a fire. If you never noticed that runes have be focused on from just the right angle and distance, it's because you didn't have to do it in mere seconds in the previous sections of the game. And you'll need to do all three in one go as the game does not save your progress between them. And each failure will make you watch Senua think she's burning to death, the rot spread up her arm, and a brief intro to the scenario in all its unskippable glory.
• Win Back the Crowd: Those critical of Ninja Theory after DmC: Devil May Cry consider this to be a step up, even though it has its problems.
• The Woobie: Senua. She has been put through absolute hell her entire life, and it's practically impossible to leave the game feeling anything but sorry for her. Whether it be the death of her mother at five years old at the hands of her father, Zynbel's horrifyingly abusive treatment of Senua, the loss of Dillion (the only person other than her mother to treat her compassionately and with understanding) to a Viking raid or the constant torment she experiences because of her psychosis, Senua's life has been one of constant turmoil and pain.
  • And the worse part is? She is living in a time period eons before psychiatry and adequate, humane treatment for mental illnesses existed. She has absolutely no hope of ever curbing the extent of her psychosis. So she wanders the world tormented by voices and hallucinations, surrounded by people who can’t, or won’t, understand her and choose to ostracize her.

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