Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

VideogamerAlice Bell

9/10

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is beautiful, discomforting, and compelling. It might challenge what you like about games, but challenge is good. You're doing yourself a disservice if you don't try it.

TechRaptorSamuel Guglielmo

9/10

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice manages to tell a thoughtful story about mental illnesses while also providing exciting gameplay and some absolutely fantastic visuals and audio. For anyone looking for a tight, well-paced, linear action game, this is it.

XboxEraAustin "Proven"

8.8/10

Hellblade is simply a great experience, and after finishing it for the very first time recently, I am even more excited for Hellblade II. The game is available on Game Pass, so if you haven’t taken the journey to Hellheim yet or want a quick refresher before the sequel releases on May 21st, it’s a game I fully recommend.

Xbox AchievementsDan Webb

88/100

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a harrowing journey into the fragility of the mind. It’s a masterpiece in storytelling, and while the game mechanics itself might not complement that throughout, they do a decent job of allowing Ninja Theory to deliver a mature story revolving around a sensitive subject matter. We hope that this opens up the door for more budget priced triple-A experiences, because this one was one hell of a ride!

Impulse GamerNathan Misa

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is best summarised as an assault on the senses, but in a very good way.

Pure NintendoSeth Coit

8/10

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, made by a unique group of folks of whom don’t necessarily represent an indie studio but rather AAA individual studio, made a m

GameSpotAlessandro Fillari

8/10

It's all a matter of perspective.

Nintendo World ReportMelanie Zawodniak

7.5/10

Though the puzzles are bland and the combat is stretched too thin, neither of those aspects is bad enough to ruin the incredible journey established by Hellblade’s narrative. I can’t overstate how effective the realistic depiction of psychosis is at making Senua’s journey incredibly intimate and compelling, and a strong attachment to her character kept me hooked right up to the end of the story. The incredible port by QLOC has kept everything that made Hellblade enthralling completely intact, and besides a low resolution it’s difficult to tell the difference between the Switch port and…

Video ChumsA.J. Maciejewski

7/10

One of last year's biggest surprises from veteran game developer Ninja Theory is finally available for Xbox One. If you still haven't played it yet then unsheathe your blade and let's see if it puts up a fight.

Sirus GamingEnricko Ozoa

6/10

You better have to choose if it’s worth spending your spare cash, because it might not be the game for you and it might be for others.

Analog Stick GamingJeff Young

Unscored

Hellblade is an experience. It is also a discussion about mental health, a subject often considered taboo in many forms of entertainment, let alone one being addressed through a video game. While characters with mental health issues do exist in the industry, they are rarely ever positioned as the ma

PolygonAshley Oh

Unscored

Hellblade is not an Orphean quest to retrieve a dead lover from the underworld. It’s not some epic tale of revenge. It’s an education and contextualization of being psychologically different in the time of Vikings and Celts. Nearly every facet of the game — whether it’s combat, puzzles or exploration — is deliberate, pointing back to the overarching theme of what people called “cursed” during that time. Hellblade successfully weaves metaphors of grief and loss into fundamental game mechanics and rich folklore, and through these I felt like I truly was able to understand how someone else sees t...