I can’t stop playing Dark Souls 2 and it’s going to kill me. OK, so that’s a bit of a redundant statement—of course The Hard Game will kill me, but I mean, I really can’t stop. Back when it first released, I forced myself through it so I could be part of the conversation, but I didn’t like what I played, and no one talked to me about it! Bum deal, if you ask me. Years later, I finally decided to give Scholar of the First Sin a try, if only to play through the three DLC expansions, which I heard were pretty damn good. 

Big surprise: they’re pretty damn good. Thank goodness my partner is still studying abroad, because if she saw how I’ve been spending my days—well, I don’t want to think about it. Eat, sleep, Dark Souls, and so on. But, besides Dark Souls, I’ve dipped into a few new games throughout the week that I’m excited to play more of. First up is LawBreakers, the new FPS from Boss Key Studios (Cliff Bleszinski's new joint), and even though I’ve only played an hour, I’m surprised by how much I dig it. The classes came off as Overwatch imitations at first, but they’re mostly characterized by locomotion styles. There’s the lumbering rocket jumping character, an assassin with a grappling hook, a soldier with a sprint that basically turns him into an Unreal Tournament character for a few seconds, a chunky robot with a heavy charge dash and a powerful shotgun, and a bunch more I’ve yet to play with. 

I know I’ll be soliciting PC Gamer Club members in our Discord server throughout the weekend to play with me. And you better play with me. I also dipped into West of Loathing, a slapstick comedy RPG from, surprise, the Kingdom of Loathing folks. Chris liked it a lot in his review, calling it “... a wonderfully written RPG adventure, both fun and funny from its opening credits to whenever it is you decide you've probably read every last word in the game and realize, regretfully, that you've finished.” I’m on track to agree with him completely. Oh, nearly forgot! I played and finished Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice too, and damn, it moved me. Read our review to see if it’s for you. 

So what are you all playing this weekend? We want to hear stories from the games you’ve been digging lately, so be sure to share in whatever form best suits you in the comments below. We do ask that you avoid spoiling anything, though. This is a chance to chat with others about what you’ve been playing, either to vent or gush praise, and a fine opportunity to discover great games that would’ve missed otherwise.

And hey, if anyone is playing Rez Infinite in VR, let me know how it is! Wondering if it's worth digging up an Oculus to try it out. 

For Tameem Antoniades, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice's titular theme of sacrifice hits close to home. For the last two years, he has given up nearly every part of his personal life to create Hellblade. No holidays, no social life, no free time. "I'm exhausted," Antoniades tells me over Skype. "Hellblade has become a burden, a massive responsibility for me and for the team. It felt really important to try and make something that we own and we knew it was going to be super hard, but I think I just pushed this one a bit too far for myself."

Antoniades' conviction doesn't stem only from the usual freezing shock of a studio like Ninja Theory wading into the indie waters, but also because of Hellblade's unique vision: To tell a story that explores mental health in a serious and nuanced way. It's not just a viking-themed brawler, but an intimate character portrait of a warrior. Forget sanity meters, Senua's struggle to coexist with her own psychosis comes from a deeply personal place—both for Antoniades, Melina Juergens, the actress who plays Senua, and the individuals who have psychosis that assisted the project.

Senua's Sacrifice 

It's never very clear if Senua's journey into the depths of hell is physical or imagined, but that's exactly the point. Psychosis is a condition where a person loses touch with reality, often experiencing hallucinations or delusions. For Antoniades, it was crucial that Hellblade portrayed psychosis in an accurate way. 

Originally, the idea to explore such a heavy topic didn't seem like much of a burden. Antoniades tells me that he was simply fascinated with the subject in the same way he was fascinated with Hellblade's Norse aesthetic. He wanted to create something different and, not yet understanding the human impact psychosis could have, it seemed like an interesting subject.

But it wasn't until Antoniades began researching psychosis that he realized what a massive undertaking Hellblade would be. It might be a smaller game, but the responsibility of accurately portraying a condition that people live with rather than feeding stigmas surrounding it was huge.

"Psychosis was very interesting to me, because although it seems like it happens only to other people, it's a mechanism in the brain that drives it and it's the same mechanism that makes us dream and it's where imagination and creativity come from," Antoniades explains. "I think a lot of the mythical journeys of old were not necessarily just made up stories, but were someone's literal experience. I think that fantasy, psychosis, and mental suffering are all intricately linked. That's what got me into the subject."

"But the more I started to learn about it, and we started to bring in healthcare professionals and people who had actually experienced this stuff, it really hits you like a ton of bricks just how personal it is."

During development of Hellblade, Antoniades and several of the team would interview psychosis patients about their experiences. He tells me it started as a very clinical examination, but it quickly became a challenge to separate himself emotionally from the people he was meeting.

In one particular interview, Antoniades was speaking with a teenage girl about voices she heard. "We asked her if she could ever see the voice, and she said, yeah, sometimes I can see him. And we asked if he looked real, like, I was imagining it was some ghostly apparition. And she was like, yeah it's completely real, as real as anything. And we asked, if you're in a room with a bunch of people how do you know which one is real? And she said, because he's got no eyes. It was a much more literal experience than we imagined. We asked if she tried touching him, and she said she tried once and he screamed so she doesn't do that anymore."

It was a moment that Antoniades remembers vividly—the moment he understood the gravity of the story he had set out to tell.

"This is a person she lives with, that she's lived with for years. It can appear anytime of day or night, wherever she is. She's a teenage girl. I don't think I could cope with that," Antoniades says. "It's all well and good to understand the symptoms, but story-wise it's about how it affects people growing up. And that's where it's very hard to separate yourself. If you're trying to tell a story about a person and they've been stigmatized by their peers, ostracized or abused, then it becomes very difficult to treat it as a subject. When it's people's real suffering you're talking about."

But it wasn't enough to merely incorporate psychosis into Hellblade's story, Antoniades needed to make sure that Senua was just as human and sympathetic as the teenage girl he had interviewed. There was just one problem: he didn't have the budget to hire an actress.

Digging deep 

Sitting next to Antoniades during my interview is Melina Juergens. She's usually Ninja Theory's freelance video editor, but for Hellblade she had the enormous responsibility of bringing Senua to life. She tells me that she's never acted before.

"It was definitely a challenge," she laughs. Not being a trained actress, Antoniades encouraged her to channel her own emotions into the context of Senua's struggle. She would have to dig into her own traumas and pain, and use them to bridge the gap to Senua's. "I had to cry real tears and scream my heart out, and it's hard to have people watching you do that. Sometimes I'd just sit in the middle of the room for half an hour, thinking of really bad things and trying to cry and they're just sitting there waiting."

"What you see on screen is Melina being Melina," Antoniades adds.

But with so many people pouring themselves into Hellblade, Antoniades became increasingly aware of the massive burden he had to make it all worth it. "The more I reached out for help from people, the more it felt like I can't let my team down," he says. "I can't let the people we've been speaking to with mental health difficulties down, I can't let these researchers and professors down who put their name to this game and trust that we'd do a good job. And we have to get this game out without going through the usual publishing support. It was, frankly, very ambitious."

And with all of those pressures building up, it was Antoniades' personal life that suffered. While he made sure his team wasn't overworked, he says he personally worked nearly every waking hour to bring Hellblade to life. For two years.

"I had to learn as much as possible about psychosis and mental illness, how to make a game with a smaller team, and Norse and Celtic mythology. I brought three professors onto the project to help me, two in mental health and one in Norse mythology. We had to build our own mocap studio, and make a compelling game as the glue that binds everything together. It was just too much."

And, what's maybe worse, Antoniades doesn't even know if it'll be worth it. "I think for a lot of other people it's going to be totally not what they want in a game, but I suspect that this will be a game that will touch some people in a very deep way."

Hellblade is now available and you can read our review of it here. But I suspect it'll be some time before Antoniades has closure to everything he's sacrificed. But even if Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice doesn't live up to expectations, Antoniades tells me he's proud of what they accomplished—not just going independent, but in "taking a subject that's so serious and then forcing yourself to take a medium that a lot of people don't take very seriously and really push to do something meaningful with it."

He tells me that before our call, during a rare break from work, he was watching a documentary about Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. "Some of the critical reception for 2001 was blisteringly bad," he says. "But Kubrick knew what he was making and he had assurity in what he was trying to communicate. That's very inspirational, and that's more important than pandering. What's worse than creating something you're proud of and it not being met critically well is to pander to a vision you don't believe in. That's a worse fate to have." 

Spoiler warning! Big plot points and systems are talked about at length, so be sure to finish Hellblade before reading. 

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice makes no compromise. A rarity in games, and now the subject of depressing internet controversy because of it, every aspect of its design works to impart its message. It tells the story of a young, mentally ill Pictish warrior on a journey to the heart of Norse hell, throughout which she faces an overwhelming, horrifying darkness, both literal and metaphorical. Senua fights demons with a sword, but she’s also forced to grapple with internalized torment so profound that each step toward the story’s conclusion feels like an act of unimaginable pain. Making you feel warm and fuzzy and strong isn't a priority.    

It’s a game of uncommon thematic consistency, willing to test the resolve of its audience so that they struggle in tandem with the character they control. Though there are many examples of the ways it does that, from impeccable audiovisual work to actor Melina Juergens’ heartrending performance, critics and players have centered conversation about the game on one specific point: Hellblade’s use of a supposed “permadeath” system that resets all progress if Senua is killed too often. 

It makes sense that players, without knowing how the entire game plays out, would be concerned that the hours they’ve spent solving puzzles and killing demons could be erased after one slip-up too many. But that looming sense of dread—the fear that so much time and energy guiding Senua through hell could be futile—is a crucial part of what makes Hellblade’s narrative so successful. 

Hela no, we won't go

Early on, marked by a first encounter with Hela, ruler of the underworld, Senua’s right hand turns black to signify her infection by an evil, corrupting force. Every time she’s struck down, the infection travels further up her arm, thick black veins spreading necrotized tissue toward her head. Die too often, the game says in plain text, and “all progress will be lost.” It’s a twist meant to instill big, definite stakes—if Senua can’t triumph over evil, neither can the player. Put in game jargon, it’s a “permadeath” system that ups the stakes of defeat by doing away with the endless chances usually granted by modern games, particularly those whose priority is to tell a story.

Permadeath is an attempt to bridge the divide between reality and fantasy, to truly kill a character dead rather than allow them to exist as an endlessly reborn demigod. It's rare because losing progress can be frustrating, especially progress through a narrative-heavy game that will play out roughly the same way a second time. Imagine having to stop a movie 90 minutes in, then rewatch the whole thing just to see the ending. 

But Hellblade isn't a movie, and in a game, permadeath can be an effective narrative tool. Each time Senua's corruption progresses—ropey veins and charred-looking flesh consuming her arm—it marks a real danger to her ability to keep fighting toward her goal. That threat to her, and the player, represents evil, defeat, and hopelessness.

Part of the corruption's success as a design choice is in how unpredictable it is, spreading or staying the same depending on accumulated deaths, important plot points, and other variables that, thankfully, haven’t yet forced into the public eye by eager data miners. As the story progresses, the nature of the corruption becomes clearer as the player comes to understand a correlation between Senua’s backstory and psychology and the way they perceive the game’s dangers. It is a beautifully executed bit of narrative design, game systems and story working in tandem. Saying too much would be a major spoiler. 

Yet a vocal segment of the internet has bristled at the idea of permadeath in Hellblade. The reasons why are sometimes baffling and manifold, running the gamut from that old blank slate accusation of bad game design to John “Totalbiscuit” Bain tweeting that the decision is bad for consumers. Arguments about what narrative games 'should' be have crowded out analysis and criticism of what Hellblade actually is.

The issue gets even more confused following reports that the entire permadeath system is a feint and that having to restart all the way back at the game’s beginning is either an impossibility or so difficult to trigger it may as well be.

Dying for a good cause 

Lost in all of this is the purpose of Hellblade’s permadeath as a design choice. Whether it exists and how it happens has little to do with the fact that the game wants the player to feel like the stakes are high. Once Hellblade says that failing too often will erase all progress toward its end, each in-world danger gains weight. Like Senua, the player understands that what they’re trying to accomplish is enormously difficult. If she can’t press on, her very being will be obliterated. More than just her body, her soul will be consumed by the chaos of an indifferently malevolent hell. Allowing the player to feel even a fraction of that—for them to know that the data situating them in the game world could be thrown away—is a crucial component of her characterization.

Hellblade’s setting, a magical realist Scandinavian island where the line between myth and reality overlap completely, is overlaid with constant menace. Solving the game’s puzzles involves frustrated wandering back and forth through stinking swamps and the charred remnants of ruined Viking villages. In one sequence toward the end of the game, as Senua nears the confrontation with Hela the entire game has lead to, she stumbles into a maze where taking too long to find a way out results in her being consumed by waves of flame.

Soon after, she fights for her life against an enormous, boar-like demon that can kill her with one powerful attack. Fights can go wrong in an instant, and as the game wears on, the blue paint covering Senua’s brow cracks and rubs away. She picks up cuts. Her face becomes covered in the dirt, blood, and ash of hell as evidence of how much she’s been through to get as far as she has. But she, and the player, persist.

Moments like the boar encounter might be exciting in another game, but knowing that the entire story can end so close to reaching Senua's goal, they become terrifying—as close to life-and-death stakes as a game can manage. It’s a far cry from being beaten down, exhausted and at your mental and physical breaking point in the depths of hell, but the darkness that plagues Senua feels more and more authentic as the game goes on. 

While trying not to lose my concentration in what seems an endless battle against waves of demons, I know that the wrong dodge or an opportunity to attack not taken won’t kill me, but each mistake could mean that a story I’m invested in will end. A sense of real dread creeps up in proportion to the progress of Senua’s rotting arm. Approaching the end of the game, afraid I’d made too many mistakes, I wondered, just like the character I controlled, if everything up to that point had been futile—if I, not just Senua, had what it took to achieve her goal. 

Through coming to terms with how fragile their experience with the game might be, players just might come to understand a fraction of Senua’s mental illness, or at least empathize with her. Without the threat that everything could end for Senua and the player, I'm not sure Hellblade's tension and themes would have half the sticking power they do. It’s a bold design choice that willingly alienates anyone who won’t consent to try, despite the odds. 

Whether the permadeath system does or doesn’t exist, how it works, whether it involves the kind of lying all storytellers are guilty of whenever they tell stories shouldn’t matter. In every other medium, from film and books, to music and visual art, audiences understand that each aspect of a work exists in service of its message. And all media we watch, listen to, or read gambles with our time.

The too-long rest before a song continues and the unreliable narrators of so much fiction are formal tools meant to lead listeners, readers, and viewers toward a specific feeling. Game design is no exception. The best should be able to play with our expectations—to use whatever means available to say what they want to say. Hellblade’s permadeath, no matter how it works, should be celebrated for this, not pushed back against without considering its purpose.