Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice‘s positive reception has a lot to do with its dazzling visuals and the desire of many to stick it to AAA companies who overcharge and underdeliver, but it’s just not a good game. For the most part, it feels like a walking simulator filled to the brim with locked doors that have to be circumnavigated/slowly unlocked in a shape-matching environmental puzzle and combat that’s slow and repetitive. The main character’s psychosis and the ways the visuals and audio reinforce it are all interesting. That’s not enough to prop up terrible gameplay, a terrible camera more interested in Senua’s braids than helping you to see the things that the voices in her head keep insisting have happened, and terrible pacing that weighs you down with busywork. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is too interesting to hate, but I’m exhausted by its clunkiness.

I’m not going to try to explain Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice story in any meaningful depth because you can get a basic idea of what to expect by screaming at the top of your lungs into a pillow, but suffice it to say that the goal is to journey into Helheim—because we’re dealing with always-interesting Norse mythology—and help Senua’s dead love rest. Or something. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the ending revealed that all of this mythology is just another symptom of her psychosis and that she lives in a different time period entirely. The writing is fine, though. Scattered, but fine.

It’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice‘s gameplay that I truly despise. I hate the camera angle that’s so close that a third of the screen is taken up by Senua. I hate the gameplay twists that devolve into stupidity like chase sequences (among other timed escapes), a blindness sequence that pretty much requires using headphones, numerous dark mazes designed to be as confusing as possible, and more slow shambling across thin wooden planks than anyone has ever asked for. There are instant deaths if you turn the wrong way during some sequences, which is remarkably easy since some of the voices lie to you and it’s rarely obvious which direction you’re supposed to be going anyway. Meanwhile, there are frequent breaks where the game throws up its hands and goes, “screw it, just look for this symbol hidden somewhere in the world and it’ll open up that locked door.” Sometimes the symbol is hidden in faint lettering on the ground. The visuals are so busy that forcing you to notice anything is asking too much.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice‘s other standby is to throw you into combat against 5-10 damage sponge enemies. You can parry, but they materialize behind you, so you’re forced to stay on the move. I could swear that you have to fight 20-30 guys in one particularly bad sequence where the visuals are such a cluttered mess that noticing attack cues and other important details is a crapshoot. You’re automatically locked on to enemies until they’re all defeated, too, so you can get pushed back into a wall you didn’t realize was there and find yourself unable to dodge to the side because of an invisible barrier, of which there are oodles. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is practically made out of invisible walls, and half of the battle is figuring out which areas are arbitrarily impassable and which you can interact with to move on. I’m blown away by how bad this is.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is exhausting – Game Pass, part 8 first appeared on Killa Penguin