Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is an action-adventure game. The events of the toy are based on Celtic and Scandinavian mythology, and unfold in the young Middle Ages. The heroine is a crazy militant girl who went on a dark and terrible journey to the land of the dead. This is a high-budget toy developed by a private company at its own expense. Senua’s madness became the basis of the relying part; she looks around through the prism of her illness. For greater reliability of the condition, the creators called in a professor as an expert, he shared materials from the archive of the 1960s, consisting of the individual experience of people with this disease. These documents brought a frightening plausibility and anxiety to the toy. For example, there is a moment with plants moving in rhythm with the player – this is the transmission of the theory that a mentally ill person can see some intelligent design in ordinary natural phenomena. The authors tried to recreate an atmosphere of anxiety, when we would see hidden meaning and hidden evil in the most ordinary things. Auditory hallucinations play a key role – we constantly hear voices, distant or whispering in our ear. To achieve the desired result, a binaural recording technique was used.

The interaction of the warrior with the player takes place non-verbally, animation and movements, so that they become realistic, and Senua truthfully broadcast fear or movement in the water, motion capture technology was used. The original combat concept has been nailed down and is similar to the studio’s past games. Now the camera is as close as possible to us, for a more detailed consideration and perception, an improved combat system consists of ordinary actions lined up in combinative strikes. All movements were developed by stuntmen.

System requirements

• Operating system: Windows 7 / Windows 8.1 / Windows 10 (64-bit versions)
• Processor: Intel i5 3570K / AMD FX-8350
• RAM: 8 GB RAM
• Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 (2GB) or AMD Radeon R9 280X (3GB)
• Sound Card: DirectX® 9.0 compatible sound device
• Free hard disk space: 21.5 GB