So what is this game, you ask? It's a psychological thriller, on paper at least. Much like Alan Wake. You play as Senua, the warrior girl, who is trapped in her own mind, and must face her own demons to escape the darkness that haunts her. There are a bunch of references to Viking mythology, so I assume the story takes place in that time and place. Before you pick up the pitchforks this is no spoiler, this is clear from the beginning of the game. And if you followed the development it was mentioned and explained numerous times by the developers as well.
I've been following the game's development closely for a few years, and was very excited about it right up until I saw the final trailers. Why is that you ask? Because I perceived that to be a huge downgrade in graphics or at least a sidegrade. They completely sacrificed crisp clear graphics, for modern as I call them bullshit effects. Tons of bloom, fake hdr, and depth of field was added with a nauseating amount of motion blur as the topping.
But I had hoped I'll be able to turn those effects off in the actual game and get the clear look back. But nope, you can't. You're stuck with the worst offenders, like motion blur, but most annoyingly depth of field, which makes your character blurry in the default third person view in which the entire game is played. My eyes started melting by the time I finished the otherwise not so long game.
I was also a bit disappointed because the developers boasted that they wanted to make the character to really look like a warrior and be believable in that sense, they even had a development diary explaining how they scanned the body. But the end result is not that convincing, maybe it's the lighting but the character doesn't look to have a warrior's physique.
The graphics of the game, is somehow not that good, the character (yes in singular as there is no other character rendered in the game than your own) looks good, at least the face when they show it in portrait. The facial animations are fully digitized like in La. Noire, so those are OK as well. The environment however feels weird most of the time, there is something intangible about it that makes it feel extremely fake. I've experienced this with other medium budget games before, when on paper it should look good, it has a good engine, it has large enough textures, but something just doesn't click, and it has to be the lighting, what else can it be?
So let's see the gameplay, the game has two distinct elements. The first is exploration, which includes the solving of some visual or logic puzzles. Or some combination of the two. Most of the time this is very straightforward, but there are a the few occasions when you're stuck walking aimlessly for half an hour in the same area, because you don't know what the hell are you supposed to do or where are you supposed to go for the solution. This is exaggerated by the fact, that running in the game feels slower than walking in 99% of all other games. And walking speed is like time stands still. The game area is not that big, usually you're confined to a few rooms. And most maps are pretty linear, but with the speed you're able to move everything feels like an eternity. And it can get very annoying when you're walking the same passage for the fifth time looking for a clue on what to do, or a side passage you missed. The game desperately needs an auto walk feature. I swear that my finger was pressing down on the forward walk key during 99.99% of the entire game, and it hurts. And adding insult to injury is the fact that the game forces you to do a ton of backtracking, almost every "chapter" ends with you having to backtrack to the beginning of that level. These are completely non-interactive, you just have to walk back to the start while not having to interact with anything or anyone, except for the voices in your head sometimes.
Ah yes the voices. There are a few distinct voices in your head, some imaginary some seem like wisdoms from a long lost friend or mentor. They usually offer clues on what to do, but most of the time they're not very helpful. The problem with being stuck for me lied with not being able to decipher the logic used by the map designer. Or when you have to line up runes with the view I got stuck a few times because you have to stand exactly where the devs intended you to stand, it doesn't matter that you can achieve the same visual effect from a different vantage point the game won't accept it, and you'll think that's not the solution when it is you just have to stand 3 steps to the left and 2 steps back. And the audio is completely designed for surround headphones, if you have a stereo setup like me, the audio of the game cannot accommodate for that. In most other games I get excellent positional audio despite having only two speakers, here it was a mess when I was supposed to follow audio clues.
And the second gameplay element is the actual fighting. There is definitely less fighting in the game than exploring. But still it gets very repetitive. There is only 2 type of basic enemy with some minor variation of equipment on them. The ones with a shield are hardest to take down as they block most of your attacks, unless you can use focus on them, or flank them. And during the first two thirds of the game I didn't even realize I had the focus ability during combat that is the Viking equivalent of bullet time, or sword time in this case. So I ended up fighting the enemies completely manually on equal terms for a long part, which made it even longer and repetitive. I don't know if the game never told me that I can use focus to defeat the enemies much easier or I just forgot about it. One weird thing about combat is that you're always confined to a small arena when you have to fight enemies. And you can't move around freely in the arena, as you're always focused on an enemy, and can only move relative to that enemy. And coupled with the absolutely tiny fov the game has, you have absolutely no overview of the area. And you can't see when you're being attacked by another enemy from behind. The fighting itself is only dependent on timing. You have to block, dodge, and attack at the right moment,and that's it, it really just goes down to how fast can you smash buttons. Sometimes when there are more than a few enemies they can corner you, which is very bad as you can't dodge then, but even worse you cannot see jack shit as the camera doesn't know where to go if you're backed up against a wall. Some battles takes ages, as the enemies just keep spawning for minutes. Apart from the basic enemies there are a surprising amount of boss-fights in the game. Unfortunately they're no different than any other fight, only that their attacks are more significant, and that they take more hits to defeat.
And finally all that's left to discuss is the story. Well you don't get any story directly in the game, but you can piece it together pretty well from clues what's been going on. The only part that wasn't clear to me was the end. But maybe it wasn't supposed to be clear as it definitely felt like they're teasing a sequel there.
+
- Face and facial animations
- Graphics (sometimes)
- Interesting story telling
- Good effort on voice acting (not great but at least they're trying hard from a limited budget)
- The game does get better after the first few hours
-
- Graphics (most of the environments) / bullshit effects
- The few other characters that appear during cutscenes are clearly not rendered with the game engine but are actual clips of actors, thus they feel completely out of place and immersion breaking.
- repetitive and boring sometimes
- painfully slow paced
- Lots of backtracking
- Walking aimlessly until the W key gets pushed trough the keyboard
- Not that good combat system (especially the lack of free movement during fights)
- Unclear sequel bait ending.
- Only 7 hours
Scoring:
graphics : 6/10
concept : 10/10
realization: 6/10
story: 8/10
atmosphere:8/10
gameplay: 5/10
controls: 6/10
overall impression: 6/10
Had I judged the game based on the initial 2-3 hours it certainly would've gotten a more bleak score. But it does get its act together. It even becomes slightly addictive. I wasn't just driven to finish it to get it off my plate but I was actually immersed in it.