Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice

”Hellblade Selling Above Expecations, Nearly Breaking Even For Developer” is a bit of a downer title for something that is far more exciting. The news isn’t that Hellblade is going to turn a profit, quotes from the studio make it clear that was always going to happen. It’s that Hellblade is going to turn a profit months earlier than expected, meaning the game is selling rather well.

”We own the IP this time. It’s opened up a bunch of doors and possibilities that we just didn’t have until this point." Antoniades, chief creative director at Ninja Theory told GamesBeat. "In terms of a model, I’d say it is a success."

If you don’t remember the previous look at Hellblade Korny gave us, not only does Ninja Theory own the IP to Hellblade, they self published it. In doing so they necessarily made a smaller game with a smaller team than a AAA title gets, but now they are reaping that reward as there is no EA or Activision there to take their share of the profits.

The exciting thing here is that maybe, just maybe, this could be a signal to the industry. Not every game needs to be a massive AAA adventure. Not every game needs to be filled with random loot boxes. Making a good game on a less astronomical budget can work!

And yeah, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a good game. I played it over the course of two days and thoroughly enjoyed it. Without jumping straight into spoilers, the game opens with Senua, a Celtic warrior on a quest into a Norse version of hell to save the soul of her lover after he is tortured and killed in a Viking raid. Except, this isn’t a game about a heroic damsel or femme fatale epically storming the gates of hell. It’s a story about a deeply troubled young woman being pushed over the edge by tragic events trying to overcome her own daemons while giving everything to save someone who she loves.

It is a very dark, very gritty game. From about a minute in, things like bodies impaled on spikes is a normal you’ll need to accept. The game includes somewhat graphic looks at things like fire sacrifices, making your way through a dark place filled with monsters, or what it feels like to die. But all of this is in service to its story and is laser focused on what Senua is feeling and experiencing. Ninja Theroy worked long and hard to correctly portray various aspects of mental disorder in how Senua reacts or sees the world. This is a game where what they called “the low hanging fruit” of correctly portraying psychosis meant making amazing and chilling use of 3d positioned voices constantly talking to you, laughing at you, encouraging you, mocking you, and being afraid for you and for themselves!

All in all, the story is dark and introspective and extremely well done. It’s told fairly out of order, but I like that sort of thing. Piecing together what happened and when and why without everything being spoon fed. And the acting done for Senua is the best I’ve ever seen in a game. Easily.

Gameplay wise, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is something like Epic’s Infinity Blade mobile games from a few years back. Senua is the best rendered character model I’ve seen in a game, but they can get away with that because the entire game is a close up perspective on her which limits the amount of environment that need to be rendered. It all looks really good, but there is that sense that it can look so good because it is very carefully keeping you to tight hallways on outdoor corridors of trees or whatever.

The combat also reminds me a good bit of Infinity Blade. Combat has a very fixed feeling to it in contrast to something like Tomb Raider or Horizon: Zero Dawn. Instead of scampering and dodging in an open world, combat is always in small-ish circular areas or occasionally on narrow bridges. Instead of the camera being freeform, it is always behind Senua and always fixed on an approaching enemy. At first, it can feel a little restricting. You can switch which enemy the camera focuses on (and thus which enemy you are engaging) but you are basically always facing an enemy.

Fortunately, this somewhat fixed, somewhat mechanical feel is made up for by some simple but very well done combat. Combat is a game of dodging, blocking, attacking, and counter attacking. If the sort of base enemy is about to try and hit you with a heavy attack you can see it in his great character animation and choose to dodge to the left or right, or you can hold a block and absorb the impact while being thrown off balance, or you can counter with a well timed block that will allow you to flow into a counterattack combo. So, combat is about picking the correct move in real time to defeat your opponents. The guy with the light sword can be beaten through easy blocks and the occasional heavy attack to break his guard. The guy with the shield required a kick or a shove to break his guard since your direct frontal sword attack are mostly useless. And so on.

Combat gets frantic and challenging as the game throws more enemies at you. They cluster around you and it becomes a game of picking the right enemy to focus on. Of dodging and blocking enemies who attack from the side or behind. And all of this is happening while a chorus of voices cheer you on, or warn you of an attack behind you, or fret as you take a hit, or taunt you as you are about to die, or urge you to finish an injured opponent. Once again, this game is gritty and violent. Get knocked down in combat and you can see the pain on Senua’s face. Having to stand back up after a near fatal blow feels hard and the game even goes so far to drastically limit your attack speed and power for a few seconds until you recover. It makes every battle tense and terrifying, even if mechanically there isn’t really all that much going on. There are certainly times where you chain together dodges and attacks and blocks and combos that let you slice through an otherwise hard group of enemies and it feels very satisfying... so it’s not all grit and pain. It is fun, as well... well for you the player at least.

Taken all together, from the extremely excellent facial capture and acting for Senua, to the hellish story about her quest to defy the Norse gods, to the combat that is somewhat simple but deeply satisfying, to the various set pieces and puzzles you’ll face, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is a fantastic game. It is not particularly long. Maybe 5 hours. 10 hours at most. But those hours are packed with narration and combat and storytelling and creepy frightening sights.

That is is apparently doing well and is being considered a success pleases me greatly! :)

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Hellblade’s budget is reportedly 10 million dollars.

Now, that’s small, but it isn’t THAT small. Nier Automata was only twice that much.

10 million actually seems like a reasonable fraction of an AAA budget. All of this AAA quality at an indie budget seems overhyped.

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This article at Redbull.com (of all people!) has what I think is the money quote:

Key to this model is that we’ve kept our budget low and, as such, we don’t need to sell millions to break even. We need to sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies to make our money back, which gives us the confidence to make a game that isn’t aimed at everyone. Our lower budget means we can take more creative risks without fear of not being able to achieve the multi-million unit sales that the big blockbusters now need to be deemed a success.

When it came out that Tomb Raider didn't meet its sales targets after selling 3.4 million copies in four weeks, having a game like this built to be sustainable in perhaps 1/10th the number of copies sold feels pretty good.

It's a game with a very strong story and visual style. It has no DLC. No loot boxes. No progression system. Its puzzles and combat are both pretty good. And it will be making a profitable return on its investment.

You may be right that it's "AAA quality at an indie budget" narrative is a bit overplayed, but just looking at the facts of what was accomplished... I hope we see more of this style of development.

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This article at Redbull.com (of all people!) has what I think is the money quote:

Key to this model is that we’ve kept our budget low and, as such, we don’t need to sell millions to break even. We need to sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies to make our money back, which gives us the confidence to make a game that isn’t aimed at everyone. Our lower budget means we can take more creative risks without fear of not being able to achieve the multi-million unit sales that the big blockbusters now need to be deemed a success.

What risks were taken with this game? This is a genuine question, as I have not played it yet, and nothing in your post describing the game seemed like a huge departure from conventional mechanics or design.

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This article at Redbull.com (of all people!) has what I think is the money quote:

Key to this model is that we’ve kept our budget low and, as such, we don’t need to sell millions to break even. We need to sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies to make our money back, which gives us the confidence to make a game that isn’t aimed at everyone. Our lower budget means we can take more creative risks without fear of not being able to achieve the multi-million unit sales that the big blockbusters now need to be deemed a success.

What risks were taken with this game? This is a genuine question, as I have not played it yet, and nothing in your post describing the game seemed like a huge departure from conventional mechanics or design.

Personally, I've never played a game so focused on despair, suffering, doubting one's self, insanity, and violence as this one.

Spoilers:

There are levels where the bordering geometry is made up of giant manifestations of the dead and the liquid you are walking and wading through is almost certainly their blood. Early on, Senua is depicted as dying in up close detail until her eyes go fixed and cold. Later, she burns to death on camera. There's not exactly any gore beyond somewhat nude humans beheaded and impaled on pikes, but every time she gets knocked down in combat the gasps and expressions of pain and fear on Senua's face are somewhat gut wrenching.

Though not entirely shown, Senua's father isolated her, performed rituals on her, and was probably violent towards her. It is certainly made clear that he beat her mother when she talked about hearing the same kind of voices Senua hears and he eventually went on to burn Senua's mother at the stake (partially shown, face half burned away) to try and drive the darkness out of her.

Personally, I can play such games without too much trouble... I draw the line at something like the bone breaking scene in The Watchmen movie... but Hellblade is not a Rated T for Teen game and its levels of on-scree and off-screen suffering and violence should be a limiting factor in who buys and plays the game.

I believe that's what he was talking about, the creative risk of aiming the game at a story where shown and implied violence and insanity are key components.

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Hellblade’s budget is reportedly 10 million dollars.
Now, that’s small, but it isn’t THAT small. Nier Automata was only twice that much.

10 million actually seems like a reasonable fraction of an AAA budget. All of this AAA quality at an indie budget seems overhyped.

Do keep in mind that the game is self-published, and it was pretty heavily marketed, so a pretty size able chunk of their budget (which is, by their own words "way below $10 Million", not $10 Million) is devoted to that alone, since there's no Publisher with established experience/partnerships eating any of the cost, so Ninja Theory had to set up all those channels themselves, not to mention the tech that they had to develop for the game themselves, so you really can't compare it to a game like NieR: Automata on the basis of "budget" alone.

You should watch their dev diaries, they're very open about the game's development. This one in particular deals with self-publishing:

In case you don't read the linked article, they used the amount of "way less than $10 Million" to contrast the budget of a AAA game, which often starts at $50 million.
Also, saying that a AAA like N:A was "only" $20 Million is a bit disingenuous, since you know what tricks they had to do to make the game as huge as it is (cleverly tying replay value to story, so they only had to make about a third of the content that a team normally would for a game its size).

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Hellblade’s budget is reportedly 10 million dollars.

Now, that’s small, but it isn’t THAT small. Nier Automata was only twice that much.

10 million actually seems like a reasonable fraction of an AAA budget. All of this AAA quality at an indie budget seems overhyped.

For smaller AAA games you could see 15-20 million, and for the bigger ones, you're talking 60 million + 60 million more in advertising. So yeah, 10 million is pretty legit.

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I’m glad the game is doing well. I’d like to see more stuff like it, despite disliking the game.

I want to experience the story, but actually playing the game is a tedious chore, so I’ll likely never finish it.

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Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice (Gaming)