Ninja Theory’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is going to be a weird game. Taking their famed third-person action roots and stripping out all the UI, the studio have decided this is the platform they want to tell a story of loss, mental illness and beating up weird shadow men with a sword. Just in case anyone had forgotten, the latest dev diary – focusing on sound design and the voices in Senua’s head – has twirling voice actors, pitch-black levels and giant goat-men.
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It’s got lofty goals with brave ideas on what can be tackled in an action-focused combat game. With the amount of work going into the sound alone, hopefully they can realise that. It’s certainly vital to the horror themes that clearly offset the stabbing parts. There’s no guarantee it will work, but whatever Hellblade becomes will almost certainly be worth investigating.
After being delayed out of 2016, we only have a vague ‘this year’ idea for when we’ll get to play it. This is dev diary number 27, and the scant glimpses of gameplay are as solid a sight as we’ve had of it, so it could be a while yet. If you like the details of game dev, plenty more over on Ninja Theory’s YouTube channel.