Someone Else's Shoes: Framing and Enforcing Perspective
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
It’s essential to begin our process by talking about how video games establish perspective, solidifying the context through which the player will engage with the game’s story and world. Enforcing perspective is the means by which a game places the player in the mindset of the character they’re controlling, and when done well ensures that the player’s understanding of the world is in line with their character’s. Pulling this off effectively means doing more than simply putting the player into the boots of a character and releasing them into the game, providing neither means by which the player may understand their character nor any real reason to care about what they’re doing.
A scene from Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, is a cerebral and surreal experience that sees the player wholly inhabit the perspective of its lead character
Establishing perspective requires a nuanced approach to both character and world-building, and I can think of few games where this is as essential to the experience as Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Despite what its goofy title might suggest, Hellblade is far from your average adventure game – if it can even be called that – and that’s largely thanks to the game’s handling of perspective.
Hellblade places the player in control of Senua, a Celtic warrior on a journey to revive her fallen love. What makes Senua a bit more complicated as a protagonist, however, is that she’s plagued by severe psychosis. Historically, psychosis wouldn’t have been acknowledged as the legitimate mental illness that we know it is today, and Senua’s understanding of her predicament is appropriately vague. She knows that her perception of the world is tainted, but only knows to refer to it as her inner “darkness,” thinking it is some curse placed on her by the gods.
Despite her ignorance of the reality of her condition, the game’s portrayal of the symptoms of psychosis are true to life. In fact, the game’s developer, Ninja Theory, approached the game with the primary goal of accurately replicating the experience of psychosis, a decision that permeates every aspect of the game’s design.
Hellblade is built from the ground up so as to portray the experience of a person suffering from severe psychosis, and as such frames the player’s own perspective of the world through that condition. The world we experience when playing Hellblade is warped and oppressive, our understanding of it limited to how Senua herself perceives it.
"Hellblade is built from the ground up so as to portray the experience of a person suffering from severe psychosis, and as such frames the player’s own perspective of the world through that condition"
In a short documentary that comes with the game, Ninja Theory emphasizes how they based much of the game off their research working with actual people diagnosed with psychosis. These people’s experience with their mental illness informs pretty much every design decision in the game. As such, Hellblade blends reality with surreal hallucinations defined by Senua’s life, the boundary between the two never clearly drawn.
For the entirety of the game, Senua is haunted by a choir of disembodied voices, taunting her and sharing in her dread, replicating the common psychosis symptom of hearing voices. The environments bend and transform based on Senua’s visions, reflecting malformed representations of her deepest anxieties and insecurities. Senua’s goals are defined by a logic that she takes for granted, all of it a product of her psychosis-addled mind – as the narration of the in-game documentary puts it, “To complete Senua’s quest, you have to internalize and accept the logic and meaning behind these things to progress.”
Even the gameplay mechanics of Hellblade reflect Senua’s fractured psyche. The primary puzzle mechanic involves finding naturally occurring symbols in the environment that act as keys to locked doors, though there is no objective connection between these symbols and the doors they open, the connection purely one in Senua’s deluded mind. Enemies materialize out of nowhere and at inopportune times, overwhelming Senua with their size and numbers, forcing the player into uncomfortably close combat encounters that feel suffocating and tense.
Perhaps most stressful of all is the game’s perma-death mechanic which is introduced to the player early on, informing them that every time they fall to enemies, darkness creeps up Senua’s body, threatening to overtake her, ending the game and erasing whatever progress the player has made to this point. This feature adds a palpable tension to even the most rudimentary encounters, as it only takes a few dumb mistakes to undo everything you’ve worked for up to that point.
An example of the symbols Senua sees obstructing her path, made to look real and sinister, though they're actually just products of Senua's mind
Except, this isn’t actually true at all. The game tells you in its opening minutes that too many failures will result in an irredeemable game over, but such a fate never comes to pass, no matter how many times the player may fail. The game flat out lies to the player, a fact that is never addressed in-game and was the subject of some controversy upon the game’s release.
This lie, though, is arguable the game's most effective recreation of the irrational anxiety that is symptomatic of psychosis, as it plants a fear in the player’s head about something that isn’t actually a threat. This is presented to the player in a manner that they trust, as the game wants the player to genuinely believe that failure will mean death, just as Senua does.
In these aspects of Hellblade, we see how the game’s design serves to craft a specific and biased perspective through which the player experiences the world, one that is essential to the story Ninja Theory is telling. Every element of the game’s design works to frame our understanding of this world through Senua’s skewed lens, so even if the player knows that what they’re experiencing is just a figment of Senua’s psyche, they don’t have any other choice but to treat it as reality.