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EsperBot
I started playing Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, which is a game that I would never have guessed would have come from the same minds as DmC: Devil May Cry.
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EsperBot
I want to talk really briefly about something this game does which is incredibly wild
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EsperBot
but revealing this might fuck up your experience with the game
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EsperBot
so I am posting it beneath a spoiler wall, read at your own risk
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EsperBot
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EsperBot
SPOILERS BEGIN NOW
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EsperBot
The game has almost no non-diegetic text in it. There's the opening credits, but even those are overlaid over the game world in a kind of neat way
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EsperBot
there's no hud, etc
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EsperBot
except for one series of test that appezars onscreen after the first time you die (a scripted sequence)
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EsperBot
Which says explicitly:
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EsperBot
One of Senua's hands is fucked up and black, and every time you die, the blackness spreads further up the arm
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EsperBot
until it reaches her head
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EsperBot
at which point, her death is permanent and you have to start the whole game over
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EsperBot
Which is kind of a neat gameplay conceit and a wild thing to put in your faux-AAA game
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EsperBot
but what's wilder still is
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EsperBot
it's a lie
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BF
YEAH I fucking love it
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BF
have you beaten the game yet or
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EsperBot
I got curious and started googling around and it turns out it's fucking bullshit
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EsperBot
Nah, I just fought Surt
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EsperBot
and then it was VXM time
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EsperBot
the darkness does grow up her arm when she dies - I saw this myself - but only so far
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EsperBot
apparently gated by progress through the game
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EsperBot
the game outright threatens you with permadeath and it's a complete lie
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EsperBot
I've never seen anything like it and I kind of love it
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BF
I won't say anything else, then, save for the fact that this lie is probably my single favorite aspect of the whole game
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EsperBot
I don't know how much I trust Tameem, genius writer behind DmC: Devil May Cry, to tell this kind of story about mental illness but I guess we'll see
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EsperBot
it certainly has my attention
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oh i'm scary
that's why I haven't played it, like
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oh i'm scary
it's inconceivable to me that the writing would actually be good, despite all testimony
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EsperBot
so far it's genuinely hard to believe that it's Tameem
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oh i'm scary
it's like if everybody was telling you about this new Oscar darling Michael Bay movie
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oh i'm scary
or, no
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oh i'm scary
Zach Snyder
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EsperBot
I was about to say
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EsperBot
Looking at the wiki article it seems like he actually did a lot of research and consulted with experts
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EsperBot
I still don't Trust but it at least seems like he was trying his best