Dear Player: Hearing Hellblade

Apophenia: (beautifully) excessive pattern recognition.

Hellblade is an exquisite bricolage of cracked wood, woad and lime. It's the experience of suffering humbly and intensely free from fetishized pain or redemptive rescues, and it's ambition is breathtaking. Senua's Sacrifice is simply groundbreaking on so many different grounds: it blazes a trail for a third category of publishing as an 'Independent AAA'; it gives space to education on mental health for the mainstream; it lays claim to a fully rounded experience in a medium so often fissured into the narratively, aesthetically or mechanically satisfying; and it provides the groundwork for revolutionary audio techniques capable of unparalleled immersion. In short, this game cuts so many 'dark' paths, there is only space to discuss just one part of its darkness here. My interest is in and how the game plays with pattern and sound to question our belief in a coherent, objective world.

“This game pioneers groundbreaking sound to carve new interstitial spaces for the player to experience and inhabit - both populating the space between us and the screen, and including us in its mixed ontology of voices and agencies. ”

This game is a rich, third-person, HUD-free experience of a mythical 8th-century Orkney, rendered with vivid photogrammetry and dynamic real-time audio and materials. Hebridean islands are no stranger to art game adaptations (Dear Esther being beautifully based on another Scottish island)), but Ninja Theory's offering is also a mechanically nuanced and meaty work with perspective-based puzzles and bladed-based combat. Here a Pictish warrior living with profound psychosis fights to overcome grief through a hellish landscape drawn from finely woven Norse mythology. Informed by Prof. Paul Fletcher (Neuroscience) and Dr. Elizabeth Ashman Rowe (Scandinavian History), as well as multiple additional advisers, psychologists and the first-hand accounts of lived experience, along with support from the Wellcome Trust, the pedigree and research-base of this game is impeccable, and its artistic choices deserve careful attention.

Crucially, designs were inspired and reviewed by people effected by psychosis - from the granularity of individual filters which amplify colour or fracture the appearance of objects, to level design incorporating multiple perspectives of the same environment, or even the catatonic restriction of sensory input leaving the player to navigate by sound alone. First and foremost this game is a loving attempt to translate the untranslatable, to give body and form to subjective realities and collapse the distances of historical time and differences of discrete minds. Key to this project is the use of binaural audio to articulate 'voices,' which records sound as it's heard by human ears, generating the powerful evocation of space and location allowing for audio as complex and engrossing as the visual cacophony of splintered hulls and burning limbs.

Through this technology, 'voices' assault, cajole and reassure the player incessantly, to the point that the space around our head can feel like a whole world, a communal space outside of the screen. Five hours in, we may even fear the threat of silence. In a world of Twitch streaming it can feel like a darkly empowered 'chat' playing along with you, but more fundamentally Hellblade subverts the form of the narrator by generating multiple, unceasing and disputed narrators pushing narrative, mechanical explication, fictive memory and philosophy at the player simultaneously. In this game there is no true or false narrative, and no univocal narrator. Instead, all levels of the text are given literal voice - subtextual fears, interface prompts, Norse mythos, background, hints, plot and penetrating analysis of those who fear you in turn. By filling the space between you and the screen with a whole discursive world, you are forced to question your own fictive and phenomenal position in the game. Are our own thoughts just another voice? Is our control of Senua part of a whole fecund ecosystem of discipline from which she suffers or the guidance with which she identifies? In the opening sequence of the game we are invited to join the voices, and told we 'might have a part to play in this story', but this has radical implications. We are immediately told that this is not the conventional relationship of embodiment common to games, this is not a 1:1 identification of player with protagonist. We are just part of the community which made this game, the voices which shape it's trajectory.

Some have argued that psychosis may indeed have been the normal state of consciousness for ancient peoples - they claim we weren't always able to distinguish between our own thoughts and those of a God, or, to put it differently, they claim that perhaps we didn't have a sense of singular consciousness or identity in the pre-Modern world. If you think your internal monologue is someone else speaking to you, who or what does that make you? A conduit of greater powers or a mute player in costume?

Indeed, the player is cast in many roles during cut-scenes - our first-person camera can take on the character of the protagonist's lover, and even her abusive father, and Senua speaks directly out of the screen, her photo-texture eyes freezing us like headlights. We can often seem to bear the brunt of our avatar's anger, and find ourselves unable to satisfy her entreaties to the camera. Like an intense modernist performance that borders on intimate theatre we are partly acknowledged, partly present, but also powerless in many dramatic encounters. We can be 'aware', but we are mute - we are low in the chain of beings that make up Senua's world view. To her we are both as real and unreal as any pre-recorded voice, invisible. Her pre-rendered gaze reifies us as part of her delusion. The developers are open in there intent to make hallucination and reality and spectrum in Hellblade, but perhaps the deeper and more insidious power of the game is that it's audio can reach out and include us as players in this spectrum of real to unreal. It's narrative drive will include is in the reconciling of different worlds as we ourselves learn to let go of control.

Senua's 'darkness' often dips into the film-grain and camera lighting of home-recorded horror.

Indeed, here the thematic shell of delusional psychosis and blurring of reality is reflected in our relationship to the narrative and its assault on the fourth wall. From the very beginning this game is happy to lie to us - from threatening non-diegetic text, to self-referencing its credit sequence via voices, it encourages an almost paranoid attentiveness in the player. Mechanically we find ourselves solving puzzles by locating recurrent patterns in a seemingly natural environment, or seeing the same environment from a different perspective - spotting the shape of a rune in a tree seen from just the right angle, or turning around to see that the world looks different from this side of the arch than the other. This intense pattern recognition, and paranoiac reframing of the world, are deeply felt experiential facets of psychosis, as well as being deeply rooted fixtures of play. Apophenia (spotting patterns where there are none) is par for the course in both gameworlds. What is the Magic Circle but a shared delusion? While I want to stress that these are historically and socially radically different experiences, this game generates interesting reflections on both by drawing them into alignment.

“...perhaps people are afraid of those with the psychosis because the existence of a different worldview calls their own into question...”

— Voice, Hellblade

To an outside observer, pressing buttons can look like an obsessive ritual, but to the player they are eloquent patterns. As players, we are in the same business as Senua, drawing order out of chaos, and trying to fathom hidden systems. For Salvador Dali, paranoia was even to be envied and replicated in the play of images - if we could look twice at the same picture and see different things, maybe we could reshape the real world by changing our vantage point? The technology of digital gaming bears something of this promise as it blurs the line between bodies, objects and images - dabbling equally with agency and illusion. But Dali's optimistic 'paranoiac critical method' (he was a great one for titles) has dark implications as we let go of comforting stories about our reality. As one of the game's many voices points out, perhaps people are afraid of those with the psychosis because the existence of a different worldview calls their own into question.

The postcard Dali used to demonstrate how pattern-recognition might be used to reconfigure reality

I've written before about the persuasive power of disembodied voices in the context of 'Everyone's Gone to the Rapture', Drawing on David Hendy's work on the history of radio - such voices can claim a greater intimacy than those with visible sources, having no physical frailty to betray them while enjoying the confidence of an inner monologue. However, the voices of Hellblade are from a new chapter in the history of sound - one where sound is being spatialised, capable of shaping invisible but palpable worlds with a newfound spooky intensity. Like the early life of many new technologies, this one spooks us, and to bluntly summarise Friedrich Kittler's analysis in 'Gramophone, Film, Typewriter' new recording technologies are quickly written into ghost stories, because the copies they make of us hit the uncanny sweet spot. Binaural audio may prove to be such a moment of ghostly revolution - recording more of life than ever before, but still never quite enough as we work tirelessly to collapse the distinction between body and medium. The machinery of binaural audio is itself a spooky reflection of what it attempts to do - taking the form of two silicon ears with embedded microphones like a mechanical hallucination of the human form. It even bears an eery ('eary'?) similarity to Alexander Graham Bell's prototype for his own early recording device, a Frankenstein phonograph made using a real human ear and pieces of skull. These odd, cyborg recording devises are also close thematically to Helllade's world, where Senua carries the skull of her lover in the hope of using it to house his soul. Indeed, the artefacts of dead media are put to good use by Ninja Theory in their efforts to erode the distinction between memory and artifice - film grain veils horrors and recollections alike on the screen while audio pops like vinyl or flickers like a loose cassette tape. Hallucinations in this game are analogue to the bone.

Binaural mic [Left] and Alexander Graham Bell's 1874 phonograph [Right]

Hellblade does all it can collapse distinctions and to deprive us of comfort and distance from its subject matter, and it strives to use narrative and narration itself to make us reflect on the bumpy gradient between our side of the screen and Senua's. As Professor Fletcher observes in interview, many people living with psychosis develop instrumental narratives as coping mechanisms, envisaging a quest they hope will free them from their hallucinations and delusions. However, to the outside observer, this very belief is a delusional fiction, but it is deeply and affectingly real for the individual as they struggle to shape a world into sense. In a game focused on a noble quest, one informed by this observation, the game's narrative presents itself as a delusional mixed-reality - there are no concrete events in Hellblade, and interactivity in this game is the admirable attempt to empathise with a world that cannot be. Indeed, this extends to the space beyond the screen, even when we take the headphones off - reality has no narratives, no satisfying conclusions, its a mess of happenings with unfathomable patterns of cause and effect, and we narrate it in order to overcome our existential suffering. In the climax of Hellblade, however, we can only win through losing - our narrative of triumph unravels as we fight an impossible sea of enemies until our avatar collapses. To finish this game, the player must fully commit to abandoning their privileged position of distance and control. Senua's sacrifice is multifaceted - she abandons suffering, she abandons struggle, and she abandons society's policing of the real and the unreal, the light and the dark. Melting the distinction between herself and her foes, we succeed, and staring through the screen she invites us to come and write new stories with her.

Hellblade is many things, but at its most ambitious it uses spatially-situated sound to disrupt the power and privileged position of the player. This game pioneers groundbreaking sound to carve new interstitial spaces for the player to experience and inhabit - both populating the space between us and the screen, and including us in its mixed ontology of voices and agencies. It let's us be a bit of darkness in the 8th-century, but it also points to how we might overcome the distinction of light and dark, body and technology, right here in the 21st.

Dr Merlin Seller

|Game Studies Blog|

Dear Player: Hearing Hellblade