Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is beautiful and terrifying at the same time. Its combat mechanics and puzzles are strong, but its true strengths lies with its ability to tell a story and craft a world that differentiates itself from other titles out there. Together, we're offered an adventure that is equally horrifying and brilliant - a true masterpiece of a game.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is beautiful, discomforting, and compelling. It might challenge what you like about games, but challenge is good. You're doing yourself a disservice if you don't try it.

Hellblade is a bold game in that it represents an issue that people have in a more positive and realistic way and more importantly confronts the stigma attached to mental illness. All this is all wrapped up in a tight, purposeful, and meaty package that should be experienced at least once.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is every bit as vicious, epic and dramatic as its predecessors in the Ninja Theory library, but interweaving a delicate storyline through simple, yet ruthless mechanics makes it one of the most visceral portrayals of psychological turmoil in recent video gaming.

But Hellblade is so well executed in so many ways, so committed to its mission and has integrated concept and design so well that we found it easy to look past these things to enjoy it immensely...Intense, powerful, important and very well done. [Issue#191, p.70]

This intense exploration of a young woman's personal anguish is a triumph of interactive storytelling.

Ultimately what was intended as a thoughtful depiction of a terrible mental illness has ended up casting it as something of an asset: a helpful superpower that can give you the strength to soldier on through the darkness, so long as you can put up with the odd breakdown here and there. That, we suspect, was not what Ninja Theory intended. It's certainly not what we had hoped for. [Issue#310, p.112]