Which, in a very real sense, they all inevitably are. So many game worlds feel empty, and dead, and basically constructed. Lots of videogames offer this promise, of freedom, of unfettered and truly organic exploration, but most fail. Encountered roughly five minutes into the game, this vista-a wide shot of a whole continent's worth of wilderness, open and ready to be explored-is a promise. The commanding image of Breath of the Wild is a sweeping vista.

Hellblade is flawed, sometimes monotonous and sometimes infuriating, but it's unlike anything else I've played this year, and its imagery and sound will stay with me for a long, long time.Ģ.

It's held together by the brilliant work of Melina Juergens, whose motion capture and vocal acting as Senua is possibly the best performance in the entire medium. The story of Senua, a warrior journeying into the land of death in search of her lost love, is an uncanny screaming death knell of pain and perseverance.

But Hellblade is, at its heart, a game that rises above those conversations, and above the sum of its own components. Whether or not that's true, or to what extent telling that kind of story is appropriate in a game mostly about obscure puzzles and hack-and-slash combat, is a question worth debating. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is a controversial game, largely because of a single page of text that appears before the experience even begins, claiming that Hellblade is a story about mental illness, specifically psychosis, and that care has been taken to make that representation thoughtful and accurate.

Best games of 2017 i missed