Inside: CrisTales, Axiom Verge 2, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

CrisTales
RPG

An RPG so boring I couldn’t even finish it — and this is me we’re talking about here. It’s just so aggressively mediocre. The central gimmick is that the protagonist has time magic that lets her see into both the past and the future, which sounds interesting, right? The game proceeds to do almost nothing with it, as you can only time travel at approved times for the most banal of purposes (usually fetch quests), even though past- and future-vision were always showing me tons of things I wanted to interact with. You can even bring physical objects from the past, but there is zero consideration given to how this must surely muck up the timestream. You can also use time magic in battle to age or de-age enemies, but the alternate versions almost all fight and die in the exact same ways, so there’s little point. The one clever thing is that if you apply a DoT and send the enemy to the future the damage will all apply at once… but it does less damage than you mage can do in a single attack, so it’s pointless. The whole game feels really weirdly balanced, with one character who outdamages everyone else (initially by a literal order of magnitude), one who’s just completely useless, and one whose gimmick is supposed to be random effects yet is trivially gamed by very predictable action commands.

The plot is not any better; I dropped it after the antimonarchist revolution leader turned out to be an evil tyrant who only cared about power and cruelly killed the innocent royals for no reason.

I don’t normally care about art, but the visual design of this game was also extremely weird. Everything is rendered in a fluid, hand-drawn style that genuinely looks quite nice in motion… yet all scenes freeze time so the characters can just stand still while talking to each other. The engine appears unable to let models perform animations outside of a cutscene, so in the rare cases where characters do move during scenes, there has to be an extremely jarring loading screen before and after. Even then, the actions are all painfully obviously stock animations that are frequently reused, so we get all the limitations of SNES sprite cutscenes without any of the expediency. I can’t imagine what possessed the designers to do it this way.

Axiom Verge 2
Metroidvania

The followup to Axiom Verge. It is more of a sidequel than a sequel, focused on a different character exploring a mostly-independent plot. Judged on its own merits it’s a perfectly fine Metroidvania, but compared to its predecessor I found it quite a letdown. The plot is simpler, the characters flatter, the horror and surrealist elements nearly nonexistent. I kept expecting earth-shattering twists on the level of Axiom Verge’s, but there was nothing. Everything happens quite straightforwardly and despite a lot of lore suggesting otherwise, mostly everyone is exactly as they appear to be. The ending was also very abrupt and unsatisfying, and felt more like it was setting up a sequel than interested in actually resolving anything.

The gameplay is flatter too. All the powerups are pretty standard Metroidvania fare — no teleporting, no glitch bombs, no secret minus worlds. Most bosses are not only optional but completely trivial due to a new mechanic where you can hack enemies, including bosses, to both cripple their weapons and inflict a ton of free damage. The main gimmick now is a dual-world system where you can enter the Breach at various points and use it to circumvent obstacles in the main world, which was interesting but didn’t make up for the overall mediocrity. The whole game just feels less — less plot, less character, less weirdness.

You are at least given fast travel this time, so there’s that.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
Horror/Action Adventure

A schizophrenic woman journeys into Hel to retrieve the soul of her beloved. I found it a very interesting and empathetic look into living with psychosis — Senua is constantly besieged by voices giving contradictory and unhelpful advice when they’re not simply mocking her, and the environments warp from her hallucinations when she’s stressed. This all makes for a profoundly effective psychological horror experience, even before the story gets into the very real horror of the persecution Senua faces for her disability. In particular, the game uses the fear of the dark to great effect — later segments force Senua to travel through dark caverns where even with a torch she can barely see her own feet, and it felt genuinely tense and claustrophobic.

Also, while the game uses Norse mythology, the Vikings are not lionized or whitewashed as often seen in media depictions — the story is quite honest about how violent and brutal they were and the trauma they inflicted on their victims, which I appreciated. Media has a tendency to gloss over the negative aspects of ancient civilizations to mythologize them as cool, strong warriors, so I’m glad the story took a more realistic approach here.

One thing I particularly liked is that Senua is genuinely fearful. Most protagonists, especially in video games, act completely unflappable to the horrors they witness, but Senua frequently panics, hyperventilates, and even freezes up the first time she faces the final boss. One detail I especially liked is that she startles when she hears a distant sound or stumbles over something she can’t see in dark sections. It all made her feel very human and relatable, and fit the story’s theme of bravery and overcoming fear — you can’t be brave if you were never afraid in the first place.

The gameplay itself is mostly a walking sim with light puzzle elements, most of which are — fittingly — perspective puzzles. Most of them were fairly simple and obvious, and I might have liked them to involve a bit less running around, but overall they were fine. This is occasionally broken up by Soulslike combat sequences, which were moderately enjoyable but (probably because I’ve honed myself on too many Soulslikes) also quite simple. Parry windows are generous, dodge windows even moreso, and even fighting multiple enemies is manageable because Senua’s voices will warn when an enemy is about to sneak up on her (a feature I would have really appreciated in Sekiro, honestly). My biggest complaint is probably the lack of enemy variety — axe-wielders are the only enemies who require more sophisticated tactics than the old reliable of parry-and-counter. Fortunately, enemies are limited to fixed set piece encounters that never respawn, so you don’t have to keep wading through them while exploring.

My biggest criticism is that the game needed better tutorials — or any tutorials at all, really. I appreciate the importance of maintaining immersion for a horror game and I don’t mind the lack of HUD, but were button prompts really too much to ask? The only time controls are shown are in the pause menu. The voices will prompt you to take certain actions, but that’s not helpful when I don’t know what buttons to press to make those actions happen! I also didn’t realize you could focus in battle until after dying several times to the boss meant to tutorialize it, and it took me even longer to realize you could focus to dodge deathblows.