'Hellblade' punishes you for dying a lot

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, released today, has an interesting permadeath mechanic. The more you die, the closer you get to needing to restart the whole game, players are told.

Players are quickly realizing they need to be extra careful, which falls right into the developers' plans.

Warning: Mild Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice spoilers ahead.

Instead of seeing a traditional Game Over screen, Hellblade players' deaths will be met with an explanation that if they keep dying, they'll eventually have to start all the way back at the beginning of the game. On the surface, it's a pretty harsh punishment, and not very common for narrative-driven games like Hellblade.

Here's what that looks like:

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The protagonist of the game, Senua, develops a rot on her hand that spreads closer to her head each time she dies. The game claims that when the rot reaches Senua's head, the player loses all their progress in the game, although PCGamesN tested it out and never hit the permanent death meter even after more than 50 deaths.

Our own Adam Rosenberg tested out the game and found that, although the rot moved up Senua's arm after each death, it stopped growing after about the fifth. PCGamesN reported that the rot grew up the arm more later in the game, but never actually reached Senua's head.

Permadeath in Hellblade's case -- even if it is a bluff -- isn't just there to create a challenge for players: it also creates a connection between players and Senua.

Part of developer Ninja Theory's goal is to have players experience what it's like to be Senua, a Celtic warrior with psychosis who believes she is traveling into the Viking underworld of Hel to find the soul of her dead lover.

She's an unreliable narrator who hears voices and sees things that aren't real. The developers met with psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and people who have experienced psychosis to accurately bring that experience to Hellblade, Ninja Theory co-founder and creative director Tameem Antoniades said in June.

This threat of permanent death acts as a way to connect players with the main character to understand what she's going through by feeling the same kind of anxiety she would feel about dying. The visual of the rot growing up your arm is a constant reminder that players have already failed at least once, and relates to Senua's fear of darkness.

If the permadeath is in fact a bluff, it could be a part of Senua's psychosis, and players believing in the permadeath may be another layer in which Hellblade brings players closer to understanding Senua. Emphasis on could be.

But even outside of that context, it's still a groundbreaking concept. Most games either decide to initiate permadeath for every death, or they let you save without worrying about most of your progress being lost. There's safety in checkpoints, but Hellblade doesn't want players thinking they can rely on them.

Depending on the game, the freedom to practice a section of a game over and over until you perfect it can actually be to the detriment of the narrative. Take Resident Evil 7. It's a game that immediately immerses you into its horrors, but the moment you hit pause and select Reset to try again from your last checkpoint, the game loses half of its tension.

Hellblade doesn't want players to lose that tension.

A number of people have expressed their opinions online both for and against the idea of permadeath in Hellblade, although there are still no recorded instances of people actually losing all of their progress in the game from dying too much.

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And of course some people have joked about the possible permadeath mechanic, saying that if you're extra bad at the game it will start messing with your computer.

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Now that would make players be really really careful about not dying in Hellblade.