Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice is being praised for its fantastic storytelling and gameplay. The devs Ninja Theory have described it as an Independent AAA title, and initially reviews suggest that its going to be right up there with the stand outs of the year 2017.
Apart from the immersive story telling experience, Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice has also been in the news due to its purported feature of perma death, which apparently erases your save games. The story here is that the titular character has been infected by Hela and her arm has the rot , a sort of a curse which increases with each death , and in the case of increased deaths the rot will eventually reach the titular characters head and your character may experience perma death and the deletion of your save file. Well full marks for realism but in reality once you start playing the game you come to realize there is no perma death in Hell Blade. None at all in fact, and the idea at this point seems to have been blown out of proportion.
Its true that the rot keeps increasing but if I had to guess it would take around 100 consecutive deaths for the rot to actually reach your brain. While playing the game I kept dying and around the 30th or so time I noticed that the rot had gone up to the arm and eventually up till the elbow , and in some key moments as the game progressed I eventually saw the rot automatically reach upto the shoulders and then depending on how far into the game you are it eventually stops.
When you reach a certain threshold and die the rot is erased and respawns , this in turn gives of the illusion that it is still increasing.This is likely done to have a psychological effect on the player , and to induce fear that your progress may be wiped out completely in case you die which meshes in really well with the games story and ties into the characters suffering from her own mental state..
Hence it is really unlikely that you may die during the game , heck I have so far been killed more than 30 times on repeat and have yet to experience perma death. I have completed a significant portion of the game at this point so I think that its really really unlikely that you will experience perma death and your save file erased.
Have any of you experienced perma death in Hellblade Senua’s Sacrifice? If so let us know by commenting in the comments section below.
