Crying Wolfshene: On Hellblade’s Progress

Ninja Theory has pitched Hellblade as “independent AAA”, and by doing have wedged themselves into an unnecessarily tough, possibly inflexible, position. Whether long-winded introductions are saved with this distillation, it nevertheless invites a much greater level of scrutiny and pressure, the latter of a variety the developer may have been kinder to itself to keep internal.

With Heavenly Sword and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Ninja Theory established a commitment to “character action” games with sophisticated facial capture and exuberant cutscene work generally: if the company’s creative foundations stabilize on a reliable bedrock, it’s because they are consistently iterative on these areas. The frustration in being a fan of the studio’s work is in having to endure a few equally consistent weaknesses whose improvement is mostly static.