James Lynch 
According to a post on the developer’s Twitter page, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice has just reached 1 million total downloads across all the platforms the game has been released on. This is a rare milestone, particularly for an indie developer (as they were at the time), and should be applauded as such. Ninja Theory themselves were recently announced as one of Microsoft’s new glut of producers that they purchased and announced during their E3 conference. They were, arguably the most notable featured (possibly alongside Playground Games) and a lot of people are waiting to see what they come up with next.
Hellblade itself follows the titular Senua, a Pict warrior on a quest to Helheim. En route she must tackle a multitude of enemies rooted in Celtic and Norse mythology. The whole thing has been praised for the way that it uses it’s story as a metaphor for how the character deals with her psychosis, something the game approaches admirably. In fact Professor Paul Fletcher, a Neuroscientist who helped work on the game, had this to say on how it deals with mental illness:
“It’s been refreshing to see a representation of psychosis in which the person isn’t just a sort of passive receptacle for madness. Senua is the hero of her own story, trying to make sense of her experiences and work her way through them – that’s incredibly de-stigmatising. In representations of mental illness onscreen, you usually have the illness first, and then a two-dimensional character attached to that. In
Released back in August 2017 on PC and PlayStation 4, the title was met with an overwhelmingly positive response from critics and players alike. With the announcement that they would be working with a juggernaut like Microsoft, and now this, the future looks very bright for Ninja Theory.
