Hellblade, the hotly anticipated new game from Enslaved: Odyssey To The West and DmC: Devil May Cry developer Ninja Theory, comes with an interesting caveat. Apparently, dying too often in-game may result in your save game being permanently deleted.
In a recent Twitter post, British game critic Mark Brown mentioned that the game itself explains the perma-death mechanic with the rather ominous quotation below:
“The dark rot will grow each time you fail. If the rot reaches Senua’s head her quest is over. And all progress will be lost”.
Since the game review embargo has been lifted on Hellblade, this interesting save mechanic has sparked much debate from critics. Perma-death modes are normally optional challenges gamers undertake, such as in Diablo III and XCOM. Ninja Theory, however, have opted to make it a core part of Hellblade’s gameplay.
Prominent YouTuber and game critic John ‘Totalbiscuit’ Bain has criticised Hellblade’s perma-death mechanic as an “outdated, stupid waste of everyone’s time”. However, he did mention that he had yet to play the game for himself.
It is worth noting that PCGamesN.com claim they have tested out the perma-death mechanic and report it to be no more than a simple ‘bluff’. However, players on NeoGaf have reported that the perma-death mechanic is in fact real, it is just not as harsh on players as it originally appeared. Players must die multiple times, across multiple checkpoints in order to trigger a perma-death.
In the coming weeks, it will be interesting to see whether or not this perma-death save deletion mechanic will help to popularise Hellblade among fans of games such as From Software‘s Souls series or ultimately doom the new game to failure.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments!
