Fact or Fiction? Kant and the Question of Reality in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice [NO SPOILERS]

[Originally posted to r/Hellblade in March 2021]

What is real? For as long as we’ve had eyes to see, we’ve been asking ourselves whether the things we’ve been seeing are actually, in fact, there. It can be an unpleasant topic to think about- much like video games, too much and you’ll go mad. But one such game that takes on this topic in bold color is Ninja Theory’s 2017 tour de force release Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. It swept the 14th British Academy Games Awards, telling the poignant story of Senua, a Celtic warrior travelling deep into viking-era Scandinavia to unravel her past and come to terms with her psychosis. Her psychosis is arguably the defining feature of the game- the game employs an over-the-shoulder perspective, but the world of the game is seen through Senua’s eyes and Senua’s eyes only. We experience the world only as Senua experiences it. With Senua’s perception of the world being shaped largely by the symptoms of her psychosis, this begs the question- what, if anything, is real?

This is a question that players often ask at some point in the game, and answers to this question tend to lie along a spectrum. On one end, there’s the “hard fantasy” side- the interpretation that Senua literally travelled to Norway and fought gods and monsters while also experiencing psychosis. This would make Hellblade a historical fantasy game, similar to the God of War franchise. The combat of the game certainly supports this view- you can’t wish the monsters away, you need to vanquish them by your own accord; they appear like physical creatures blocking your path. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the “hard reality” side- the view that the whole game is just Senua hallucinating in a field in Orkney somewhere. This would make Hellblade almost a psychological thriller game, one where your mind is the real enemy. And that’s not entirely wrong. Most players adopt some form of a “reality” view, because there are many hints throughout the game that Senua’s view is not wholly accurate. However, there is more to this game than can be understood by calling it a “hallucination.” And for that, we can turn to a rather unlikely source- Immanuel Kant.

Kant is often called the “father of modern philosophy,” having synthesized the previous enlightenment-era discourses of rationalism vs. empiricism and laid the foundations for all of the philosophy that came after. One of his most important works is the massive, impenetrably-academic tome the Critique of Pure Reason, a monstrous treatise on metaphysics and epistemology. Much of it talks about the nature of reality, and how we know what we know- the exact questions we’re looking to answer in the world of Hellblade.

Ninja Theory certainly was not in the business of fabrication when they created the world of Hellblade- in creating Senua’s world, they worked closely with Paul Fletcher, professor of health neuroscience at Cambridge University, and Charles Fernyhough, professor of psychology at Durham University, as well as numerous people who suffer from psychosis and schizophrenia in their daily lives. They consulted with them to learn about their experience with reality and perception, and how it can differ from people who don’t have such conditions. They found that time and space doesn’t work the same for everyone- one person described seeing the world “like a photograph that’s torn and put together again. If you move it’s frightening.” Another said that “I see wavyness and melting of the walls.” One person said “colours seem to be brighter now, almost as if they are luminous,” and someone else, that “sometimes the world appears like a kaleidoscope and it can be beautiful” (Development Diary 14). These perceptions are a part of their reality, and the fact that they are not caused by the same audiovisual stimuli as other people’s perceptions make them no less real to those who are perceiving them.

So what is the objective reality in Hellblade? What is or isn’t real?

It doesn’t matter. We’re not supposed to know, because Senua doesn’t know. This is Senua’s reality, and that’s all that matters. Does Senua experience what psychologists term “hallucinations?” Absolutely. But the term “hallucination” has taken on the connotation of being fake or untrue, whereas Paul Fletcher says it’s just the opposite- “Psychosis can’t really be easily understood as just some malfunction of the mind, it’s actually a very creative process where somebody constructs their world, and if we recognize that that’s what we’re doing all the time anyway, constructing our own reality, it may help us to understand” (Development Diary 12). And Kant backs him up- when talking about the intuitions of space and time, he says, “As to the intuitions of other thinking beings, we cannot judge whether they are or are not bound by the same conditions which limit our own intuition, and which for us are universally valid” (Transcendental Aesthetic, S1 SS4). He puts it more plainly later in the Critique: “We should only be able to say, ‘so common experience teaches us,’ but not ‘it must be so’” (T.A., S2 SS5).

Kant set out to achieve a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy- just as Copernicus shifted the center of the astronomical universe, Kant meant to shift the center of philosophical discourse (in an opposite way), away from an objective viewpoint and towards a human viewpoint. Kant recognized that “the nature of objects considered as things in themselves and without reference to the receptivity of our sensibility is quite unknown to us. We know nothing more than our mode of perceiving them” (T.A., S2 SS9). Senua only knows what she perceives, psychosis or otherwise. And because her viewpoint is the only one we get in the game, that is what we must also take for reality. Does it accurately reflect the reality around her? We have no way of knowing. We must take her word for it.

Taking Senua’s viewpoint as fact (the “hard fantasy” view previously mentioned) discounts the fact that she is filtering her perceptions through her brain, as we all do. Paul Fletcher says, “we like to think that we experience the world almost like a high definition photograph, as it really is, but actually, a lot of the time, what we’re doing is using what we already know to shape and govern what we perceive” (Development Diary 12). Completely discounting Senua’s perceptions (the “hard reality” view previously mentioned) makes a similar mistake- ignoring the fact that her perceptions are what inform her reality. Kant says in the Critique that “It is therefore from the human point of view only that we can speak of space, extended objects, etc. If we depart from the subjective condition, under which alone we can obtain external intuition, or, in other words, by means of which we are affected by objects, the representation of space has no meaning whatsoever” (T.A., S1 SS4). He also says, “[Time] has to do neither with shape nor position; on the contrary, it determines the relation of representations in our internal state” (T.A., S2 SS6). The concepts of time and space only have authority within Senua’s internal state; who are we to say that they are “incorrect?”

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice exists in a beautifully meta-aware way- we experience this game on a screen that takes code from a disc and projects light into our eyes and electronically-generated sound into our ears. It's not real, and the game knows that. It tells us to put all our conceptions of what's real and what isn't aside, and simply experience. So rarely do we have the chance to fully immerse ourselves in another person’s reality, fictional or otherwise. Most other games, even ones from a first person perspective, still operate under the assumption that you are experiencing objective reality. It’s a handy assumption to make; one that arguably enables society to exist. But it can lead to a lack of empathy for those whose realities might not be so easily relatable, and that’s what Hellblade sets out to remedy. It asks this very question, “what is real,” and boldly states that the answer does not exist. It certainly doesn’t use the stiflingly academic language of Kant, and thank God it doesn’t, but it fundamentally says the same thing.

And that’s what makes the game so powerful- the monsters you fight are simultaneously literary symbolism for Senua's fears and the literal embodiment of Senua's fears, at the same time. Like Schrödinger’s Cat, you have to treat both of them as existing simultaneously. It’s beautiful in a way that transcends the distinction between fantasy and reality. It allows people to better see themselves in Senua- because the events of the game cannot be put into the boxes of an outsider’s “fantasy” or “reality,” they take on a universal quality and applicability. They become myths, in a way. The topics discussed, the lessons learned, aren't just tied to Senua’s psychosis; they can be applied to anyone who feels their mind is an enemy. And this message has rung true for countless people- the game was fantastically received by the people it intended to portray, and Ninja Theory achieved exactly what they set out to do. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice won many awards for its story, but the awards that truly matter are the stories of the human beings this game has touched, the lives it has changed. And those? Those are undeniably real.