Yep. We’re in video games now. That’s right, the first-ever video game to feature a mentally ill character comes out in 2016.
Based on a Celtic myth, Hellblade is a third-person point-of-view game that tells the story of Senua, a Celtic warrior who is left to fend for herself after a Viking invasion. Senua encounters enemies like demon wolves, evil beasts, and winged giants in her quest to escape this hellish scenario.
She also battles her own demons of mental illness.
“The game’s protagonist experiences psychosis, and suffers from depression and anxiety. Her ‘journey into hell’ is a manifestation of her mental health,” Dominic Matthews, product development manager at game-developer Ninja Theory, told Motherboard. “As it’s a third-person game, the camera sits behind her, and as a player you see her personal health through her eyes.”
Mental illness is a touchy subject to say the least, and that’s why the game’s developers enlisted psychiatrist Paul Fletcher, professor of Health Neuroscience at University of Cambridge, as a consultant.
“When people think about mental illness in the context of making things, sometimes they want to sensationalize things,” Fletcher told Motherboard. “But it was clear that Ninja Theory wanted to represent mental illness as sensitively as possible.”
The authenticity of the psychosis, depression and anxiety remains to be seen, but take a gander at these screenshots from the game, scheduled for release on PS4 and Microsoft Windows in 2016.
Would you play this game? And how do you feel about a mentally ill character featured in a video game?
