P5

Task 1)
Hellblade's impact on it's audience

Hellblade in some cases has proved not only entertaining but also helpful to those suffering from mental health issues like depression and anxiety. A good example of this is the review of the game on IGN titled 'The Cathartic Intensity of Hellblade: Senua's sacrifice' by Julian Rizzo-smith. In this article/ review he explains how he relates to the game and the main character's psychosis to his struggles in his teenage years at school, when he suffered from social anxiety and depression. He states that he thinks the game is cathartic.



Task 2)

Hellblade breaks the stereotype that men are always the main characters in violent games. In this image, the Protagonist is shown to be fighting and using a sword.

In hellblade there is a balance between female and male characters, this can also apply to the monsters in hellblade as well. Some of the monsters look although they are more of a masculine and some feminine.


    











Mental health is highly represented in hellblade, with the main character having psychosis which is a serious mental health problem some people suffer from. This sheds a good light upon hellblade because ninja theory wanted to show it as realistic as they possibly could they did this by getting funding for the game from the Wellcome Trust, who are a company that help people with mental health issues and raise awareness of the issues. They also worked with a Professor Paul Fletcher (PF). Fletcher is a neuroscientist and psychosis expert at Cambridge university.

Task 3)

Hellblade is seen as quite a controversial game, this is because it is one of the first games that has accurately portrait a mental illness.
The game has allot of strong violence like bodies hanging from trees. This would have made making the game a problem and made the PEGI rating allot higher. This would have made a game that could have been a 16 and perhaps teach a younger audience about mental health.   


Task 4)
PEGI age rating for Hellblade

If I were to put a PEGI age rating on Hellblade I would make it a 16. This is because it has quite a large amount of violence but because it isn't realistic, it isn't quite an 18 rating. Hellblade isn't a 12 because it has a large amount of fear/horror.

  



Hellblade was actually rated 18 by PEGI.