Does Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice delete your save file if you die too often?

There has been a lot of media coverage of a controversial feature in Hellblade where your save game is deleted if you die too much.

Examples:

• Eurogamer: Hellblade deletes your save file if you die too many times
• PC Gamer: Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice deletes your save file for dying too often

However, some news site I've never heard of claims that

Hellblade save files won’t really be deleted if you die too often. [..] Adding a false message of perma-death makes sense if you consider Senua’s mental state. She is afraid of things that aren’t real, that fear is what the developers want you to feel.

So which is it?

0

3 Answers

The short answer is, in practice, no, your save won't be deleted. I intentionally died many, MANY times (in the hundreds) without my save being deleted. Some stuff went down, but I didn't lose my progress. Of course, it's possibly that if I had died a few more times my save would have been deleted, but I hit a point where the game seemed to be telling me that everything that was going to happen had already happened.

The long answer is, the game straight up tells you, in quite literally the only popup all game, and very early on, that your save will be deleted if you die too much. There were no review codes given out, so when reviewers hit this point, they went "oh dang better tweet this." Totally understandable. It never occurred to most of them that the game might be lying, and they might have felt a sense of responsibility to their audience. They reported what the game told them. It just seems that, like so many other times, the game was lying.

1

According to the Giant Beastcast on 8/11 "the game states that you will loose your save file if you die too many times but your brain is lying to you" which is like the game saying its lying to you about this feature. There is no permanent death in the game this is discussed at the 19 min mark.

1

I have read this somewhere else, so I cannot claim "ownership" of this answer. It is also a spoiler for the ending of the game, so I will mark it accordingly.

If I recall correctly, the message says that the Darkness is trying to take over Senua, which is shown with the dark patches crawling up her arm. Dying makes these patches go up a tiny bit of skin. Allowing this darkness to reach Senua's brain will delete the save file.

After the battle with Hela, Senua accepts that her love is gone, and that makes the darkness reach her head. The game is intended to just finish after this last event, as there is nothing to "continue". The message is foreshadowing this moment, in which the save file gets "deleted" and the only option is to start a new game.