Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice (2017) (PC) (Ninja Theory)
0Ninja Theory's experimental action adventure Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice is visually stunning and includes a frankly astonishing amount of innovatively produced voice work which together delivers an experience unlike anything else on the market. Unfortunately, the actual gameplay is fairly simplistic and the familiar third-person puzzle/combat mechanics manage to overstay their welcome even though the game is only about 6 hours long (and priced accordingly).
And despite handling a delicate subject matter - mental illness and psychosis - with the appropriate empathy and respect, I didn't come away from the game feeling particularly enlightened about the everyday struggles of disabled people. What Hellblade does effectively communicate is that psychological impairment must not be approached from a moralistic and judgmental perspective. A key character in the story illustrates the fact that if your treatment of mental illness is punishing and abusive you're not only failing to fight the darkness; you *are* the darkness. Although this is no doubt an important message, it should hopefully come as no surprise to most reasonably well-informed audiences...
That being said, the game does offer a powerfully unsettling artistic representation of what it might be like to hear voices in your head and see disturbing things that aren't part of "objective" reality (whatever that means). On a purely impressionistic level, then, Hellblade is a triumph and well worth playing through for its impeccable presentation alone (also, there's a whole lot of Norse mythology as well if you're into that sort of stuff).