Racing around the internet like burning helheim fire today has been the knowledge that Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Ninja Theory’s celt action/thriller, will delete your save file if you die too much. Is it too harsh? Should it be something you can disable? How hard is it anyway? Those are questions for another game because, well, it’s not true.

Here’s what Kirk thought of the threat of permadeath in Hellblade.

Yes, the game promises you that the rot will increase with every death, eventually killing Senua permanently. It just, well, doesn’t. The rot will grow to a certain point – which we think is governed by how far through the game you are – and then stop. In fact, this happens fairly quickly after a couple of deaths. Details, and 50 of our own deaths, are in the video above.

However, the threat of it plays into the game’s message, which focuses on Senua’sown fear of her enemies and degrading mental state. We’ll let a few more people finish the game before we discuss how the ending plays into all this but, needless to say, it was a clever decision, even if it may have backfired with a portion of the playerbase.

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