Hellblade 2
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 is a gorgeous game full of industry-best visuals and performances.
It is also not terribly fun to play.
Admittedly, I was not the biggest fan of the first Hellblade, which also was beautiful and well-acted. The puzzles and gameplay didn’t quite land for me, but with an open mind heading into the sequel, I was hoping to see more improvements and evolution in the sequel. Instead, a few things seem to have gone backward, even, and I am realizing that this brand of storytelling is mostly not for me. As such, you may interpret some of these issues here may be about Hellblade more generally. Though it has similar strengths as well.
Hellblade 2 is beautiful. Its sweeping Icelandic landscapes, deep underground caves, massacred villages and ritual sacrifice death pits are among the best I’ve ever seen in the medium. Accomplishing this on a Series X instead of a maxed PC running Cyberpunk on path tracing is really something else. The environmental detail here is unparalleled and there is no chance it will not take your breath away on multiple occasions. It really is jaw-dropping in this regard.
Hellblade 2
The same is true for the acting work, with another powerful performance from Melina Juergens, which will no doubt be remembered come award season next winter. I also appreciated Chris O'Reilly as the slaver Thórgestr, in particular.
Hellblade has a relentless focus on being “cinematic,” miles beyond even what games like Uncharted and The Last of Us attempt. There’s no UI at all. No “upgrades” to find, extremely limited exploration, but mostly just marching straight through the story. This cinematic experience extends into combat with dynamic sequences that have enemies crashing into you and each other in between player-controlled segments, and many of the battles can feel like one-take John Wick Viking fight sequences as a result. That part is neat.
But I just do not enjoy this as an actual game. The term “walking simulator” was thrown around some indie games a while back, but here? It’s pretty accurate. There are long stretches of time where you’re doing nothing but holding down forward, or occasionally, the run button to upgrade that to a light jog. Sure, it’s time to take in the landscape, but it gets old, especially in a game that is quite short to start with. I was beyond bored in an absurdly long cave sequence peppered by a couple of puzzles. Then later, you go through a mind-bending foggy woods where you quite literally do nothing but walk. There aren’t even puzzles there. It’s probably 20 minutes of just walking, which for a seven hour game, is not ideal.
Yes, seven hours. Definitely not more than that. Ninja Theory is unapologetic for the short length of its titles, and I won’t hold it against it. My playthrough was brisk, though I suppose it could be extended if you stumbled on puzzles or combat sequences. The problem is not length, but pacing, long, dragging sequences with a sudden sprint near the end that was not built out enough at all. I wish I had spent half the time in the caves, skipped the woods entirely and did more with the final space.
Hellblade 2
The story this time around feels less urgent. This is not Senua’s previous saga of personal tragedy, this is her helping strangers, and by proxy her unseen “people” by slaying a number of giants across the land. By the end I understood how this process connects to her own story, but it’s missing that deeply personal hook from the first game.
I know that this is a signature of the series, and I did play with the recommended headphones, but the voices in Senua’s head, and therefore in your own, are almost intolerable. It’s non-stop narration that almost never says anything useful or interesting. I get that it’s trying to convey genuine mental illness, but as a game, I quickly grew tired of two bickering voices saying things like “It’s a torch! A torch! Pick it up. It’s giving us light! It will show us the way. What if it goes out? We’ll be lost in darkness. Keep the torch alight! The torch!” It was just too much, too often, and deeply unpleasant to play. That may be the point, but that doesn’t make it a good experience.
As for the rest of the “game” game, one reason it can look so amazing is that it’s so linear and on-the-rails. Like the first game, you essentially have one path and one path only. Maybe a few times you can walk 15 feet down a tiny offshoot to find a secret bit of a story, but that’s it. It’s just walking, running, climbing as you push further and further ahead.
Combat too, though it’s dynamic in its presentation, is very rote in practice. You have a heavy attack, light attack, dodge and parry. That’s fine, standard, but enemies usually only have just two sets of patterned moves that quickly become easy to work around. The process for every single enemy is block, dodge then hit them a few times to build up your mirror, then put them in slo-mo for what is essentially an autokill. Though it’s all very “cinematic,” there’s no depth here.
Hellblade 2
Some of the puzzles are interesting, particularly some “flip pieces of the room upside down” ones. I was less amused by the return of the “find the shape in the landscape” ones returning from the first game which is mostly bumbling into a eye-level walls or knee-high out-of-bounds rocks you wonder why you can’t bypass to get a vantage point. I’m not sure I counted more than three types of puzzles in total, only one of which I’d consider somewhat interesting.
I enjoyed many parts of Hellblade 2, and there are some environmental/music sequences in particular, one near the beginning, the other nearer to the middle, that are going to stay with me a while due to the absolute crushing, horrifying, intense atmosphere paired with amazing audio. But as a game? Something I enjoyed playing? Generally speaking, no, it wasn’t really for me.
Score: 7/10
A code was provided for the purposes of this review.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
