Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II (Review)

Developer: Ninja Theory
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Available On: PC, Xbox Series X|S
Reviewed on Xbox Series S

To quote one of the greatest musical artists of this generation, Ren, when discussing his own struggle with psychosis, “It was never really a battle for me to win, it was an eternal dance.” In Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, the sequel to 2017’s critically acclaimed Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, our heroine Senua has grown a little older and learned to accept the voices she hears as mere participants in her dance and not the guiding steps she once perceived them to be. Although her reality is still colored and informed by her inner “Furies” and the visual hallucinations that accompany them, she’s no longer at their mercy, learning to find her own voice and stand firm during their attempts to silence it. In Hellblade II, we get to see this next step of Senua’s journey unfold in a powerful and thought-provoking fashion, but more than any game in recent memory, this sequel has quickly earned a reputation as being extremely divisive and led to countless debates over what it is and what it’s trying to do. While this review isn’t the be-all and end-all of the discussion, I’m going to do my best to give you an idea of why I think it’s not only one of the best games of the year, but also a huge step forward for the medium.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, Hellblade II has more in common with an experimental art-house film than a traditional video game. The puzzles and combat from the first game are still present, but they’ve both been stripped down considerably to let the visuals, audio, performances, and narrative take center stage. I wouldn’t necessarily call the first Hellblade a mechanically rich experience, but as someone who just replayed it earlier this year, I found it shocking just how much the gameplay has been paired down for the sequel. So much of that first game was centered around immersing you into Senua’s experience with psychosis, utilizing binaural audio with the aid of mental health researchers and those who actually suffer from psychosis to most accurately simulate what it sounds like to hear voices in your head. It also used the repetition of symbols and the way the brain looks for patterns to depict the visual hallucinations that come with this condition. These features were implemented into the puzzles and combat as well, but the lasting effect and legacy of the game is the way it made the player feel during exploration and story beats, so it seems like Ninja Theory decided to focus on the audio/visuals this time around at the expense of what would most generally be considered “gameplay”. That’s not to say there isn’t any in Hellblade II, but as we’ll discuss in just a moment it’s necessary to understand that this game is a hard pivot from the blueprint of the first installment and blurs the lines of what’s possible in interactive fiction.

Senua spends much of this game on a journey to track down and destroy a group of Viking slavers. After losing her village to a raid in the first game and losing the love of her life in the aftermath, Senua sees this as an opportunity to end the suffering of others by striking the head of the snake. Her journey takes her to the barren wastes of Midgard, where the valleys, caves, and beaches house terrifying secrets and the natives live in fear of murderous giants that stalk the land. It’s easy to fall into the trap of dismissing everything that happened in the first game as an exaggeration of reality due to Senua’s condition, but this time around there’s a grounded sense of urgency and fear that’s only heightened by the introduction of NPC companions who follow her and give her something to protect. While it’s clear that Senua’s shifted sense of reality makes her an unreliable narrator of sorts, it leads to a fascinating story where you’re left to analyze and interpret things in a manner that feels intentionally open-ended. Even after finishing the game, I’m left with questions and theories about what different elements of the story meant and whether or not they were literal or metaphorical. As someone who loves stories that require you to think and don’t hold your hand, I thought Hellblade II was incredibly satisfying, and I will probably be doing another playthrough to see how much is recontextualized knowing where the story ends up.

What truly sells this world and its story is the extreme detail that went into the visual fidelity of this game. Put simply, Hellblade II is without a doubt the most realistic video game I have ever seen in my entire life. Everything from the environments to how highly detailed and perfectly nuanced the motion capture is (especially the faces!) completely blew my mind. This is easily the most “next-gen” looking game on modern consoles, and I’m playing on the weaker hardware of the Xbox Series S. This is largely because it’s taking full advantage of all the tools in the new Unreal Engine 5, which gives a level of unprecedented photo-realism the likes of which has never been seen before. I don’t think visuals alone make a game great, but it’s hard to deny just how spectacular this game looks and the fact that it’s clearly a selling point. There were literally dozens of times when I had my jaw hit the floor due to what I was seeing. What Ninja Theory has managed to achieve with the tech of this game is borderline unbelievable, and in regards to what they’ve done with motion/performance capture, I think they’ve just outclassed every other studio in the industry.

Similar to the first game, the audio also plays a major role here. The game was created with the intent of being played with headphones to experience the binaural audio, a sound design that simulates the actual way our ears hear noises by using direction and depth to make every sound in the game feel natural and realistic. This is most notably used for simulating the experience of hearing voices in your head, which is made all the more realistic due to the previously mentioned help on the game that lets you get as close to a true experience of what it’s like to live with this condition. The first game was genuinely unnerving, but there was one particular voice in this sequel that used a low and gravelly tone that made me feel so uncomfortable and gave me a weird “brain tingle” (almost like an allergic reaction to ASMR) that I couldn’t finish the game with headphones and had to use my TV speakers for the remainder of the experience. Yes, the game is supposed to be uncomfortable to experience, but this was such a strong physical reaction unlike anything I’ve experienced before that left me feeling physically ill, which is a problem I didn’t have with the first game. Regardless, I think the way Ninja Theory have evolved their audio tech is worthy of recognition.

This is all brought together by the powerful performance by Melina Jürgens as Senua. Jürgens has such a raw vulnerability in her performance that you completely buy into Senua and immediately feel for her and understand both the horrors she has to live with and the strength she possesses to keep moving forward. While I do think her performance in the first game was just slightly better due to the more inward and emotional journey it took you on, that’s not said to discredit this performance in any way whatsoever. Senua has lived so much of her life as an outcast and has been forced to steer clear from others, so seeing her struggle with learning how to connect with people and become someone others look to for guidance and support hit especially hard. In what I think might be one of the greatest aspects of this game, Senua’s growth is so subtle and meaningful that by the time the credits roll and you reflect on everything that happens you can actually trace the path of her emotional journey and see how even the smallest of steps can lead to the biggest of changes.

As to where all of the controversy surrounding this game stems from, it’s probably best to dive deep into the combat and puzzles. In the first Hellblade, combat had a hack-and-slash feel to it where you could chain light and heavy attacks with dodge and parry mechanics to take on waves of smaller enemies and more powerful bosses. It wasn’t groundbreaking, but it was serviceable enough to be entertaining and was bolstered by the fear of “the Rot”, a growing sickness that would take over more of Senua with each death with the threat of full infection causing you to lose your save data. This added a palpable sense of danger to where you weren’t just trying to win to get to the next part of the game, but fighting for Senua’s actual life and the fear of having to start the game over again. As it turns out (spoiler for a game mechanic?) the Rot symbolized Senua’s paranoia and wouldn’t actually erase your save data, so it was intentionally designed to cause fear and panic in the player over something that wasn’t actually real. In Hellblade II, Ninja Theory couldn’t get away with doing something like that again, so now if you die you just restart the fight you’re in with no real repercussions. That alone removes some of the thrill of combat, but it’s also slower, more deliberate, and has a much smaller window for dodging and parrying attacks, which most people will find to be a huge step back.

Personally, I like the new feel this game is going for. The heightened visuals and motion capture make each fight look insanely cinematic and there’s an added weight to combat this time around that makes the slower pace feel intentional. Each hit you land feels earned, and the more skill-based parry makes pulling one off feel powerful, and it can change the flow of the fight in a matter of seconds. The only thing about the combat I didn’t like was that there’s an object similar to the first game that charges up as you block, attack, and take damage that then allows you to slow time on your foe, allowing you to basically slice through any enemy in the game with ease. It cheapens most fights drastically, so I simply stopped using it and relied on the actual combat mechanics to get through encounters, which I found much more satisfying. Another major change is that while the first game would often pit you against multiple foes at once, each encounter in Hellblade II is a 1v1. This does make it a little easier, but it also allows Ninja Theory to really make each individual fight a spectacle, with the motion capture making every encounter look hyperrealistic.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the puzzles. Where the first game largely used the same puzzle type over and over again (perception-based shape matching), Hellblade II has much more variety. Early on you encounter a chain of puzzles where you deal with an upsidedown mirror world superimposed above you. You have to look for irregularities in your world and the mirrored one to find orbs that serve as keys, and while it’s not exactly tough to solve these puzzles, the visual aspect of two worlds on the screen at once is impressive. Likewise, another puzzle type is introduced later on where you have to light pedestals with a torch or snuff them out with sand to make magic barriers and pathways appear or shift. I found these puzzles to be a little more tricky, but they’re not so hard as to stall progression for long. However, they are memorable for their great use of lighting and particle effects, with the bridges in particular dissipating into ethereal mist as they take and lose form. Unfortunately, the shape-matching puzzles (my least favorite part from the first game) return, but they’re thankfully more spread out and are now more easily defined in the environment so you don’t waste large chunks of time walking around in frustration to look for a match. Personally, I’m okay with the combat and puzzle mechanics being downplayed this time around, because it only serves to make what the developers wanted the focus to be (visuals and storytelling) stand out more prominently.

Lastly, it’s impossible to discuss this game and not consider the discussion going around it in terms of what it means for Xbox as a brand and Ninja Theory as a studio. With a lack of marketing outside of a few showcases, many feared Hellblade II was going to be sent out to die, and with low player numbers on Steam and Xbox, people recommending you watch it on YouTube instead of playing it for yourself, a runtime of about 5-8 hours that’s being deemed “too short”, and now a misguided movement that seems to be slamming the game for not being more action focused and having more intricate mechanics, there’s some understandable fear of what this means going forward. I love Ninja Theory and the style of game they make, and I don’t understand how people could play that first Hellblade game and then expect a follow-up to be a big-budget AAA action game when it’s so clear they’re deliberately trying to go against gaming expectations and make a more thoughtful experience centered around new tech, emotion, and story. There have been so many people riding on the expectation and hope that this was going to be the big AAA game to change things for Xbox when that expectation was never set by the team or conveyed to the fans in any way. Hellblade is a series that’s trying to blur the lines of interactive entertainment by making something that’s half-game half-movie, and I guess I just don’t understand how so many people got the impression it was going to be something bigger than it is.

Sadly, this brings me to my biggest fear. With the general audience seeming to completely misunderstand what the game is setting out to be due to unrealistic expectations which I can’t figure out the origins of, I can’t help but wonder if all of the negative feedback on social media, the low player count being tracked, and the sense of dismissal the gaming community has around this game is going to lead to Microsoft shutting down Ninja Theory. If Microsoft closed Tango Gameworks after releasing the successful and highly acclaimed Hi-Fi Rush last year, what chance does something like this have with how poor the reception has been? We’ve been in such a brutally awful cycle of studio closures over the past few years and it feels like now if a game isn’t a massive success at launch we have to start worrying about how long until the studio that made it goes under. I hope that’s not the case for Ninja Theory, and I really hope more people give this refreshing game a chance.

So, where does that leave us? If you haven’t caught on already, I appreciate the hell out of what Ninja Theory is attempting to do with Hellblade II. As someone who plays and reviews a lot of video games, I’m always looking for studios that take big swings, go against the norm, and craft experiences that genuinely feel unique, and I don’t think I’ve ever played anything quite like Hellblade II. Even if this isn’t going to be the type of game with mass appeal, I can’t stress enough how important it is to have weird and meaningful art like this that plays around with the expectation of what a video game is or what it should be like. While it would be easy to criticize the simplified combat or how downplayed puzzles are this time around, ultimately I was won over by Ninja Theory’s commitment to their vision. This is a game that oozes passion and you can tell it’s the exact game the studio wanted to make. There are sights, sounds, and moments in this game that I think will genuinely stay with me for years, and as someone who strives to be unapologetically myself, I’m inspired by how authentically the vision of this game was executed.

FINAL VERDICT

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II is a game of uncompromised vision. It’s slow-paced, downplays nearly all of its interactive elements to focus on its narrative and implementation of advanced visual and audio tech, and above all else, it’s the game the team at Ninja Theory wanted to make. From a purely technical level, this is the most “next-gen” experience on the market, with photo-realistic graphics and unrivaled sound design that pull you into the reality of Senua in a way that’s both beautiful and terrifying. The story is a wonderful exploration of how a broken and hurting person can grow, and thanks to the masterful performance by Melina Jürgens, the character of Senua feels wholly realized. Although simplified from the first game, combat is deliberate and weighty and uses the best motion capture seen in gaming to date to make each fight feel dangerous and realistic. Likewise, the puzzles aren’t as much of a focus this time around, but those that show up use the visual prowess of Unreal Engine 5 to create mesmerizing sequences. This is a game that’s become wildly divisive in the few short days it’s been out, and while I can see why some components wouldn’t work for everyone, I think there’s something really special to be found here and I hope more people are willing to experience it on its own terms.

– Zack Burrows