Hellblade 2 continues Senua’s story with grace, confidence, surprising brutality, and shocking conviction.
I think it’s fair to say that Ninja Theory had a pretty tough task ahead of them when making the sequel to 2017’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. The original was praised for its exploration of grief, trauma, and mental illness, but how can one tell more about a woman’s battle with mental illness without seeming repetitive, or worse, exploitative? As it turns out, the answer is that you made Hellblade 2 – a phenomenal game.
As you may recall, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice tells the story of the Pictish warrior Senua, a mentally ill woman who struggles to come to terms with her mental illness, which separates her from the community disgrace and the death of her lover Dillian. Assault on the hands of the Northerners. After an opening cinematic that briefly outlines the above, Hellblade 2 picks up more or less where it left off. The Northerners resumed their attacks on Senua’s people, and she vowed to stop them. She allows herself to be captured by slavers and plans to attack the Northern stronghold from within and end the raids once and for all. Unfortunately, the weather has different ideas for her, leaving Senua shipwrecked and defenseless in a hostile, foreign land. Bound by her oath, she had no choice but to move on.
In other words, this is a game about keeping your promises. Senua takes on responsibility for an entire community—which both puts pressure on her character and takes the narrative focus slightly away from her. Where Senua’s Sacrifice mostly centered around Senua and the various traumatic events she tries to deal with, Hellblade 2 is more about the people she encounters: the people she saves and the people she can’t, The people she trusts and the people she fears, and the people she saves. Navigate these relationships. This isn’t so much a game about a man’s battle with mental illness as it is about a man who happens to be mentally ill embarking on a great and dangerous journey.
iGamesNews
From a character perspective, Hellblade 2’s outward focus is very satisfying. While Senua’s insanity still haunts her, her relationship with it is noticeably different after her first outing. Not only is Senua more confident in her abilities, she’s also more compassionate than we’ve seen before, suggesting she’s controlling her psychosis rather than fighting it. This is especially evident in her relationship with the Furies – the aural representation of her condition essentially provides commentary on what she’s been doing throughout the game. The voices overlap, staccatoly expressing fear, hope, encouragement and harsh, vitriolic criticism. While they’re certainly not benevolent – listening to them talk is a bit like an ASMR scene where everyone secretly hates you – they at least have more faith in Senna. They encouraged her and even supported her more than before. When other voices drift into Senua’s mind – chief among them her late, abusive father – angry people tend to side with their master, urging her not to listen and to remember her power . It’s a rewarding feeling of progress, especially considering how much hard work Seina put in to get there.
From a structural perspective, the core experience of Hellblade 2 remains essentially unchanged from the first game. Senua’s world consists of a series of puzzles, many of which rely on perspective tricks, interspersed with sudden combat encounters and intense hallucinations. Most puzzles are a time of calm and reflection—in some, Senua needs to move around and arrange certain elements of the world around her into the shapes of certain runes. In other puzzles, she’ll find herself in a mirrored area on the ceiling, needing to switch between the two spaces to advance. The puzzles aren’t too challenging, but she still feels satisfied when the solution becomes clear.
As with the first game, the key to this fight is timing. Learning to dodge and parry attacks at just the right moment is key, and perfectly timed blocks fill up the meter, allowing you to slow down time and unleash a flurry of attacks on your opponent. It’s pretty forgiving – Senua can take a surprising amount of damage, and on the rare occasions when you do fall, the game is quick to get you back into the fight. That said, I found myself taking a lot more hits throughout the game than I’d like, especially against some of the faster, harder-to-read enemy types. These enemies fight differently as the game progresses, keeping you on your toes, and without giving away any of the story, some of these enemies are absolutely terrifying.
The hallucinations that Sena sometimes falls into are both very vivid and clever. Often, you don’t realize that Senua’s sense of reality has become warped until she’s reached a point where the world around her changes and warps, stressing her out and realizing some of her worst fears. matter. These hallucinations often occur during particularly emotional storylines, driving the plot forward and reflecting Senua’s conflicting mental state. On the one hand, it’s a clever narrative approach, but it also ensures that Hellblade 2 doesn’t torture Senua for the sake of it. It’s important to note that I’ve never experienced psychosis myself, and this performance strikes me as thoughtful and grounded, and it would be easy to produce something gimmicky and reductive.
However, there were several moments that made me wary, in which Senua was described as being chosen, or special, or possessing powers from beyond the Veil. Most of these comments come from the character Fargrímr, a mystic who, lest we forget, lived in the 9th century, but I was surprised to find that one or two of them came from the game’s narrator. Chosen One narratives are certainly nothing new in video games or fantasy novels, but using this framework around a character like Senua requires caution. This is a character who remains strong despite his illness, not because of it, and while that moment was brief, I was surprised to see Hellblade 2 blur that line, even just a little bit.
Those arguments aside, Hellblade 2 is an excellent game made by a team that clearly understands what made the first game special. To say that the core experience is familiar isn’t to say that it’s just more of the same – rather, it improves and expands on the original in every way, creating a stunning sequel.
On the one hand, Hellblade 2 is absolutely gorgeous. The environments are rich, detailed, and beautifully lit – I really struggle to think of another game where lighting is such a prominent and active part of the storytelling. Character animations are smooth and believable, while facial capture helps bring to life great performances from the likes of Melina Juergens, Chris O’Reilly, and Aldís Amah Hamilton. I’ve also never mentioned lichens in a review before, but the moss and lichens scattered throughout the game are absolutely top-notch.
Secondly, the combat is excellent. It’s responsive, allowing for feints to knock enemies back, and the animations absolutely shine throughout. In the past, enemies would swarm Senua and wait patiently for their turn, a practice that was practical, if not necessarily exciting. Now, previously unseen combatants will burst into view, taking the place of the combatants you just eliminated—sometimes a fleeing NPC appears, gets knocked down, or someone is pushed out of the way. The camera reacts realistically to devastating strikes and changing tides, giving combat a heaviness that rivals even the best combat God of War has to offer. In doing so, it takes a huge amount of camera control away from the player, putting each scene firmly on track, so to speak, but the payoff is amazing.
If there’s one thing that Senua’s Sacrifice was particularly praised for, it’s the audio, and Ninja Theory brings the same great qualities to the sequel. Angry whispers pass by your ears like they’re toying with you, while distorted roars and unsettling noises rise from the darkness. The soundtrack features work by the band Heilung, whose drumming, guttural vocals and occasional growls seem tailor-made for the setting (the members of Heilung describe their music as “amplified history,” which is certainly Fitting. ) I hate to describe playing Hellblade 2 with headphones on as a pleasure – it can be downright uncomfortable at times – but it’s really the best way to experience it.
In fact, my main takeaway from Hellblade II is that it’s absolutely zero-punch. The violence throughout the game is brutal, and at times, the game descends into outright horror. I consider myself to be fairly physically fit, but there were moments early in the game where I found myself genuinely nauseous. There’s also a section later on that could have come straight from Neil Marshall’s 2005 film Descendants, which really irked me. The story goes to some extreme places both in terms of Senua’s past and the relationships that those around her are trying to navigate, and her reactions to those extremes are sincere and heartfelt. All of this combined with a well-designed soundscape, extremely fluid movement, and excellent visuals makes for a game that’s not only a magnificent piece of work, but one that delivers its message with absolute power and verve.
Simply put, Hellblade 2 is the most confident sequel I’ve ever seen – Ninja Theory showed huge ambition in this game, and the results are equally stunning. A lot has changed since Senua’s Sacrifice released in 2017, not least our comfort and familiarity with mental health and mental illness as a subject, but it’s unclear whether Hellblade can keep up with the times. If you have any doubts, you can now safely dispel them. Not only has Ninja Theory proven that it can decipher the ever-changing landscape, but Hellblade and Senua definitely still deserve their place in the space.
Xbox Game Studios provided a copy of Senua’s Legend: Hellblade 2 for review.
