Senua’s Sage Hellblade 2 review: fun? No, but a spectacular action-adventure game

Ahead of you lies a grim volcanic landscape, draped in mist and rendered with an eerie realism you’ve never seen in games before. Behind you lie the bodies of the slavers who foolishly tried to tangle with you, perforated in places no doctor would endorse. There’s no HUD, no objective marker, nor any collectibles randomly strewn around 10th century Iceland. What there is instead is a constant overlapping dialogue between the voices in your head, doubting, chastising and teasing you every lumbering step of your journey. Still, nice to kick back and spend a bit of relaxation time with a new game, isn’t it?

Probably the most pertinent question about Hellblade 2 is this: is it fun? And the answer is no. It’s almost no fun at all to occupy the life of a woman battling psychosis as she endures a gruelling mission to free her people from slavery. Fun was not big on developer Ninja Theory’s agenda for this experience, one senses. However, that still leaves plenty of room for Hellblade 2 to be great.

Firstly, it’s quite something to look at. And while its 2017 predecessor wasn't ugly either, its scenery was decidedly more grim and less varied than Senua’s Saga. Grim is still very much in this game’s wheelhouse, as you’ll discover on your first trip through a marauder camp where the paths are lined with bones and viscera. In moments like that, you wonder if the Unreal Engine visuals have to be quite so photorealistic, the lighting quite so immersive and convincing.

But then you’re treated to twilight skies painted in pastel shades above the rolling Icelandic tundra, hypnotic tidal waves crashing against beaches, and northern lights to rival your own May photo roll. You see every twitch and nuance of Melina Juergens’ performance as Senua, and you appreciate that the spectacular visuals aren’t just here to wow you, but to really immerse you - for better or worse - in this otherworldly environment.

And that’s often very unsettling, because Senua isn’t a reliable protagonist to experience this world through. The psychosis she’s suffering manifests as visual and auditory hallucinations, and she teeters between feeling empowered and defeated by it.

It seems to inform the gameplay directly, too. If you boil Hellblade 2 down to its component parts, it’s an action-adventure game with combat and puzzles. And those puzzles most often take the form of perspective tricks, symbols that you need to assemble by finding the right angle within your environment and making fragmented pieces into a whole. When you do this, it feels like pulling together the fractured parts of Senua’s mind and establishing a moment of clarity.

And fittingly enough, solving these puzzles opens a gate formed by your own hallucinations and shows you a path forwards. Is it a rip-roaring, rollicking time to solve these puzzles? Absolutely not. But it’s a great exercise in empathy for the protagonist you’re controlling. They follow a kind of internal logic that really puts you in Senua’s headspace, and there’s at least a small moment of control and order when you complete these puzzles.

Combat is where Hellblade 2 remembers that it’s a game. In a different life, developer Ninja Theory made bombastic action games like DmC: Devil May Cry and although the backflips and spin-kicks don’t carry over, you can tell this is a studio that knows how to make a blow land.

Fights are heavy, lumbering, and purposeful. The camera punches in, almost uncomfortably tight, close enough that you can see the lacerations you’re inflicting on the slavers and cannibal murderers who - fair enough - probably deserve them. The camera shakes and judders when you land each blow or get hit. The internal dialogue between the voices doesn’t abate here, either, and the sum total of all those elements is combat so intense that you’ll probably need a cup of tea and a quiet moment afterwards.

It’s combo-based sparring, and there’s a lot of satisfaction to be had in getting a sword-jab in when the enemy’s defences are down, or timing your parry just right to deflect a blow away. Sometimes these battles take place mid-psychotic break, leading to darkly, confusingly beautiful scenes. At one point Senua travels to her childhood home in her mind’s eye, picks up an old mirror and somehow prompts the environment to catch fire, seeing it as though through the shards of a broken mirror while fiery warriors lunge towards her. We weren’t joking about that cup of tea.

There are mis-steps. In the opening half hour - and we’re not exaggerating for effect - you climb a cliff, walk along a path and at one point press a button to climb down a small ledge. It’s a punishing start that imposes the game’s slow, indie flick-like pacing on you like a stern schoolteacher, but unlike the later hours that reward your patience with interactivity, environmental variation and narrative revelation, there’s so little to latch onto in the beginning. You could be forgiven for giving up on it at this point.

Persevere, and you’ll experience a story told in a different way than games ordinarily manage. The disturbing interior thoughts that initially torment you start to become characters in their own right. As they become familiar, you listen to them for guidance. The same thing happens with the small supporting cast of secondary characters - a slavemaster who almost killed you, and a slave who was almost burned on a sacrificial pyre - however unrelatable and otherly they seemed at first, as you navigate the landscape with them and converse, you see them as increasingly human.

At a moment when we hear about more studio layoffs than game releases in triple-A game development, it’s encouraging to see a game that’s purposely uncompromising, chewy, and sometimes difficult to stay with. Hopefully the spectacular visuals alone will see Hellblade 2 find the large audience it deserves, but the real substance here is how well it grounds you in the experience of being someone else in a totally different time, place, and mental state.