Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II review: nerve-wracking, bombastic and simply incomparable

I creep through a camp permeated by thick fog. The ground is littered with corpses. Some are strung up on wooden poles. What on earth has happened here? The voices in my head urge me to turn back. No, I should carry on, one foot in front of the other. But isn’t everything hopeless? There’s no time for my inner conflict. The music swells menacingly and disfigured grimaces jump out at me from the darkness. The dance of life and death begins.

After I pull my bloody sword from the lifeless body of the last enemy, calmness returns. The fog lifts, and for a moment the scene seems almost peaceful. But the corpses around me and my arguing inner voices bring me back to reality. What’s real and what’s not is never quite clear in Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II. The only thing that’s clear is that Ninja Theory’s sequel to Senua’s Sacrifice has turned out fantastic.

What’s it about?

In the first part, Celtic warrior Senua set out to save the soul of her dead lover. She travelled through Viking hell and tangled with gods. In my opinion, the idea sounds better than the game. The trivial puzzles and annoying fights made me less motivated to finish it. It’s a shame, because I liked the story and especially the visual presentation back then. Fortunately, the second part goes one better in all respects.

Hellblade 2 picks up directly from the first game. Senua lets the Vikings capture her and be taken onto a slave ship. This allows her to travel with the Viking invaders to her homeland – Iceland. She wants to find out what the Northmen are up to and put an end to slavery.

The path of suffering

When the ship is caught in a storm and capsizes, Senua is thrown from the ship and washed up on a beach. She doesn’t have time to catch her breath, because some slave traders have also survived. Among them their leader Thórgestr. After a short, bloody battle, Senua takes him prisoner. She needs him so she can find the way to his tribe and his father. Thus begins an arduous and breathtaking journey through a mysterious world full of myths and monsters – some of which live in Senua’s mind.

Senua suffers from psychosis. In order to present this as authentically as possible, Ninja Theory worked with Paul Fletcher, a professor at Cambridge University and an expert in this field. The internal dialogues are sometimes a little exhausting. But at the core, there’s a person struggling with themselves, and it creates a unique atmosphere. Every decision is questioned, confirmed and rejected.

In the course of the story, Senua is accompanied by Thórgestr, Fargrímr and Ástríðr. Fargrímr knows more about the supernatural occurrences of the world, and Ástríðr is a tribal leader who wants to protect her people from a giant. A large part of the story revolves around these mystical beings. However, the focus is on the four travellers and their disagreements, especially for Senua. She’s not just fighting real demons, but also her inner ones.

Eerily beautiful

The audiovisual presentation combined with the first-class actors had me hooked to Hellblade 2 from the very first minute. Thanks to motion capture, movements and facial animations are captured perfectly. Every uncertainty, exhaustion or frustration is clearly visible. I’ve never seen photorealism like this in any other game. The creation tool, Unreal Engine 5 is the reason for this. You can really see this in the surroundings. The rocky and fairytale-like landscape of Iceland is captured perfectly. I may have discovered a new fetish for myself: rock porn. I finally understand the fascination of the stone biters from The Neverending Story. The boulders just look tasty. Just like the rest of the game. There are pretty moss-covered stone huts, caves illuminated by crystals and breath-taking fjords with rushing waterfalls.

There aren’t any cuts in the game, or at least none of them are noticeable – similar to God of War. And there’s no fade to black during a time jump. Instead, the camera zooms away, flies over the dreamlike landscape like a drone and finds the adventure group again, who have now arrived at a different location. The fusion of reality and visions is just as impressively staged. I enter a deserted village when suddenly a black figure appears and bathes the entire screen in red and black shadows. The next moment, the world turns upside down and the surroundings become a surreal nightmare.

The game uses a 2.39:1 aspect ratio, which at first takes some getting used to. It originates from the film industry and is rarely used nowadays. If like me, you don’t have an ultra-wide monitor, you’ll have to be prepared for black bars. This gives the game a more cinematic feel. It helps that the game has no user interface at all.

The sound design impressed me just as much as the graphics did. Ninja Theory recommends headphones, and for once I have to agree. Even with my 5.1 surround system, the soundscape doesn’t really come into its own. And this one has it all. When monstrous grimaces pounce on me, I can hear deep growls that sound like they’ve come straight from hell. The sound swells into an orchestral symphony of horror leaving my heart in my mouth. It rumbles and thunders, and just as suddenly, calm returns – the sudden absence of sound creates a wonderfully melancholic mood. The soundtrack regularly gave me goosebumps.

From a technical perspective, the game runs very smoothly on PC. Thanks to DLSS and FSR 3, it should also run smoothly with less powerful graphics cards than my RTX 4090. Apart from a few loading delays, I had no technical problems. Only the voice output sometimes wasn’t lip-synchronised.

Repetitive battles and boring puzzles

While the story and the staging completely lull me, the fights and especially the puzzles keep pulling me out of the narrative flow. I can forgive the fights. They’re entertaining and over in just a few minutes. Plus, they don’t happen all that often enough for me to call Hellblade 2 an action game. They don’t have enough complexity for that. There’s a heavy and a light attack and I can dodge. What’s more, my focus builds up over time. When I activate it, time slows down and I make short work of the enemies.

The opponents’ attack patterns are very easy to read and the dodge window is generous. What’s more, enemies attack one after the other. The staging, however, is first-class. Firstly, the enemies and their masks or disfigured faces, which are usually only vaguely recognisable, are wonderfully scary. Secondly, a battle with the sword has a lot of power and is dynamically staged. One minute I’m sticking my sword into an opponent’s stomach, the next someone is pulling me to the ground and only at the very last moment can I snatch his axe and ram it into his skull. The fights always follow the same pattern, so there could’ve been fewer of them. Nevertheless, they help to convey the brutality of the world.

I don’t know where to start with the puzzles. Most of them hardly deserve the name. I usually have to find certain symbols in the surroundings and aim at them from the right angle. Or I have to collect three orbs to open a magically locked gate. To reach the orbs, I can interact with larger bubbles that change the environment. A bridge suddenly becomes visible or a wall disappears. The puzzles are staged in such a way that I’m automatically guided to the right place and hardly have to think. With a few exceptions, I could’ve done without them completely. They merely prolong the playing time.