Watching Senua emerge from a shipwreck onto the shoreline bruised, bloodied, and struggling to breathe immediately drags us back into the depths of desperation and despair of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II’s psychosis-affected lead from the outset. What follows is a supremely taut, six-hour tour across the human realm of Midgard that’s conveyed through staggeringly vivid action sequences, stunning Nordic-inspired locations, and intense encounters with towering terrors intimidating enough to make a Viking mess their furs. Hellblade II serves up another satisfyingly brutal and consistently enthralling heroine’s journey, even if its streamlined swordfighting favours cinematic spectacle over substantial gameplay depth.
Although it’s been some seven years since Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, the events of Hellblade II take place shortly after the original’s vengeful highway to Helheim, with Hel’s belle now feeling empowered by her psychosis rather than encumbered with it. (Suffice it to say, if you’re jumping into Senua’s story here then the included story recap is mandatory viewing.) However, after the Icelandic slave ship she stows away on is wrecked during a severe storm, survivor’s guilt sees her prior struggles with self doubt reemerge to clash with her own stoic sense of justice, setting her down another gripping and tortured path towards battling both her own inner demons and the bloodthirsty monsters roaming Midgard as they take human and mythical forms.
Senua is joined along the way by a handful of human companions, including a shackled slave master who begrudgingly accompanies her on her path and a settler she saves from a sacrificial altar. None of these supporting characters are given enough screen time to really develop much of a personality beyond the surface, but I appreciated having them along for various parts of the quest since their incidental conversation felt like a far more organic method to process exposition than the superimposed live action vignettes of the first game.
It’s the battle-scarred Senua herself who is the star, though, portrayed to stirring effect by Melina Juergens, returning from the still gorgeous original game now in near-photorealistic form. Juergens is a truly courageous and compassionate presence, and I completely bought into her determination to battle through the fear and self-loathing, from moments where she’s paralysed by anxiety through to shocking outward bursts of blood-boiling rage.
Hellblade II once again takes Senua to some dark and disturbing places, but the sequel’s environments have been painted from a broader colour palette than the mostly bleak backdrops of the original. Sure, you’re still forced to hold your breath during crawls through heinous pits of blood and gristle and infiltrate marauder camps decorated with gruesome bouquets made out of human bones, but these darker moments are contrasted with peaceful mountain treks beneath beautiful coral-coloured skies and jaw-dropping glimpses of aurora borealis so vivid you can almost smell the steamed hams cooking in Principal Skinner’s kitchen. The impressive lighting and fog effects employed throughout bring added depth to each destination, making for a journey that feels grounded even as it shifts between reality and the haunting altered states that spill out of Senua’s psyche. The tradeoff is that Hellblade II runs capped at 30 frames per second on Series X, but I felt its visual design was gobsmacking enough to justify that limit.
These immaculate visuals are once again reinforced by first-class binaural audio design, and playing with headphones on is an absolute must in order to really appreciate the detailed environmental touches like flies buzzing around mutilated corpses and drops of water echoing in underground caverns. More importantly, the swirling voices in Senua’s head seem so close you can almost feel their breath on the back of your neck. This time around not only do these disembodied backseat drivers serve as the bickering angel and devil on Senua’s shoulders casting confusion over every decision she makes, but they also cleverly sow suspicion about the supporting characters around her, making it tough to know who to trust along the way to the story’s thoroughly cathartic conclusion.
En Garde in Midgard
Whereas much of Senua’s war in the original Hellblade was waged against demonic manifestations of the Northmen who raided her village and murdered her lover, in Hellblade II the majority of her foes are flesh and bone human warriors. This means that every attack you land feels all the more brutal, with Senua’s sword splitting surface wounds in her opponents’ skin that continue to bleed for the duration of battle, and enemy encounters can be brought to a viciously abrupt end by jamming Senua’s blade so far down their Nordic necks that they’d need to perform a Helheim-lich maneuver to cough it back up again.
The combat camera is so tight on each conflict that every weighted blow lands with concussive force, and I was acutely aware of Senua’s knees buckling under her as I blocked an incoming series of powerful slashes. Dodging feels far more physical too, lurching you out of harm’s way but leaving you open to a followup attack in the brief moment it takes Senua to regain her footing, if you don’t manage to time it just right. Timing is also now more key to performing successful parries relative to the original, and the window in which to do so has been shortened to the point where I wasn’t able to just calmly deflect each and every enemy assault with Jedi-like consistency anymore. That made each fight feel like a little less of a foregone conclusion.
That said, while I remained consistently engaged in each ferocious and remarkably fluid fight to the death, I do wish the team at Ninja Theory had done a little more to build upon the fairly modest combat template established in the original Hellblade with what they’ve served up here. Admittedly, Hellblade II’s swift six-hour run time leaves little room to cram in a skill tree to flesh out or additional attack combos to unlock, but it does feel a touch familiar to play through another campaign with the same basic two-button mix of light and heavy sword slashes, as superbly animated as they may be.
If anything, Hellblade II’s fighting feels even further streamlined than the original, where Senua also has a guard-breaking melee attack. That’s been dropped entirely, with nothing to replace it. Meanwhile, her slow-motion focus ability, which was unlocked midway through the original Hellblade, is made available in this sequel virtually from the outset, with no further attack-altering abilities to be found for the remainder of the story. Hellblade II’s combat encounters are consistently menacing and muscular as new enemy types like flame-spitting cultists and nimble ghouls are introduced, but without any additional charged attacks or alternative weapons to wield my basic methods for overcoming each marauding mob remained mostly unchanged from start to finish – even on the hardest difficulty setting.
One combat change that I did appreciate, however, is the way Hellblade II limits each duel to one-on-one encounters. With no HUD to indicate incoming attacks and the whispers of warning from the voices in Senua’s head easily missed during the heat of battle, in the original Hellblade I often found myself getting stabbed in the back by an unseen offscreen assailant whenever I found myself outnumbered. Thankfully that’s no longer an issue here, and the way Hellblade II’s energetic direction brings new opponents seamlessly barrelling into frame the second another foe is violently dispatched successfully sells the illusion that Senua is stuck amidst a proper rough and tumble free-for-all, rather than the carefully choreographed turn-taking brawls of a Bruce Lee movie.
Speaking of direction, there are some exceptionally well executed sequences that revolve around murderous giants who have crossed over into Midgard from another realm and are hoovering up sacrificed slaves like they’re human-shaped snack bars. These encounters are urgent, desperate scenarios that put Senua through rigorous physical trials, and although they don’t ever actually put her in head-to-gigantic head conflict with one of the man-hungry monoliths, they still deliver some blood-pumping story peaks to Senua’s Saga that fill the void left by the absence of any traditional boss battles.
Norse Code
Hellblade II isn’t all life and death fighting, though, and as was the case with the original game there’s an equal amount of environmental puzzles to tease your brain as there are combat challenges to test your reflexes. At regular junctions the path forward will be blocked by a swirling, kaleidoscopic gate made of fractalized body parts – one of the most disconcerting images to be found in a journey packed to the brim with startling sights – and the only way to progress past it is by carefully lining up elements of the environment around you and resolving them into the shape of a specific symbol. I was a big fan of these perspective-based puzzles in the original Hellblade, and was happy to see them return here.
In addition to a bit of Midgard Magic Eye, Hellblade II sprinkles in the use of torchlit braziers and bubble switches that each transform the terrain around you and open up new paths towards your goal. They’re effectively new spins on the landscape-altering portals from the previous adventure, and although they might not be quite as brain-bending to behold they’re still just as satisfying to solve. None of these environmental riddles are particularly taxing, though, and for the most part Hellblade II’s puzzles have seemingly been designed to momentarily stall Senua’s forward march rather than ever truly stump you, but there are still some stand-out sequences. One mid-game stretch that involved sharing Senua’s puzzle-solving torch with an unnamed spectral assistant on the opposing side of the arena was particularly inventive, and felt like something straight out of the PlayStation 2 classic, Ico.
Despite the wide-open appearance of its world, Hellblade II is every bit as much a linear adventure as the original. However, the lorestones that were hidden off the beaten path in the first Hellblade make their return here, triggering further teachings about the Northmen from Senua’s friend Druth, delivered with earnest gravitas by returning voice actor Nicholas Boulton. Supplementing the lorestones is a second new string of secrets: hidden trees of Nordic knowledge that can be stumbled upon by focusing on faces found in the world that then dissolve into hidden paths like one of the false walls in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Neither give you any gameplay benefit but I still felt compelled to collect them, and unlike its predecessor, Hellblade II unlocks a welcome chapter select feature upon completion so that you can go back for anything you may have missed without having to replay the entire story from start to finish.