Hellblade II’s full title, which I refuse to spell out more than once, is Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II. The titular character, Senua, is a warrior from some fuckin’ island near Britain during what I shall refer to as “the Viking days.” She’s a sword-wielding badass who’s on a quest to rescue a bunch of slaves from raiders. The raiders might be Icelandic or something. I don’t know. Senua also suffers from some pretty severe mental illness, which primarily entails hearing voices that compliment, cajole, or undercut her in her mission. The game’s sound design does a great job of making you feel surrounded by the voices of Senua’s mind, which is unsettling but immersive.

The game’s graphics are eye-scaldingly beautiful. Iceland hasn’t looked this gorgeously inhospitable since Death Stranding. This extends to the characters, whose emoting gets a long way across the uncanny valley before throwing too many teeth at you.

Teeth aside, the limited cast is utilized well: I’m not sure how to spell any of their names, but I felt inclined to keep them alive during the story’s 5ish-hour runtime. Five hours isn’t a ton of time, but the tale runs through a passably broad selection of locales and presents encounters that build from clumsy beachside brawls to confrontations with mythical giants (whose visual majesty is somewhat undercut by their insanely-simplistic mechanics).

This game reminds me of A Plague Tale: Requiem – a AAA-adjacent sequel to a high-quality AA game with a really unique premise that was diluted by the expanded scope of an arguably-unnecessary sequel.

Now – leaving the story aside for a moment – Requiem actually iterated on its predecessor’s combat, and Hellblade II very much does not do that.

The original Hellblade wasn’t exactly the most mechanically complex game, but combat still had enough depth to it from getting repetitive: you had your usual mix of heavy and light attacks, a kick to break enemy blocks, and block, parry and dodge moves (plus the requisite slow-motion mode that charges up as you fight). When fighting multiple enemies, the game would do this cool thing where Senua’s “inner voices” would warn the player of foes about to strike from your blind spot. That’s a clever merging of theme and mechanics!

Know how they “improved” the combat for the sequel? They took out the kick and you no longer get to fight multiple enemies at once. That’s it.

Then we get to the puzzles…oh, God. The puzzles. The “match the shapes in the environment to the runes in Senua’s mind” puzzles from the original Hellblade return, and they’re…fine. They’re not good. Most of them boil down to wandering around until you’re pretty sure you’ve got something lined up right, then doing little wiggling motions with your fingers until there’s a visible reaction. It’s kind of like bad foreplay.

And those are the sufferable puzzles. Far too much of this game depends upon swapping out imaginary rock formations inside a goddamn cave system, interspersed with sequences where nightmare monsters kill you if you don’t walk in just the right path at just the right time, like a version of hopscotch designed by Satan.

I miss the oddball shit that the original Hellblade would pull, like how it told you that the darkness spreading up Senua’s arm every time you died would straight up delete your save file if it got to her head. The sequel seems content to sand off the weirder edges of its predecessor in favor of embodying the kind of “movie game” that Playstation exclusives are sometimes accused of being.

Hellblade II is clearly a passion project made by a talented team – it just seems like they wanted to make something that didn’t really work within the chosen medium, like a person trying to use Thanksgiving turkeys as winter boots.

As a Game Pass title, it could be worth your time, if you know what you’re in for (relatively minimal gameplay, annoying puzzles, a good story & pretty visuals) – but I can’t help but feel like Hellblade II is a round hole insisting on a square peg.

Wow, that sounded nasty in my head, but it’s even worse in written form. You’re welcome.

Score:

5.5/10 (+.5/-1.5)