I think it’s fair to say Ninja Theory had quite a daunting task when it came to producing a sequel to 2017’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. The original was rightly praised for its exploration of grief, trauma and mental illness, but how do you tell more of a story about a woman’s struggles with psychosis without seeming repetitive or worse, exploitative? The answer, it turns out, is you make Hellblade 2 – a game that is nothing short of phenomenal.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 reviewDeveloper: Ninja TheoryPublisher: Xbox Game StudiosPlatform: Played on Xbox Series XAvailability: Out now on Xbox Series X/S, PC (Steam
As you may remember, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice concerns itself with Pictish warrior Senua, a woman living with psychosis as she struggles to come to terms with her mental illness, the stigma that separates her from her community, and the death of her lover Dillian at the hands of raiding Northmen. After an opening cinematic briefly outlining the above, Hellblade 2 picks up more or less where it left off. The Northmen have resumed their raids on Senua’s people and she has vowed to stop them. Allowing herself to be captured by slavers, she plans to assault the Northmen’s stronghold from within and put an end to the raids once and for all. Unfortunately for her the weather has different ideas, leaving Senua shipwrecked and defenceless in a hostile, foreign land. Bound by her vow, she has no choice but to push on.
This is a game about keeping a promise, in other words. Senua has assumed responsibility for a whole community of people – something that both weighs on her as a character and also shifts the narrative focus away from her slightly. Whereas Senua’s Sacrifice is firmly set around Senua and the various traumatic events she’s trying to process, Hellblade 2 is much more about the people she meets: those she saves and those she can’t, those she trusts and those she fears, and how she navigates those relationships. It’s less a game about somebody battling mental illness and more about somebody who happens to have a mental condition going on a great and dangerous journey.
The outward-facing focus of Hellblade 2 is deeply satisfying from a character perspective. While Senua’s psychosis is still very much something with which she struggles, she has a markedly different relationship with it after her first outing. Senua not only has more faith in her abilities, she’s more compassionate towards herself than we’ve seen before, indicating that her psychosis is something she’s managing, not battling. This is especially evident in her relationship with the Furies – aural manifestations of her condition that essentially provide commentary on what she’s doing throughout the game. These voices overlap with one another, speaking in staccato bursts of fear and hope and encouragement and scathing, bitter criticism. While they’re certainly not benevolent – listening to them is kind of like an ASMR scenario in which everybody secretly hates you – they do, at least, have more faith in Senua. They encourage her far more than they used to and even go so far as to stick up for her. When other voices drift into Senua’s mind – her deceased, abusive father chief among them – the furies side with their host more often than not, urging her not to listen and to remember her strength. It’s a rewarding sense of progress, especially considering how hard Senua had to fight to get there.