As A The Last Of Us Fan, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 Is Giving Me Everything I Want

I didn’t play the first Hellblade game. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice looked extraordinarily cool – it featured a protagonist with an often overlooked mental illness, was based on Norse myt❀hology and Celtic culture, 💝had critically lauded storytelling, and featured some excellent, TGA nominated acting.

Many lauded it as a﷽ fantastic work of art as well as a fantastic video game, but as you might know, I’m a massive scaredy-cat, and Hellblade can get pretty intense. Even the opening minutes, which I did try on Game Pass, freaked me out enough that I didn’t want to keep playing. Unfortunately, I am a big baby.

But I’m determined to make my way through Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2. It’s hard to justify suffering through a scary video game to myself if it isn’t for work, but I write about video games for a living now, and forcing myself to confront my fear and play Hellblade 2 will make for a wౠorthy sacrifice to the content gods. More than that, everything I’ve heard about the game only reaffirms that it’s going to cater to exactly what I love to see in video games. In fact, a lot of it reminds me of one of my all-time favourites – The Last of Us Part 2.

For one, it’s brutal in a way that highlights the horror of the situation. Where The Last of Us 2 uses convincing gore to emphasise the violent reality of revenge, Hellblade 2 has you fighting enemy after enemy in smoky, blood-soaked surroundings, taking on back-to-back duels with individual enemies who are quick to take advantage of every mistake you make. Around you, people die screaming, mutilated bodies hang in rituali🌜stic sacrifices, and human remains are strewn everywhere. Senua’s uphill battle against horror after horror makes us feel the full weight of her difficult journey.

Both are also technical marvels in their own rights, though this isn&rsquꦉo;t as big a factor for me. Naughty Dog prides itself on how its games use cutting-edge tech, with vi♏sual fidelity being a big point of The Last of Us 2’s marketing. The game’s animations looked incredible, while enemy AI was impressive and subtle touches like vegetation and lighting made the world feel more real. Hellblade 2 is also often lauded as a showcase for the capabilities of Unreal Engine 5, featuring inconceivably detailed motion capture and almost hyperreal facial capture. Recent previews have commented on the game’s shocking level of realism.

Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 And Stellar Blade Somehow Became Fuel For The Console War

Two games with women protagonists, released within weeks of each other, on different consoles. Maybe we should have seen this comin♊g.

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But perhaps most importantly, both are linear narrative games in an age when open-world games reign supreme. I’ve made no secret of the fact that , especially those that don&rs📖quo;t put in time to make them feel dense and alive, and have found myself gravitating towards smaller games that aren’t padding out settings with poorly-written fetch quests. The Last of Us 2, like its predecessor, tells its story in carefully designed, albeit sometimes fairly big, levels. It propels you through its narrative by setting your path for you, instead of setting you free to wander aimlessly.

Hellblade 2, also like its predecessor, does the same thing. It’s narrative-first, and keeps you moving along through a linear narrative. For that reason, it’s a short game, a far cry from the 100 hour RPGs that have long been the norm in triple-A development. And I’m grateful for that. I want 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:shorter games with a heavy narrative focus, because they have clear visions and respect your time instead of making you faff about with pointless side quests. Like The Last of Us 2, Hellblade 2 is trying to give you a focused, expertly crafted experience, and it does that by taking away all that space to run around and while away your time in. There’s nowhere to run from Hellblade 2’s scares,🍸 and that’s why I’m all in.