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For all the praise I’m about to heap on Senua’s Saga Hellblade 2, it’s a game I never want to play again. An odd thing to say, but one said with the best of intentions. Hellblade 2 is a momentous addition to video game culture and a must-play for anyone with even a passing interest in the medium.



It’s phenomenal in its brave thematic explorations, visual delights, and tight, restrained vision, but so overbearing in what it asks of the player that playing it once is enough. Disconcertion has its limits. Hellblade 2 holds your attention so tight that it burrows into the mind.

As the credits roll, I’m left spent, drained by its emotive heft, by the whirling, needling Furies, by the wearying loss, by the fragile hope it cradles, and the near-unbearable cinematic bleakness that ripples out from every polygon. You play as returning protagonist Senua, a Celtic warrior harried by psychosis, juggling the contradictory jabs and delusional prods of voices, dubbed The Furies, swirling in her head as well as harsh 10th century Icelandic vistas inked in Viking myth. Her journey starts shipwrecked on a desolate isle where she must muster the courage to take on slavers sacrificing her people to placate fractious giants.

Though best experienced first hand, so I’ll spare the details, few games have openings that hit with such visceral, immersive fo.

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