Un
I remember the first time I played Hellblade 2, expecting this grand adventure that would build upon everything the original did so well. Instead, I found myself questioning what makes a game truly feel like a game. The title itself—Un—seems almost prophetic, hinting at something unfinished or undefined about the experience. As someone who's spent over 200 hours analyzing game design patterns across different genres, I can confidently say Hellblade 2 presents one of the most fascinating case studies in recent memory of how gameplay imbalance can undermine even the most stunning narrative achievements.
Walking through those beautifully rendered Icelandic landscapes initially felt magical. The way sunlight filters through misty caves and reflects off wet stones is genuinely breathtaking. But after what felt like the twentieth identical corridor crawl—I'd estimate about 65% of my 8-hour playthrough consisted of these walking segments—the magic began to wear thin. There's a particular stretch along a black sand beach that lasts nearly 15 minutes without any meaningful interaction, and that's where it hit me: this isn't relaxation, it's pacing bankruptcy. The environmental storytelling works in small doses, but when it becomes the primary activity, players start feeling like tourists in someone else's story rather than active participants in their own journey.
The combat system, while visually spectacular, suffers from similar issues of scarcity and simplicity. Throughout my entire playthrough, I counted exactly 27 combat encounters, with most lasting under two minutes each. The fighting mechanics are essentially refined versions of what we saw in the first game—parry, dodge, heavy attack, light attack—but they never evolve beyond that foundation. What's particularly frustrating is that the combat feels weighty and visceral when it happens, with every sword clash reverberating through the controller. Yet these moments are so brief and infrequent that they never build toward any sense of mastery or progression. I found myself actually looking forward to enemy encounters not because they were challenging—they really weren't—but because they represented rare opportunities to actually play rather than watch.
Puzzle design follows this same pattern of unrealized potential. The environmental puzzles relying on "focus vision" to see hidden patterns start clever but become repetitive by the mid-game. There's one particular puzzle involving aligning stone symbols that took me nearly 25 minutes to solve, not because it was intellectually challenging, but because the visual feedback was so subtle I kept missing the correct alignment. Moments like these highlight the game's fundamental tension between cinematic immersion and engaging gameplay. The puzzles serve the atmosphere rather than the player's sense of accomplishment, creating this peculiar dynamic where solving them feels less like triumph and more like permission to continue watching the story.
What makes this imbalance particularly puzzling is that the core ingredients for an exceptional game are all present. The voice acting, particularly Melina Juergens' portrayal of Senua's psychological struggles, is some of the best I've encountered in any medium. The sound design deserves every award it will inevitably win, with binaural audio that genuinely enhances both storytelling and gameplay when given the chance. And visually? My god, this might be the most photorealistic game I've played since The Last of Us Part II. But technical excellence can't compensate for fundamental design decisions that prioritize passive experience over active engagement.
I've been thinking about why this imbalance bothers me more in Hellblade 2 than in other narrative-heavy games. After replaying both titles back-to-back, I realized the original Hellblade maintained a much better equilibrium between its three pillars. The first game had approximately 40% more combat encounters and puzzles distributed throughout its runtime, creating this rhythmic alternation between activity types that kept me constantly engaged. Hellblade 2, by contrast, feels like it absorbed the wrong lessons from its predecessor's success—doubling down on cinematic presentation while reducing interactive elements to near-cameo appearances.
There's this moment about six hours in where Senua is navigating through dark caves filled with whispering voices, and the gameplay consists entirely of walking toward light sources. This sequence lasts nearly 30 minutes without a single puzzle or combat break, and that's when it crystallized for me: the developers at Ninja Theory have created an incredible interactive movie, but they've forgotten to include enough game in their video game. The tragedy is that when combat or puzzles do appear, they're genuinely satisfying—they're just so sparse that they feel like exceptions rather than core components of the experience.
As someone who champions innovation in game narratives, I'm torn about Hellblade 2's approach. On one hand, I appreciate developers pushing boundaries and challenging conventional design wisdom. On the other, when the balance tips so far toward passive consumption, we have to ask whether certain experiences might work better as actual films or limited series. The most successful narrative games— titles like God of War 2018 or the recent Baldur's Gate 3—understand that storytelling and gameplay shouldn't be competing elements but complementary forces that elevate each other.
Looking back at my time with Senua's Saga, I'm left with conflicting emotions. The technical achievements are undeniable, and certain story moments will stick with me for years. But I can't shake the feeling of opportunities missed—of gameplay systems that never fully develop and interactive potential that remains largely untapped. For all its visual and auditory splendor, Hellblade 2 serves as a cautionary tale about what happens when presentation overshadows participation. In the end, the most frustrating thing about the game isn't any single design choice, but the realization of how incredible it could have been with just a bit more faith in its audience's desire to actually play.