Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2

“What if this fear is worth listening to?” a voice asks Senua while she’s heading up a hill alone at night, watching the trees move by themselves, opening a path to her, while the sound of drums booms in the distance, disturbing the torches’ flames. She can hear the grunts and growls of the dead, too, echoing around her, mixed with the screams of the butchered living. What if this time, it’s not just in her head? What if this time… the threat is real?

The second chapter of Senua’s Saga is about fear, how it can take many forms and be either justified, related to a tangible danger, or a powerful illusion. Fear can be a personal torment, created by a troubled or damaged psyche much like Senua’s, but it can also be much worse: it can be a collective psychosis, a product of ignorance and prejudice embedded in a society’s culture that makes it operate under false principles. The game depicts how powerful men can leverage this last form to control and manipulate people: they make us fear and hate certain groups – take your pick, really, we’re creative at fashioning enemies, everyone is a potential “other” – to make us vulnerable, distracted, looking at the wrong problems, and very much willing to keep handing them increasingly more power to solve this non-issue. In other words, fear can be much like Walter White in Breaking Bad: the danger itself.

The first game was all about Senua’s mental condition and how it impacted the way she approached the world, seeing things, listening to voices, and interacting with objects that weren’t there. The world we saw was her world: a different, twisted version of reality custom-made by her own mind to be a living hell for Senua. She had to distrust her own senses, distrust her own feelings, distrust her own thoughts and conclusions, because they were all tainted by despair. It’s a hard thing, having to second-guess your reality all the time, but that’s what Senua must always do. This time, however, she wants to help others, for she perceives in them the same sickness: fear can be very similar to psychosis in the way it warps a person’s sense of reality, making them live in their own stress-inducing world full of danger at every corner, where their neighbor is surely plotting their death or ready to steal their job.

Senua is feeling much better herself. The voices, of course, are still there – they’ll always be, for such is the unfortunate nature of these things – but they’re not all-consuming anymore: she sees them for what they are now, not letting their snarky comments and accusations get the better of her. They never leave her alone, though. There’s this early moment when she’s trying to climb a small hill, dragging herself up the damned thing, using all her strength just to not fall down, and the voices don’t give her a second to rest: “She’s a warrior,” one of them says, “A weak warrior.” “Coward,” they go on, “She’s exhausted,” “Too scared,” “Too tired to carry on,” “Too cold,” “She’s too weak,” “Stupid.” Senua is bombarded by them when she’s most vulnerable, most tired. “You didn’t do enough,” they accuse her as we come across the body of a slave she wanted to save.

But no voice is crueler and harsher than that of the dark shadow of her father – a perfect Steven Hartley, who is boasting the same ominous gravitas of Ralph Ineson in The Green Knight. “The ocean wants you back,” his shadow says, exactly when Senua is carefully traversing a tiny ledge over a cliff, staring at the crashing waves below. The suicidal ideation has taken his image, then, which is a fascinating change: one can never be truly free of such a thing after it grabs hold of us, but the desire to kill herself doesn’t seem to originate within Senua anymore. On the contrary, it’s now being personified in the figure of the man she’s always hated the most in life: suicide has taken a monstrous form, appearing in its true nature. In a battle of perception, this is everything: it means that taking her own life is not something Senua craves anymore, but what Senua fears. The danger is still there, but this makes it much more difficult for her to give in to it.

Her father’s shadow is so hideous a figure that even the voices in her head take her side. “Don’t listen to him,” they say, “You know better.” Meanwhile, her father echoes the very words the voices used to utter in the first game, when Senua was going to Hell to save her dead boyfriend: “You want to save them. They are already dead.” This type of belittling, of discouragement, is now her enemy, having taken the form of the person who oppressed her all her life.

There’s this haunting scene early on, when Senua is on a beach being besieged by the screams, pleadings, and accusations of the ones who died in the nearby shipwrecks, their specters lining up the shore as the wind assaults her from all sides. “Look at them, Senua, at the faces of the ones you failed,” the shadow says, fueling her guilt. This is when she hears the cries of help coming from a nearby overturned ship and crawls inside, looking to find someone she can finally save. Damn her father, she’ll have a win this day. But there’s no one under the ship. The voices laugh at her: the poor girl doesn’t know what’s real, she’s imagining things, her reality is unique to her, you see. She’s quite mad. And then Senua finally sees all the bodies littering the ground around her, blocking the path out of the capsized vessel. The waves hit, and water comes rushing in. And her father asks if Senua knows how it feels to drown. “There is no peace,” he explains.

There’s no escaping death. Every place Senua goes seems to be painted by it. A man she meets – a slaver who tries to capture her – leads Senua to a nearby village, and as she arrives, she passes by many burial mounds. However, the village itself is also being sieged by the undead, the horrible Draugr – zombie warriors who seek nothing but add more graves to that site. The slaver warns Senua not to get in. She doesn’t listen.

Combat is quite a personal affair in Hellblade 2: it’s always a one-on-one duel between Senua and her foe, with the camera close behind her, with her enemy in focus and nothing else. We can block regular attacks and dodge red-marked ones, striking when we spot an opening. And rinse and repeat, with the occasional use of Senua’s medallion, which slows down time, until we defeat our enemy and an elaborate cutscene starts seeminglessly from our last blow – when we’re finally privy to our surroundings, and the death and fighting that is also happening there: we see warriors being pierced by spears, being lit on fire, being chopped by merciless axes, before our next foe comes into view. And another fight starts. Combat wasn’t the point in the first Hellblade, and it’s still the same case here, being just a way to spice things up during climactic moments, successfully building up brief moments of tension.

Senua can fight Draugrs with her sword, but soon the Giants come to render cold steel useless. First, we hear their uncanny guttural sounds, then the land shaking,  and our companions telling us to run, but it’s already too late: the ground is already cracking open alongside Senua, the magma bursting out with each one of her strides, as if the earth itself were chasing the warrior, trying to gobble her up. And then she emerges from below, Illtagua her name, with her blank, piercing eyes, her charred, furious countenance, and enormous head moving and contorting in unnatural ways. Flames, smoke, and ash everywhere. A volcanic monster.

Giants are our biggest foes in Hellblade 2; they are the people’s tormentors. They are what they fear. Remember the slaver who guided Senua to a village full of undead? He defends his practice as necessary because of the giants. They need sacrifices to appease the monsters, you see, it’s for the greater good. In other words, this unfathomable danger allows them to shackle and exploit their peers; the existence of monsters justifies oppression. We can all suffer a bit of injustice if we believe it’s for the greater good. We can see people being driven out of their homes, being reduced to vapor by thermal weapons, being violently separated from their families, and we think, “at least, that worst thing I fear so much is being kept at bay.”

Senua’s quest, then, is not to butcher the giants, to drive them off, or to murder them. Her quest is to see humanity back in them, to demonstify them, to look at them and recognize human feelings. She’s to learn about their history and the tragedy of their creation. “Every monster was once a man,” it is repeated often in Hellblade 2, being the closest thing the narrative has to a mantra. We must see beyond these monsters, learn how they were made – and by whom, and with what design.

That’s not easy, though: Senua must go to hell and back in the game’s most terrifying sequence, where she travels to the bowels of the earth in search of answers. We’re deep underground, into a network of caves, her only light a feeble torch that wavers beneath the leaking rock. The tunnels get narrower and smaller with each passage. We’re aware we would be enveloped by total darkness should our torch’s light go out, and the sequence plays with that fear, making us pass through narrow tunnels dripping with water, or jump into a water stream we don’t know the depth of. Meanwhile, creatures in the shadows play with Senua, testing her perception, her courage, her resolve: bridges that seem ethereal become solid stone when we light a room, or worse, let the darkness descend upon it.  But, unlike the torch’s light, Senua never wavers. She’s scared shitless, yes, and the voices in her head get her even more anxious – “Something is coming, something is coming, something is coming, something is not right here,” they say, certainly not helping – but Senua keeps going. Ever deeper, always forward.

It’s a long, complex sequence with many layers and set pieces. It has a lake of the dead, where we must traverse slowly, surrounded by specters, suspecting that something else may be in the water with us. It has many puzzles based on perception, where we look into orbs of water to change the environment or light places to alter their configuration. It has terrifying scenes where we’re being chased by monsters and must relinquish our ways of fighting back, becoming completely vulnerable deep underground, with nowhere to hide. Some moments play with Senua’s sense of reality, changing the landscape before her eyes in ways she knows can’t be true. And there are moments of unexpected beauty, such as when we’re guided by a patch of fluorescent light throughout the darkness of the caves – a moment that truly shines on an OLED display with its use of pure blacks.

And all that to understand that sometimes monsters are manmade. They’re political tools: we are taught to hate them because we’ll then gladly allow corrupt men to gather even more power just to protect us. So, they fuel our fears and – the bigoted, righteous fools that we are – we get played time and again, never learning from the past. It probably isn’t even that hard for them to make us hate each other – we love to feel we’re on the right side of a moral battle, and the existence of monsters leaves that side clearly defined, doesn’t it? But Senua’s quest puts her on an arduous path of empathy. She’ll suffer no monster to exist: she’s to make us all human again.

February 18, 2026.