After a long wait Senua’s Saga Hellblade 2 arrived today on PC, Xbox Series Theory and those who appreciated it less, while still highlighting its undeniable qualities, from the technical and artistic sector of the highest level to an engaging story that touches on unusual themes. In short, masterpiece, good game or no game… who is right? But most of all, who cares?
Tested by the facts, like its predecessor, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 presents itself as a different experience than usual and which it is absolutely not aimed at the mass audience nor does he want to please everyone. Maybe it’s not the universal masterpiece that everyone agrees on and which, according to some, is currently missing from the Xbox catalogue, but that’s fine. Indeed, there were more similar productions in a market, that of triple and double A, which is increasingly stagnant and desperately trying to attract as many players as possible even at the cost of flattening the offer.
Those who play it safe and those who take risks
We are seeing this more and more often in recent years: publishers want to play it safefocusing on well-known franchises (see Capcom’s very solid strategy, based on a few major multiplatform series, now also embraced by Square Enix and Ubisoft), genres and structures repeated ad nauseam (see the countless action games with sprinklings of RPG elements and game worlds unnecessarily vast and full of repetitive activities just to make up the numbers and justify the 80 euro price) or if you try a new path it is only because someone else has already followed it successfully.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 doesn’t have 100 km² of explorable map and it doesn’t fill you with redundant optional activities and at least five different types of collectibles, but it goes in the diametrically opposite direction (which you may or may not clearly like), telling an engaging story over the course of a few hours, without stretching the story and frills of any kind, even at the cost of reducing the gameplay to the bare minimum and offering almost zero replayability.
So why, given the premises, does such a title exist? The answer is simple, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 is a white fly, born thanks to the alignment of the stars: a studio, Ninja Theory, with a courageous and determined vision although well aware of not being able to reach a mass audience, and a publisher behind it like Microsoft Gaming, in full expansion and well willing to also invest in games with far from guaranteed commercial success in order to diversify the Game Pass offering. A strategy that in different ways has also given life to small pearls such as Hi-Fi Rush, Pentiment and Grounded and which we hope will also be supported in the future, although the closures of Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin suggest the opposite.
This is an editorial written by a member of the editorial team and is not necessarily representative of the editorial line of Multiplayer.it.
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