Hellblade 1: "Woah.. depiction of mental illness and psychosis... Gotta look at runes, fight 3 guys in 3 waves and fight Hela, doe it might be in me head..."
Hellblade 2: "No that wasn't in your head Miss Hellblade, Giants exist and are killing my people. Please kill them with the power of therapy-talk and also by killing 1 guy in 10 waves.... and also by looking at runes. "

Aside from them focusing more on a norse fantasy narrative, this is somehow the same fucking game but like less interactable and somehow I enjoyed it a bit more! Game's stunning, yes issa slop but that UE5-powered rocks and lighting sure be yummy sometimes. Never used Photomode anywhere and I get it now - Stopping anywhere as you please with the press of tha button and just roaming around and basking in the lighting and cinematic-setup. A genuine technical marvel, running at real time with barely any loads. But that tech ain't gone do much if you just use it to let me walk through rocks upon rocks upon rocks. Felt like I was inside that PS5 UE5 tech demo. A deathly obsession of Cinemaxxing to it's detriment, sacrificing combat depth by streamlining it for tha cinema! When the game manages to suspense disbelief, it's strong and weird and captivating, but it can only hold that spark for a glimpse before retreading tired old walks and paths of it's predecessor, but somehow even more train-tracked than before!
I cannot overstate how speechless I am that they somehow managed to reuse every mechanic/thing from the first game again.

During it’s inception, Ninja Theory thought of this game as an experiment - to see if it was possible to develop a “AAA-game” with a small headcount while also tackling a topic hardly discussed in games. What came out is a dogshit imitation and implementation of both.

There is a funny interpretation to be found in Ninja Theory’s understanding of a AAA-game, as Hellblade is just a collage of high-fidelity rocks and motion capture performances funneled into a repeating on-rails flowchart of walking/dialogue/looking-at-rocks → Obligatory Puzzle → Obligatory Combat (because its a “AAA-game” of course it has to have Combat!), repeating and recycling in on itself til the credits roll. Nothing like doing Combat-Encounter #8 and you have to fight Enemy Variation 1 AND 2 in three waves after the puzzle mechanics haunt the game’s narrative: FIND THE RUNES, ENTER THE PORTALS, all padded somehow into 7 hours of playtime!? Give me a break. The Binaural audio sure is swag and all and the very tiny few moments Hellblade's Budget gets used to create harrowing and captivating imagery show glimpses of a reality where Hellblade was a 3 hour epic of just fugged up & cool shit and that would have probably been a lot better with what we got it here. It’s in its pacing and structure that Hellblade frustrate me the most: The gaming equivalent of reading a Game Design Document: it’s too rigid, too constrained by it’s listing off of 3 puzzle designs and 5 enemy types while padding you out for another 3-4 hours more than necessary. For such a nuanced topic and possibility to experience it, why did they choose to create go about it in the safest and conventional way possible rather than try SOMETHING eccentric in anything?

You can have all the professional-consultation and interviews of anecdotal retelling you want if you don’t follow up and do much with it! It really feels like they interviewed a person who said "I felt like I started seeing pattern and connections to things that weren't" and them immediately following and implementing the first thing that popped up in their heads ("RUNES BAYBEE")

It just irks me even more that it was exactly this angle they focused on entirely in their marketing and subsequent postmortem appearances - of how they depicted the most accurate example of mental-illness in vibeo jams. Fuck off.

I hope Hellblade 2 is better, hopefully with Tameem Antoniades apparently leaving the company last year.