Recent reviews by HurryUpWithMyDamnCroissants

I really, really wanted to like this game.

I loved the first game, and this was one of the few games I was genuinely excited about this summer. There's a lot to like on the surface- It certainly looks genuinely beautiful and all of the visuals immerse you in this world on the edge of a folkloric apocalypse. The audio is generally good and makes good use of the binaural system to help portray Senua's voices. Everything looks and feels genuine. Extreme amounts of detail have been put into everything you see; clothing is impressively detailed, and the spark of swords and furious blaze of fire is enchantingly well-rendered. Animations are fluid and a cut above anything else I've seen.

The problem is the story. The first game's story was strong and clear, with dedicated themes and a protagonist who was determined to complete a clear mission. On the way, players faced unique challenges, such as navigating dark areas filled with monsters, finding symbolic puzzles, and fighting large and detailed bosses that represented larger themes of trauma, loneliness, or wrath. It felt more "mystical" and meaningful because the fantastical elements played into the central concepts of Senua's own perception of the world.

This game's story however, without getting into detailed spoilers, is immensely confused. It starts with a simple goal, but constantly along the line, this goal changes constantly, updated confusingly often as Senua gets sidetracked or decided to compromise her ideals in favor of a different, vaguer solution. Each time these solutions are offered, however, it always feels contrived. Through an often strange or obnoxious method, you discover the way forward, and then you do it. That’s it. You discover a unique secret that someone tells you to use in order to win, and then you do it, and you win.

Senua’s goals are inconsistent and the constantly changing themes surrounding the main pillars of the story (and it's antagonists) mean that you're not sure how the story is going to continue- not because it's full of twists and turns, but because it's genuinely so bizarrely paced and put together you're really not sure what the central message or thematic elements are supposed to be in the first place.

A big part of this is the handling of the aforementioned mythical elements. Before, they were understood to represent some deeper element of Senua’s psyche, represented through physical struggle- fail and your dynamic “darkness” would spread, until it would consume you. In this one, a big zombie man is a big zombie man. It stabs you and if it stabs you enough you die. Everyone sees it for what it is. There’s just big zombie men around. You see them, Hogur the fisherman from Fjordisbur sees them, everyone knows about and doesn’t like the big scary zombie men. It makes Senua feel weirdly ordinary- instead of her struggling against her literal demons, she’s just someone who’s good at killing fantastical critters and magically knowing the way forward. She goes from travelling to hell and killing a god to a psychedelic soundtrack to getting swatted around by big burly zombies to guttural generic “viking-y” music. It’s weirdly bland.

The original game didn’t have a health bar, but it did have a failstate, and the player was constantly reminded of it. It made fights extremely tense and nerve-wracking. In this game, the player’s health is a random amount of hits, usually five or seven, before you have a long grace period of flopping on the floor- only staying still will get you killed, and when you die, you simply plop back into existence at a nearby invisible checkpoint.

There’s no real stakes to the quite frequent combat, which I guess is for the best because many of the combat setpieces are so dense and unpleasant to navigate. They are intricately detailed, with loads of particle effects and smoke and fire, but when they are combined with random cutaways to fleeing villagers or other fighters or the constant momentum of getting slapped around by some big fella with an axe they are miserable at making clear gameplay. They create a frustrating environment where enemy moves become almost impossible to perceive in time to dodge, and throwing weapons blend into the environment one moment only to collide with your chest the next.

This is extremely disappointing for a sequel to a genuinely unique story that used all aspects of the experience to strengthen its narrative. This game doesn't seem to know how to use it's design elements to even remotely similar effectiveness than the first game in it's series, and as a result the narrative, the thing that all the superficial elements are built around, is shockingly weak. Its vision of Senua seems aimless and foggy at the best of times, instead of driven and struggling onwards despite difficulty. Never during the story will you answer basic questions like “What motivates her?” “What does she want?” “Why is she here?” or any others because the story gives, changes, and retracts answers to these questions whenever convenient to push it’s meandering narrative.

I wanted to like this game, or at least spend some time lost in its beautiful vistas and smoke-filled setpieces and emerge unfulfilled but entertained. Instead, I finished the eight or so hours of gameplay feeling deeply disappointed, and profoundly upset that the story played out how it did. I have not, in recent memory, left a game wishing I just had never taken the chance to play it like this one. Maybe, if I only saw it through other’s experiences, I wouldn’t be forced to reckon with how utterly shallow and mediocre this game is in comparison to what came before.