Highlights

  • Hellblade 2's shorter runtime suits its heavy themes & prevents repetition, making the narrative feel natural.
  • Ninja Theory was transparent about the game's length upfront, offering good value at $50 or even less on Game Pass.
  • Despite divisive opinions, Hellblade 2 strikes a balance between acclaim and criticism, delivering a unique gaming experience.

First-party AAA games are always going to be controversial in some way. Unfortunately, that's just an inherent trait of a game that's technically being locked away from a portion of the potential audience. There also tend to be all these lofty expectations placed on first-party AAA games, and when they inevitably can't reach them, they're heavily criticized. Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 is experiencing that right now.

Released just last week, Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 has suffered a pretty divisive launch. While on one hand, Hellblade 2 has earned acclaim from some critics, it's also garnered a lot of criticism. The public perception surrounding Hellblade 2 is also a little all over the place right now, but one clear throughline in the discourse concerns the game's shorter length. Though the situation is definitely complicated, Hellblade 2's length might not be entirely worthy of all the ire.

Hellblade Burning Tree
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Hellblade 2 Makes a Good Case for Smaller Experiences

Hellblade 2's Shorter Runtime Feels Right

The first Hellblade was a short and sweet affair, lasting around 7-9 hours. This shorter length suited the first Hellblade very well, and a big reason for that is the narrative material the game is exploring. Hellblade follows Pictish warrior Senua as she embarks on a journey to Hel, where she attempts to resurrect her murdered husband. All the while, Senua is battling her own psychosis, depicted as a set of Furies loudly whispering in her ear at all times. Hellblade tackles some very heavy themes, from domestic violence to mental illness to grief, and those themes can take a surprisingly heavy toll on the player.

Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 continues to explore much of the same themes as the first game, while also adding its own unique dash of harrowing violence and uncovered trauma. Much like the first game, Hellblade 2's narrative can start to feel pretty dense the longer the controller is in hand, and this is where many fans will find relief in the fact that Hellblade 2's runtime is just 5-6 hours long.

Though it suffers some pacing issues in its first hour, Hellblade 2 maintains a fairly solid momentum after that point and right up until the credits roll. There are plenty of little mysteries to keep players guessing, plenty of intriguing character dynamics and well-performed interactions, and a compelling central goal that the narrative is building toward. So while Hellblade 2's runtime might be short, the way its story is told makes that runtime feel like a natural fit.

A more cynical take is that Hellblade 2 being a longer experience would have also made its combat and puzzles feel even more repetitive.

Hellblade 2 Is Still Good Value

When developer Ninja Theory was first acquired by Microsoft, and when Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 was first announced, many fans believed the sequel would naturally be a much larger experience on account of its higher budget and larger development team. That presumption was a fair one, and Hellblade 2's prominent place at the heart of the Xbox Series X's marketing did feed into that notion. So it's fair for fans to be disappointed in the final product's length.

But Ninja Theory was very upfront about Hellblade 2's length before launch. Back in January, Ninja Theory confirmed Hellblade 2 would have a similar length to the first game, and this gave fans plenty of time to decide whether or not they'd pick it up on launch. And though the $50 price tag seems high for such a short experience, it's about on par with shorter PS5 first-party games like Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 is also on Xbox Game Pass, meaning that fans technically only need to drop $10.99 to play it.