What to make of Hellblade II

My changing reactions to the newest Xbox/PC adventure. Plus: Some advice about game reviews from three smart critics.

One of Hellblade II’s many stunning vistas. Screenshot: Ninja Theory, Xbox Game Studios (Captured by Game File)

In 2010, when I was a mere deputy editor at the gaming site Kotaku, the owner of our company was obsessed with an Icelandic volcano.

Nick Denton, head of Gawker Media and feared publisher of salacious truths, couldn’t get enough of a video of the 71-day eruption of Eyjafjallajökull and its seven-mile-high plume. 

"I've sent around that gorgeous Iceland video so often that it's become a running joke,” he told The Guardian late that year.

It’s true. 

He’d sit his siteleads (and deputies) down in a glass-lined conference room, cast the volcano video onto a big-screen TV and urge us to publish posts that were equally mesmerizing.  (That may explain this 2011 Gawker effort to recapture the glory.)

Fourteen years later, I have been playing this week’s new Xbox and PC game, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, and my ability to critically assess it has been affected by many things. Among them is that Hellblade II is set amid striking Icelandic vistas with sky-high plumes. 

Nick, not at all a gamer, would love the sight of it, I think. It’s his favorite post, but as a video game. It’s an old office meme turned quasi-interactive.

I’ll admit that before I even thought of Nick Denton’s would-be reaction to Hellblade II, I had other thoughts about the game that I ultimately decided were unfair. Many of them were about who made it and who funded it. 

Those reactions get me thinking about my critical reflexes to new video games: about how to view a new creative work, when to care about the context around it and when to ignore all the things I know about it that aren’t right there in the work itself (or are they). Never too old to acquire some wisdom, I contacted some expert reviewers for advice about all of this, too.