“Hellblade 2” begins with Senua on a boat. Having made her peace at the end of the first “Hellblade” game, she decided to strike at the leader of the Norse slavers who once ransacked Orkney. She gets herself captured on purpose and travels bound and weaponless in a boat with other slaves who she, somehow, plans to rescue—despite having no weapons and no allies. It’s not the most well-conceived plan, but Ninja Theory takes it very seriously nonetheless and expects us to do the same.
Things go badly wrong, and Senua changes her mission and decides it’s time to liberate an island nation from the tyranny of its gods. “Hellblade 2” wants to explore themes of tradition and folklore as tools to keep people from questioning or straying too far from the norm, but it never gives the topics enough depth or thought to turn them into anything interesting.
Like the first game, the ideas in “Hellblade 2” unfold across three main components—narrative segments, puzzles, and combat. “Hellblade 2″’s puzzles are occasionally clever, including one instance where Senua’s voices encourage you to look at the world in unusual ways. The solution is focusing on a rock formation that, viewed from the right angle, looks like a face and then vanishes to reveal a new path.
These creative moments are the exception, though. Most of the other challenges are tedious—match magic symbols with painted objects that look faintly similar, find special rocks, hold a torch, and so on. A few have some shallow symbolism attached to them as well, but “Hellblade 2” shows little interest in doing anything with that beyond showing you it exists.
That’s when it doesn’t actively undermine its efforts at symbolism. At one point, Senua recovers a mirror, a precious keepsake from her childhood, and faces some of the demons from her past in an effort to move forward. She fights spirits made of glass in battle, overcomes them, and declares that her past grief will drive her, not hold her back. The moment is a moving one. Then Ninja Theory instantly strips it of any meaning by making the mirror a permanent combat tool, where you can activate Senua’s mirror superpowers and use special attacks if she hits a bad guy enough.