Senua's Saga: Hellblade II
Scored 9.3/10. The best looking and best sounding game of its generation, and it is not particularly close.
Some games you play. Hellblade II happens to you, in the best way a piece of craft can.
THE CRAFT IS THE HEADLINE
Ninja Theory built a journey through Viking Iceland that looks like a film and sounds like it is inside your head, because it is: the voices Senua hears were recorded to live in your ears, not on your screen. Play it with headphones. That is not a suggestion, it is the review. Every frame of Iceland is a painting you can walk through, and the performance at the center of it holds the whole weight.
WHY 9.3
It is a focused game and knows it. The combat is heavy and deliberate, the puzzles serve the story, and the run time respects the player. What keeps it off the top step is reach: this is a crafted experience on rails compared to the open worlds it shares this list with. But rails this beautiful, carrying a story this brave about a mind at war with itself, earn their number. 9.3, and the gap between this score and the industry's is the widest compliment on the page.
THE INDUSTRY NUMBER
Two scoreboards live on this page and they never mix. The score at the top is Moe's, argued above and signed. The industry's number, the collective critic aggregate, sits here for reference: Metacritic 81. Same game, two verdicts. Read both, then play it yourself.
