Just below, you can see a tweet from the Ninja Theory Twitter account, developers of both Hellblade games. For the upcoming Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, Ninja Theory is using “flow maps” to both make clouds form, and seamlessly dissolve naturally whenever required.

Bit cloudy isn’t it? Here we’re using flow maps to make clouds form and dissolve naturally in Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II #WIP pic.twitter.com/OrIoyGjiHKMay 25, 2021

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It’s a nice little look at some new technology that Ninja Theory is using as part of development for Hellblade 2. Recently, Senua actor Melina Juergens shared a behind-the-scenes video that depicted the actor learning how to use a sword for the upcoming sequel, revealing that combat is going to be a bigger focus for the sequel than it was with the 2017 original.

In all, we’ve seen relatively little of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 outside of these scant clips from the developer. First announced at The Game Awards back in December 2019, Hellblade 2 was actually the first game to be revealed as coming to Microsoft’s next-gen Xbox Series X console. Hellblade 2 was announced before the cheaper Xbox Series S had even been announced.

Right now, we know nothing about Hellblade 2 outside from the fact that Senua is returning, and it’ll once again focus on mental health. The original game from Ninja Theory strived to depict mental illness with a degree of realism, consulting experts on psychosis, for example. From what we’ve seen of the sequel, it looks as though the dark undertones of Senua’s original journey will be returning for Hellblade 2.

For a look at all the additional games confirmed to be coming to Xbox’s more powerful console, head over to our upcoming Xbox Series X games guide for more.

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Announcing Project: MARAFind out more in our full development diary: https://t.co/CRiLIRyILM pic.twitter.com/6CA0XKZK1FJanuary 22, 2020

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Ninja Theory outlined its goals for Project: Mara in its blog post, and like many of Ninja Theory’s other projects, it’s grounded in mental health. “Project: Mara will be a real-world and grounded representation of mental terror,” writes commercial director Dom Matthews. “Based on real lived experience accounts and in-depth research, our aim is to recreate the horrors of the mind as accurately and realistically as possible. Project: Mara will be an experimental title and a showcase of what could become a new storytelling medium.” 

Alongside the teaser and announcement for Project: Mara, Ninja Theory released a dev diary (opens in new tab) discussing its development plans for the next few years, all under the umbrella name Dreadnought. Apart from its upcoming brawler Bleeding Edge (opens in new tab), it has teams working on The Insight Project (opens in new tab), a new initiative to improve mental well-being through games, and Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 (opens in new tab) as independent projects. Project: Mara is also briefly mentioned, with co-founder Tameem Antoniades confirming that it only features one character, presumably Mara, and one location, the sterile facility featured in the teaser. 

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 is one of several confirmed upcoming Xbox Series X games (opens in new tab).  

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Dialogue Options: Should video games cover sensitive subjects? (opens in new tab)

It’s almost impressive how disappointing Bloober’s recent Blair Witch (opens in new tab) turned out to be. While the experience never really feels like you’re playing a Blair Witch game, it does look exactly the way you’d want a game bearing the Blair Witch name to look; a franchise, it should be said, that has long struggled to replicate the 1999 film’s unique collision of icky New England folklore and the searing terror of isolation, either on screen or in game. Bloober’s game sounds the part, too. Never, in the history of video games, has the noise of a wet branch cracking echoed so ominously, ringing off like a warning that something terrible is primed to happen. 

A problem is, of course, that this is a game where something terrible only very rarely happens. In fact, Blair Witch’s frequent game breaking bugs are scarier than anything the narrative offers. For the most part, it’s an aimless trawl through identikit woodland, accompanied by a dog that, should it ever be forced to sit down and take dog A-Levels, would unquestionably leave well short of the requisite qualifications needed to attend dog university. 

It’s a game that is every orienteering course you were ever tasked with taking in Boy Scouts, only without the promise of a hot chocolate at the end of it all. And yet the most disappointing thing about the new Blair Witch game isn’t any of this. Rather, it’s the incorporation – no, it’s central placement – of a trope as enduringly frustrating as they come; ‘insanity’ as a game mechanic. Essentially, ‘is something terrible happening here… oh no, the protagonist has become mentally ill’. 

Fittingly, for the genre the game belongs to, horror loves itself a bit of this nonsense. 2010’s Shutter Island (opens in new tab) and 2003’s High Tension were two good films, spoiled by the appearance of said tropes in their final moments. Literary horror icon Stephen King is a fan, often deploying it to get him out of a narrative dead end (though blame for its inclusion in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 reinvention of The Shining (opens in new tab) lies solely with the director and his writing partner Diane Johnson). There is no shortage of other culprits who weren’t listening when a teacher told them that ‘it was all just a dream’ wasn’t an acceptable way to end the stories they wrote at school. 

The big bad of gaming

Poor mental health has long been video games’ biggest bad. It forms the crux of the Silent Hill series, with the characters within Konami’s broken world battling monsters who reflect the fractured psyches of themselves. It’s an effective device – Silent Hill 2 would make any list headed The Greatest Horror Video Games Ever – but while it would be a leap to say the device is especially harmful, it’s certainly regressive. It enforces the view that people who are mentally ill are ‘other’, they’re not like us, they’re in the petri-dish and we’re examining them. What we should be pitching for, for the well-being of all, is that mental health, good and bad – to use rudimentary terms – exists on a spectrum across us all. 

The first game in the Silent Hill series is twenty-years old, though, so how far have we come since then? Vaas, Pagan Min, Joseph Seed; Ubisoft continue to confuse violent insanity and personality in scripting their Far Cry villains; it’s never a bad time to roll out the statistic that sufferers from mental illness are 12x more likely to be victims of violent crime. Outlast (opens in new tab), Until Dawn (opens in new tab), Bioshock Infinite (opens in new tab), The Evil Within (opens in new tab); the asylum stereotype – gothic, decaying, screams emanating from places you can’t see and would never want to – continues to be a go-to device by developers looking to unsettle the player. Disappointingly, released just weeks ago, the otherwise excellent Gears 5 (opens in new tab) features a multiplayer arena named ‘Asylum’, which looks more like a graveyard in Gotham than any mental health facility that has existed in a hundred years. 

Does this stuff really matter? Asylums are such a fixture in the toolbox of horror creators that it’s unlikely they’re going anywhere. And there’s certainly evidence of them often being the most horrifying places on earth! And yet it would be deeply upsetting if – given the huge range of obstacles that already exist between being mental ill and receiving treatment – sufferers stayed avoided seeking professional help because of a misconception stemming from playing a game. 

On an indie level, where progressive ideas are normally the first to bloom, there are titles where something useful is being said about mental health. Will O’Neils’ Actual Sunlight is as an accurate depiction of depression as anyone would hope to play. Night In The Woods (opens in new tab) is unquestionably a landmark game in this respect, in that it features someone who is mentally ill, while not directly being a game about being mentally ill. Maybe that’s what it takes to say something useful about mental health, an experience which, let’s remember, is inherently personal. Small teams, total control; the indie space is perfect for it.

I would be remiss not to mention Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (opens in new tab), Ninja Theory’s much acclaimed psychosis-fuelled action adventure from 2017, whereby actual psychiatrists were consulted during the game’s creation. Sure, Ninja Theory appears to have gotten ‘being mentally ill’ confused with ‘having a superpower’, but good intentions will get you a long way. And yet, where that game excels is that it portrays a protagonist who is clearly suffering, whose suffering is portrayed in a way that inspires empathy and whom is not depicted as being dangerous by means of being ill. Conversely, Blair Witch’s treatment of its central character Ellis fumbles the ball repeatedly. 

While a game called Blair Witch really doesn’t need to be about anything other than a witch in the woods, Bloober’s game – much like its Layers Of Fear gigs – might be one about PTSD, or about psychosis, or about damnation. Either way, whatever the Polish studio intended it to be, Blair Witch isn’t clever or direct enough to be putting anything useful into a conversation about mental health in 2019. Maybe it never intended to. Maybe it’s just supposed to be a spooky game. In which case, it would be worth the studio understanding that the desperation and suffering of millions of others – misunderstood, marginalized, at risk – isn’t a playpit for cheap jump scares.

Are games doing a good enough job of preparing players to deal with sensitive subjects?  We explore the question in Dialogue Options: Should video games cover sensitive subjects (opens in new tab)?

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Hellblade, then, is a story that follows Senua, a Celtic warrior left traumatised by a Viking invasion and struggling with mental health issues. That’s more than a gimmick too, with Paul Fletcher, a psychiatrist and professor of health and neuroscience from the University of Cambridge overseeing the game’s portrayal of the issues involved.

Here’s what that looks like:

I’ll talk more about the mental health side of things later because what really interests me is how the game is being made. While Ninja Theory is an independent studio, it’s not ‘indie’ in the more genre-specific sense of the the word. Hellblade’s development strips back everything from people, budgets and design but is still aiming to compete with higher end games. “We are known for our production values and we want to maintain the qualities that make us Ninja Theory” Tameem tells me over Skype. “So [Hellblade] was about ‘what kind of game can we make with our skills and talents on a budget we can self fund’? 15 people for about two years is about what we can afford, so we’ve got to make the best possible game we can for those many people”.

There are two main things driving this. Firstly, the studio wants to (finally) own one of its games after years of publishing deals that left the deeds with publishers. Then, more importantly, there’s the increasing difficulty of trying to make a mainstream game that doesn’t tick the right marketing boxes.

To some extent, both problems developed as a result of how games were made and sold as physical products, something a digital game like Hellblade can easily avoid. “If you were to try and do this five years ago it would be pretty much impossible, at least on the console side,” says Tameem. “You’d have to go through publishers, and if you go through publishers then it has to be retail, it has to be retail priced which means it has to be a certain size and so forth”, he explains.

Trying to break away from the trad publishing model isn’t just about creative freedom, either, it’s survival says Tameem. “What we’re seeing now on consoles now is pretty extreme. In fact it was very difficult for us at the start of the generation, to even consider getting a single player story-based game signed to a publisher. The demands are so big, and the requirements so specific, the checklist of features you have to do so vast – unless you sit in a particular format, you have no chance”.

It means that there’s a very unsteady middle ground right now, with small near zero-overhead indies at one end, multi-studio mega developers at the other, and very little in between. Especially on console. “A lot of studios in our position are in danger and a huge chunk of them no longer exist,” admits Tameem. Which is where Hellblade comes in: “It seems obvious that now we have the means to self publish and release digitally there should be games of all size, all genres, of all levels of ambition. I think it’s good for us as developers to explore, try things out and create our own models”.

That’s part of the reason the studio’s been so open with development with Tameem hoping that if it all goes to plan other studios can “follow in our footsteps”. If it doesn’t, though? “They know what to avoid”.

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Ninja Theory’s creative chief Tameem Antoniades said releasing the game on PC will not only open Hellblade up to a wider audience, it will also make it easier to run wide-scale playtesting. That makes sense given Ninja Theory’s new ‘independent AAA’ approach, which calls for its community to be actively involved in each stage of development. Antoniades also noted that the game may support 4K resolutions on PC.

If you’re not familiar with Hellblade, it doesn’t stray too far from Ninja Theory’s strengths: a woman named Senua sets off on a journey deep into the Norse underworld. She’s on her own in a dangerous, desolate place – so she’ll have plenty of opportunities to use that big, brutal looking sword she lugs around. Sounds familiar, right?

But unlike the rest of Ninja Theory’s projects, Hellblade is self-published. The studio hopes to avoid compromising its established standards by focusing on a few areas of expertise and using its community as a sounding board. We’ll hopefully see how the process bears out by the end of 2015.

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