They come unexpectedly, flickering moments that make you unsure whether you’re watching a video game or the real world.
Cold sunlight that makes wet stones appear blindingly bright. Undulating hills fading into the misty nothingness of the horizon. The near-photorealistic face of Senua, the unconventional heroine of this 10th-century revenge tale, as she grimaces with taut tendons and bulging veins.
The Veracity of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, out Tuesday for PC and Xbox Series
One could argue that this hyperrealism is paramount for a third-person action game that presents a visual realm full of visions and wonders, of fire-breathing humans and slithering giants. But these folkloric flourishes rely on earthy, authentic details like the dirt and blood stains that accumulate on the characters.
“The goal is to move people,” said Dom Matthews, the 40-year-old head of game developer Ninja Theory, from his plush studio in Cambridge, England. “Our belief is that we achieve this by providing a credible experience. When someone forgets that they are in a video game level and focuses on the narrative journey of Senua, they are open to being moved emotionally.”
The first Hellblade game, Senua’s Sacrifice, took place in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe: Vikings had murdered Senua’s village in Scotland’s Orkney Archipelago and sacrificed her lover Dillion to the Norse gods. The players sent Senua to the underworld of Helheim so that she could save his soul.
In the sequel, Senua’s purview expands as she heads across the stormy North Sea to Iceland to track down those responsible for his death.
The franchise’s emphasis on authenticity and realism extends to the unique phantasms of its protagonist, who suffers from psychosis. Played with fierce, haunting intensity by Melina Juergens, Senua’s turbulent mental state often manifests itself in unsettling ways: chattering inner voices swirling around her in 3D audio and ghostly enemies that are products of her imagination.
In addition to this interior landscape, Ninja Theory has gone to extreme lengths to lend credibility to the physical world, basing much of its in-game material directly on real-world sources through a process it calls “reality capture.” . The intense motion-captured combat system was the result of 70 grueling days with a stunt team, and field footage was collected in Iceland, Scotland and Wales.
The rugged terrain that Senua walks on, made up of huge volcanic rocks covered in fluorescent lichens, was pieced together from satellite imagery, drone footage and photogrammetry, said Chris Rundell, an environmental artist. The team took thousands of photos of stones, trees, bushes, traditional turf houses and tiny Viking statues they carved themselves before scanning them into the computer.
“You get a sense of the size of the place, but also how things feel, sound and smell,” said Rundell, who wanted to convey his own experience of Iceland — the heavy rain, the softness and hardness of the mossy, rugged floor – on the game. “When you’re there and you can touch the stuff, you carry it back with you.”
Dan Crossland, a character art director whose unkempt hair and dark beard would make him a perfect extra in a medieval film epic, proudly talked about commissioning real costumes for Senua and other characters from an artist in London . These costumes are on display in one of the studio’s many lounge areas, which also feature reference books on topics such as art history and programming. They were made from leather, cotton and hemp using contemporary techniques such as weaving. Crossland then scuffed and even burned the outfits to make them feel more lived-in, hoping to evoke the “crude, shabby state” of life in 10th-century Iceland.
“There’s nothing too playful about it. It’s simply a matter of facts: what materials they had, what was available,” he said. “It’s a survival thing.”
Senua’s saga is set around the time when the Althing, Iceland’s parliament, was founded in 930. This is a place of “isolated communities,” said screenwriter Lara Derham, a place where “folklore and religion were tightly woven into societies and the land itself.” Senua has a penchant for spotting runic patterns in the environment recognize that are crucial to solving puzzles and finding the way forward.
These runic puzzles tap into the “terrible, bubbling feeling of uncertainty” that people with psychosis can experience, said Paul Fletcher, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Cambridge who advised Ninja Theory on both Senua games.
Fletcher does not believe it is anachronistic to speak of psychosis in the Middle Ages, pointing to a “quite surprising level of sophistication” with which people spoke about mental illness and, in particular, madness at the time. There are classification systems in historical documents that reveal a “compassionate approach to understanding people,” he said.
“It was often about falling into turmoil through grief or fear of war,” he said, “or going into the wilderness to atone for one’s sins.”
For a game that emphasizes such a subjective perspective, the idea of ”capturing reality” might seem a strange, even paradoxical approach. Still, it provides something of a baseline over which the game’s designers and artists have added impressionistic layers of sparkling and shimmering mental perception. The moon shines a little more intensely; the colors of Iceland’s original landscape seem just a touch more vibrant; Particles and dirt swirl dramatically in the air. It’s a world of vivid hyperreality from the perspective of a character whose cognitive abilities seem to be functioning at full speed.
Fletcher sees these elements as consistent with Senua’s state of mind. “Very often people in psychosis feel incredibly close to natural events,” he said. Even time itself changes, an eerie twilight seems to turn into an enchanting night in the blink of an eye.
These details result in a strikingly aestheticized adventure that seamlessly blurs the line between the imaginary and the real. The protagonist’s slippery grasp of reality and the gorgeous, beyond-the-uncanny-valley imagery, the result of both sheer polygon processing power and skilled artistry, arguably bring Senua’s saga as close to photorealism as it gets interactive medium has achieved so far. They are delusions of the spirit right down to the depths.
But this simultaneously visceral and illusory experience has its roots in Senua. While her subconscious was spread across the screen with frightening and blissful aplomb, Matthews said it was crucial that she remained a believable person.
“Just as we digitally translate a real-world costume into the game, we try to do the same with the reality of people’s experiences and neuroscience,” Matthews said.
The aim is for the player to feel both the full force of the distance between themselves and Senua, a 10th-century woman with a distant belief system, as well as an intimate and often uncomfortable closeness.