BTW
@CriticalGaming and
@FakeSympathy, Hellblade II is about 9 hours long. So there you go.
I played about 2.5 hours of the game before work this morning so I'm either 50% or 25% through the game. I hope it's only 25% because nothing has happened yet. The first 35 minutes was slowly stagger-walking around a beach while the voices in my head told me how shit I am. Then I finally got some combat which lasted about 30 seconds before it was back to slow walking through another area. I then walked around a burned village and solved a "look at the thing" puzzle, before some combat in my brain happened, and the game showed me how to get a collectible. Then I walked through another part of the village where zombie-men where killing people before finally jumping into a battle against dude after dude.
Through out this there were several painfully slow sections of crawling under or through things that I couldn't help but feel like they were only there to drag out the run time. Senua can sprint during exploration sections but it's more like a causal jog and her normal walking speed is very slow. Partly I think this slow pace is so that the voices in your head can run through all their dialog before you get to a new section, but it serves to remove all player agency out of the game. It feels like you aren't really in control until combat and everything else is just forcing you to look and listen to everything before you get to "play" again.
That being said the combat isn't great either. Senua is ill-fitted to be a warrior. She's weak, and scampers like a cockroach, each swing of the sword is a lumbering effort for her and it feels like you aren't winning battles because you played well but more because Senua got lucky and your opponent fucked up. It's rare for a game to make you feel like a bad player even when you win so I guess that's a new trick. However when you start to fight sequences of battles one after the other, often against the same guy you just beat which doesn't feel great, though to be fair that could be in fitting with the theme of making you feel crazy.
The game might technically take 8ish hours to complete, but I feel like the actual content is far less thanks to the many many slow tight space crawls you have to do throughout. Senua's slow pace does little more than add to the runtime honestly.
The good news is the game is beautiful, runs flawlessly on my system, and the sound design is pretty fucking fantastic. I wonder why MS didn't do shit to promote this leading up to release.
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