Ninja Theory’s 2017 game Hellblade: Senua’s sacrifice is known for exploring people’s experiences with psychosis through a vision quest undertaken by Senua, a Celtic warrior in the early Middle Ages. It received high praise for its sensitive, thoroughly researched and audiovisually compelling portrayal of Senua’s plight – something the Ninja Theory team achieved through close collaboration with Paul Fletcher, a professor of psychology at the University of Cambridge.
Following a unique success like this is always a challenge, but perhaps especially so in the case of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, which was released this week on Windows PC and Xbox Series X, and is included with Game Pass. How could Ninja Theory bring players back into Senua’s experience of the world without replaying the first game – or sidelining or downplaying her plight? How could it raise the stakes for the character without undoing Senua’s growth, or succumbing to the “descent into madness” tropes that the first game had so conscientiously avoided?
The answer turned out to be very simple: let her meet and communicate with other people.
“We definitely didn’t want to go back to (the first game) and make it seem like we were resetting it,” said screenwriter and Performance Capture director Lara Derham during a chat with myself and Fletcher in the Cambridge office of Ninja Theory, which is a Polygon visited a few months before the game’s launch.
“She still has that sense of a greater sense of peace, a greater sense of opportunity,” Derham said. “But I see the first game as a very internal journey, very personal, and very focused on herself and what she has lost. And I think this game, while we still see the world clearly through Senua’s eyes, it’s more about interacting with the world around her, the people around her, and going a little bit more into the future.
This makes dramatic sense, but for Fletcher it was also a chance to delve deeper into a crucial aspect of psychosis that the first game hadn’t really explored by nature.
“I think what Lara and the team are doing now is exploring some of the pain of psychosis that may not have been so prominent in Senua’s sacrificewhat happens when your reality – your construction of reality – conflicts or coincides with that of other people around you,” Fletcher said.
One of the most prominent aspects of psychosis for some people is the constant narration of internal voices, which are characterized in the game as Furies. As Senua interacts with other people on her quest to track down some slavers in Iceland, a natural dramatic tension arises from the way the Furies react during conversations – sometimes encouraging her to interact, sometimes sowing seeds of distrust.
Image: Ninja Theory/Xbox Game Studios
Fletcher explains that this tension touches on one of the most fascinating aspects of psychosis – one that can even be illuminating about the human condition in general.
“I think one of the first things (about being human) is that we connect with each other through a kind of tacit understanding about the fact that we live in the same space with the same experiences and the same reality,” he said. “While in fact we all carry our own little environment with us – and I think that in psychosis that break is much greater.”
For people with psychosis, interacting with other people means bridging the gap between two (or more) completely different realities, which can be an enormous challenge. “That kind of split focus between this internal world and the external world can be very difficult to manage,” Derham said.
Fletcher agreed: “It’s a very tiring process to juggle it for people, you know. If someone still has these psychosis-related beliefs, but also hangs out with people who don’t share them at all – and in fact think they’re crazy – then there are all kinds of things they need to do. to suppress or hide them. And they also have to negotiate between the two somehow – to find a way to keep this cherished inner reality that they won’t let go of, while at the same time functioning within another.
That Senua could ‘nurture’ her own experience of reality is one of the most important lessons Derham and Fletcher learned from the conversations they had with people with psychosis while researching the game.
“The experiences, or voices and visions, (are) actually an integral part of the sense of self,” Fletcher said. “It’s not a symptom that’s just stuck on a person. People will often say, ‘This is a part of me. It’s my reality, it’s my experience, and you can’t just treat it like a… it’s not a tumor.” Sometimes the experiences are very rewarding and engaging, immersive and enjoyable; they don’t always suffer.”
Image: Ninja Theory/Xbox Game Studios
“Obviously, a lot of what Senua is experiencing is quite dark,” Derham said. “But every now and then there are moments when she feels a special connection with someone, or that the world seems to have a special kind of beauty in it. And I think those experiences are very positive. And that reflects what we understood from the people we talked to: that every now and then there will be a time when the world just looks a little brighter than it does for some of us.”
Exploring psychosis for the Hellblade games from a purely experiential perspective, rather than as a problem to be solved or suffering to be alleviated, also challenged Fletcher’s medical and academic perspectives on the condition. “The only question here, or the starting question here, was always: ‘How are you? How does that feel?’ And I think for me it has opened up a whole new conversation with people with a history of mental illness, which is very enriching,” he said.
After Senua’s sacrifice came out, Fletcher recalls being encouraged by what he saw as a successful effort to destigmatize psychosis and mental health issues in general. That’s still a hope he cherishes Senua’s Saga, of course, but now he harbors an even greater ambition: that the game can encourage every player to ponder a big metaphysical question. Perhaps the biggest.
“The fantasy I have is that people will think about the nature of their constructions of reality,” he said, “and how weak our ties to objective reality might be.”