Developer Ninja Theory Publisher Xbox Game Studios Format PC, Xbox Series (tested) Release Out now

To say that Senua’s Saga picks up where its predecessor left off is both accurate and wildly misleading. In a narrative sense, this is a direct continuation: Senua might have called a truce with her Furies – the whispering voices representing her psychosis – but she’s not ready to suspend hostilities with the men who destroyed her home and killed her partner. Allowing herself to be kidnapped by slavers, so as to get closer to the raiders upon whom she hopes to exact revenge, her plan goes awry when a storm batters their ship and she finds herself in a fight for survival.

What follows is a nightmarish sequence of shrieking, primal violence on a desolate, rain-lashed Icelandic shore – a bloody, muddy battle that, from a technical standpoint at least, feels like a true generational leap from the original. You might be moved to wonder if this is the best-looking videogame you’ve ever seen.

Accompanying that thought – fittingly, given the nature of the protagonist’s condition – are other, less positive ones. Anyone watching will marvel at environments and characters that look alarmingly real, photogrammetry and performance capture combining to create an illusion of live-action footage, enhanced further by the absence of HUD or UI elements. As a player, however, you’re acutely aware that your role in all this has been limited. This is, in fairness, just the beginning of the game; you may think back to The Last Of Us’s opening (which likewise deftly masked the fact that your inputs were mostly cueing up the next part of a tightly scripted sequence) and assume you will have more to do later on. But before long you realise this has more in common with the likes of The Order: 1886 and Ryse: Son Of Rome. Like those games, Hellblade II is the kind of linear, story-first adventure designed primarily to showcase the technical capabilities of its host hardware – the main difference being that it’s arriving at the dog end of the Xbox Series lifecycle.