One Of The Coolest Parts Of Hellblade 2 Is The Rocks

It shouldn't come as a surprise to me anymore that this generation of consoles are powerful machines and studios can just more easily disguise their witchcraft to create cool visual effects, but I'm still routinely dumbfounded. The latest example is Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, in which Ninja Theory has managed this incredible visual trickery with rocks.

As you're walking through Hellblade II's Iceland, you may notice some outcroppings that suspiciously look like faces. These are examples of protagonist Senua's psychosis tricking her mind into recognizing a pattern that's not actually there. If you choose to focus on these optical illusions, they'll shift and reveal secret tunnels for Senua to maneuver through. When I played Hellblade II on Xbox Series X, the transformation was seamless, mimicking (albeit on a grander scale) what it's like for your eyes to play tricks on you in real life. It's incredible.

"A lot of it came from speaking with [Bernard Wolfe Professor of Health Neuroscience] Paul Fletcher and the people with lived experience [of psychosis]," Ninja Theory VFX director Mark Slater Tunstill told me. "That's kind of a privilege for us; for those people to be open enough to talk about their experiences and what they've gone through, what they are going through. And listening to that, there's a lot you can take from it, but you get some sort of key themes and then you go, 'Actually, if that was happening to Senua, how would she perceive the world?'"Continue Reading at GameSpot


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