A few years ago Epic Games showed off what the next generation of video games could look like with an Unreal Engine 5 demo. It showed that the bleeding edge of tech could achieve near-photorealistic imagery, but it didn’t feature any meaningful evolution in game design.

It’s just a demo, of course, real games would feature evolutions in both, we thought. It took a few years, but Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 realizes that vision and vindicates my concerns about chasing that impossible goal without being backed up by engaging gameplay.

The RTX 4080 was able to render above 60fps at 1440p, and that increased to over 100fps using frame generation. I never ran into any bugs or performance issues, with minor frame time spikes while traversing through environments.