People always say things like this but I have never heard it about games with less interactivity...
What do you think about Time Crisis?, or Tetris? or Point and click games?. People use the "its barely a game" argument to cast negativity when the discussion is about best graphics. In Hellblade 2, you control your character, solve puzzles, can die, have to time your attacks and explore.
the issue is more complex than just pure "interactivity". it's all about the design behind it all.
Time Crisis is an arcade game. arcade games need to be, easy to understand, have really satisfying audio-visual feedback by using flashy animations, and need to be challenging. all about motor skill and quick reaction times.
Tetris is a realtime puzzle game. all about getting into the flow of perfectly moving pieces, developing strategies how to place them, how to place unwanted ones etc. and you need to be insanely precise if you want a good score, so your motor skills are put to the test a lot.
Point & Click adventures are about solving puzzles. so the puzzles need to be fun and need to give you that "eureka!" moment. it also helps if the setting is appealing of course. Where do I go? which items to I combine with what? where do I use this? do I need to find a specific character, and ask specific questions to get past somewhere? it's just puzzle solving, and good ones will have fun puzzles.
Hellblade 2 does nothing that is in any way good, interesting, or gives the player any agency. most of the game is literally just walking. there is no real exploration because of how corridor like the leveldesign is. there are no interesting puzzles, just "match the shape"... and then like 3 "puzzle" types that essentially solve themselves and are purely patting due to how easy they are and how little options the player has to do anything wrong or miss stuff.
then there is the worlds worst combat system, that literally has a built in feature that makes you randomly fail parries to make the game more "cinematic". zero depth, feels like shit, zero variety.
they came up with 3 gameplay elements, all of which are the simplest most braindead versions of these elements you could have, and made a couple of pretty looking environments to put them in.
the game is purely a visual showcase and has essentially no other merits to it. in fact, the fact that it is interactive makes it worse than if it was simply a cool looking animated short film or something, due to how bad and devoid of player agency every gameplay element it.
and due to how insanely simple the game is, how non-interactive it is, it's not really impressive to have a good looking game like it. because again, being barely interactive and highly linear is exactly why tech demos always look so impressive. they made a tech demo and stretched it to be hours long. hence, it's not impressive on a technical level for many, me included.
What do you think about Hellblade 1?
same as Hellblade 2, but less shit somehow. the combat was less shit at least.
