The long-awaited Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 just came out on Tuesday, and fans quickly caught on to one of the game’s best features: its photo mode.
We knew going in that this Xbox console exclusive would have a photo mode thanks to a post from Ninja Theory on X (formerly Twitter) in March. The studio also posted its own screenshots, which predictably look stunning. They also show off some of the mode’s capabilities, including a variety of angles with wide shots and close-ups.
Digging into the mode at launch, you can see how many features Ninja Theory added. Not only can you take photos at any time, but you can adjust the tint, the focus, the aspect ratio, the light source, Senua’s placement inside the photo, and more. There are even settings within the settings to adjust the intensity of things like the light and filter. All of this extends to cutscenes. As far as we can tell, you can take a photo in the middle of a cutscene and change just about everything you can to a regular screenshot in-game, including the angle and the lighting.
It’s very granular and, thankfully, it’s easy to use. Just hit up on the D-pad if you’re playing with a controller and you’re there. While photo modes in other AAA games have also presented similar features, none tout Hellblade 2‘s level of photorealism, at least not yet.
The graphical fidelity, plus all the settings means that people have been playing around a lot with the photo mode, and the results range from artful to realistic to downright stupid. Here are a few that our writer Tomas Franzese took for his review.
And here are some examples from across the internet.
Photo mode in Hellblade II is easily one of the best. It packages together existing ideas with refinements of its own. It's setting some standards.
The seamless transition from cutscenes to photo mode is one of the more impressive bits about it, too. pic.twitter.com/jnb7SAAEjC
— Aaron Jason Espinoza (@TheAgentOfDoom) May 21, 2024
I just can't with this photomode, absolutely love it
byu/Elryuk inhellblade
Look, if you didn’t want ridiculous close-ups, you shouldn’t have put that feature into the photo mode.
