Senua battles a phantom in Hellblade.
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Hellblade’s woman hero is a Celtic badass with a huge, trope-slicing sword

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Senua has a mental illness, and she carries a huge sword. That makes her very dangerous.

She’s the heroine of Hellblade, a new indie game with triple-A production values from Ninja Theory, the Cambridge, United Kingdom game studio known for its sword-fighting titles like Heavenly Sword. The game takes the usual fantasy plot and turns it upside down by adding a strong female main character.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.