As the looting and puzzling become exhausting, the 30-hour main plot begins to stale. Ragnarök offers many scattered scenes of engaging pathos, enabled both by stellar motion and voice performances and by that no-cuts ethos, showing you these gargantuan, mythic personalities at their most vulnerable. At one point we see Kratos divest himself of all the fancy armour you’ve heaped on him and contemplate his own much-abused body in silence, cradling the scar on his abdomen. Elsewhere, Freya dissects her past marriage with Odin in one of many generously written sidequests, and there’s a promising, albeit swiftly curtailed subplot involving Thor – another patriarch visiting his emotional constipation on his family.
But there are just as many false crescendos and annoying Marvel movie quips, and the plot marshalling it all is a bog-standard MacGuffin hunt, culminating in a surprisingly (and, to be fair, deliberately) muted assault on Asgard. If the no-cuts direction brings you closer to the cast, it also produces a narrative that has more plateaus than peaks or troughs – not so much a story as a meandering, open-mic podcast for traumatised divinities, endlessly chewing over the same cautionary nuggets about violence breeding violence while you swat eyeballs or pillage yet another sumptuous blind alley. The combat is beefy enough to carry you through the slower stretches, but even when you’re lopping heads off dragons it can feel like what you’re really killing is time.
