I wasn’t ready for what God of War 2018 did to me. I’d played the original trilogy. I knew Kratos as the rage-fuelled Spartan who tore Ares apart with his bare hands. I was fully prepared for more of that. Then the game opened in silence, and Kratos said — quietly, almost painfully — “Boy.” And I realised this was going to be something else entirely.
The setup is deceptively simple: Kratos and his son Atreus must scatter the ashes of Faye, his wife and the boy’s mother, from the highest peak in all the realms. That’s it. That’s the whole premise. But within that simple journey, Santa Monica Studio builds one of the most emotionally resonant relationships in gaming history. Kratos is trying — desperately, imperfectly — to be a father. Not the monster mythology made of him. A father.
What struck me most was the physicality of everything. The Leviathan Axe doesn’t just feel powerful — it feels real. You can hear the weight of every swing. The combat is tactical in a way the older games never were, asking you to manage space, read enemies, use Atreus as part of your arsenal. And the whole game — start to finish — is shot as a single continuous take. No cuts, no loading screens disguised as door-opening animations. One unbroken piece of film.
I won’t spoil the reveal at the mountain top because if you don’t already know it, you deserve to experience it yourself. What I will say is that it recontextualises everything you’ve watched these two people go through, and it hit me harder than I expected. I closed the game and just sat with it for a while. That doesn’t happen often.
This is the game that reminded me games can be more than entertainment. They can be about something. God of War (2018) is about grief, about the cost of violence, about the impossible task of breaking cycles. It’s also just an incredibly good time to play. Those two things don’t contradict each other — that’s the magic of it.