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God Of War Ragnarok’s Immersive Mode Is The Way To Play

God of War Ragnarok is stunning, and if you want to truly appreciate all the detailed environments, enemies, and characters, this just might be the best way to experience Kratos’ latest adventure.

Folks, I don’t need to tell you how good God of War Ragnarok looks. You’ve seen the trailers. You’ve seen the gameplay. What I am here to tell you is how to truly appreciate Ragnarok’s visuals in all its glorious and godly detail.

The secret: Play in immersive mode.

Playing God of War without a HUD might seem a bit ridiculous, but Ragnarok, like 2018’s God of War, was designed with immersive mode in mind–at least to some extent. It’s more challenging, but if you’re a glutton for punishment like yours truly, then it might just be the best way to play.

So let’s start at the beginning. You can turn on immersive mode from the HUD settings in the pause menu. There are actually a few options here: default, immersive, and hidden. Default gives you the standard HUD. Immersive turns off the HUD, but if you swipe the touchpad, critical information will populate the screen. Hidden removes the HUD altogether.

If you’re feeling really confident you can hide the HUD entirely. However, in my experience, I preferred having it easily accessible just in case I needed to check the compass in an open area. Occasionally you may also want to check on a boss’s health bar because some battles can be quite long.

So what information are you missing out on by turning off immersive mode? Well, you can’t see Kratos’s health bar, enemy health bars, enemy levels, the enemy indicator, Kratos’s rage meter, the compass, companion information including Atreus’s arrow count, and text pop-ups. In theory, immersive mode removes all the extraneous HUD elements so you can focus on the oh-so brutal action in front of you.

Not seeing Kratos’s health bar isn’t as much of a problem as it may seem. When that red vignette starts to appear, your health is low. Either make some distance between you and your enemies or look for some green crystals to heal up. If you’ve been keeping Kratos well-equipped you might be able to take a few lighter attacks when the red vignette appears, but I wouldn’t take too many chances.

No enemy health bars are a bit tougher to get used to though. Especially when fighting tankier enemies. For most standard enemies, there aren’t any tells that a foe is getting weak. This means you just have to hack at them until the red finisher ring pops up or they just die.