The World Serpent. The realm travel. The game expanding beyond Midgard and beginning to reveal the scope of what Kratos has walked into. The Norse pantheon is watching. Odin's design is present even when Odin is not. Kratos moves through this world as someone who has seen the architecture of divine power from the inside and knows exactly how rotten the foundation is.

Grief endures is the session's quiet insistence that the slaughter is not the subject. Faye's death is present in every conversation, in Atreus's questions about his mother that Kratos deflects, in the ashes they are still carrying because the peak is still ahead. God of War 2018 is a game about a father learning to grieve in front of his son, which is the hardest thing the game asks either of them to do.