I am so happy that I picked this game up.
Last year we saw the release of The Last of Us 2, Spider-Man Miles Morales, Final Fantasy 7R—all of those games could be contender for game of the year until a little game by the name of Hades showed up and, unfortunately for those other games, blew me away.
Looking at the short lists of GOTY contenders, it is clear many publications hold Hades in high regard. If you ever played Bastion, Transistor, or Pyre you would have a clue as to why. Supergiant Games have been on an absolute rampage with excellent narratives and addictively satisfying gameplay loops. Hades is no different. I have not had to scratch the “one more match, oh shit it’s 4 AM!?” itch since my peak Rocket League days. No other “rogue-like” style game has kept my attention for this long, and as of this post I am sitting at over 55 hours of game played in two weeks.
Hades centers around the prince of the underworld, Zagreus. Zagreus is attempting to escape to explore the world above and meet up with his estranged family in the Greek pantheon. While this is a simple setup, the plot evolves into much more that I will not get into here to avoid spoilers. Being of the underworld, dying in this game is a standard fact of life. Each death then provides a few more breadcrumbs of the narrative and relationships of the involved characters. Each death is beautifully woven into the story.
The story drip is perfect—each run ends the same way—with Zagreus’ terrible demise, but after those deaths, Zag gets to check in with all his friends, enemies, and family in the underworld before getting right back to it. I found the story portions to be perfect in terms of length and dialogue skipping was kept to a minimum as these small story beats are quite enjoyable. If the story and voice acting were not up to par, it would suck because…
The gameplay loop is perfect.
Starting out with the trusty blade, Zag quickly finds access to several historic weapons that slayed the titans. These weapons boil down to the sword, spear, shield, bow, gauntlets, and shooty-boomy-gun. From there, each gun can have 4 different aspects which radically change the attacks and outcomes of each weapon. Each run of the game feature Olympic boons which power up your various attacks. As the boons are random, and interact with each weapon’s aspects in different ways, each run provides the chance to try out new builds and to see what works best. After many clears, the game opens a way to increase the challenge of each run through demonic pacts which can be stacked to provide a monstrous challenge. A favorite is the pact that changes the bosses’ companions and attacks to keep things terribly interesting.
The runs range in time but average out to about 30 minutes each. My personal best is just shy of 20 minutes. It all boils down to how fast you can clear the mobs and the bosses of each area. For the record, my first clear was in the early 20s of my runs– I am now sitting at over 70 runs and I am not done seeing new dialogues or close to finishing the demonic pacts.
So to sum it up—lately my gaming in the last few weeks has included some nightly Rocket League or Cold War matches, but always ends with at least 1-2 runs of Hades.
Play this game. It looks beautiful on PC, but also looks simply fine on the switch (if not a little soft). Ideally? Buy both versions as the game supports cross platform progression.
