Hades

It took me a shamefully long while to figure out if this game's reputation is just massively inflated, if it's deserved and I'm just missing something, or if I've just played too many roguelikes to be fully impressed by Hades.

Don't get me wrong, it's a competently made game, but it's no Game of the Year, much less a 10/10. I think most of the reviews I've seen are correct in identifying that this game's strongest point is in weaving the narrative into the game - it's a fucking hard trick to pull off with a roguelite and they've managed to do it here in a way where "playing the game" and "progressing the story" feel linked, instead of falling into the trap of creating two systems that feel completely separate, as if participating in one means taking a break from the other.

Where I think it falls short, though, is providing gameplay that is interesting enough to carry you through the story. Runs in Hades feel much less varied than most other roguelites I’ve played, with the primary variation being the weaponry. The weapons are certainly different from one another, but on their own can only carry so much of the weight - most of the people I’ve spoken to have 1 or 2 weapons they simply do not enjoy using, and when you’ve only got 6 in the game, that has the potential to become a big issue. This isn’t counting the weapon variations, of course, which (with a single exception for a spear variant) tend to feel more like boons than meaningful modifications to a weapon’s gameplay.

Boons are relatively boring, unless you really enjoy status effects/DOTs - you can combine these to do some stupid damage, but overall no single boon ever got me pumped to try out my newly-modified abilities. The most exciting benefits in the whole game tend to be the Daedulus Hammers, which can actually change your weapon’s core moveset - these also have the potential to be underwhelming as some are straight number increases, but the potential to radically alter the way you approach the rest of the run is the kind of fun we should expect from the boons! Instead, we’re limited to an absolute maximum of two hammers per run.

Despite this, this is the best it’s ever felt to play a Supergiant game. Every impact feels like it has appreciable weight to it. Zag can feel a bit stiff and sluggish at times - I think this would be a little better if he were like, 8% faster and his dashes didn’t rapidly lose speed at the end. I suspect this is meant to make him feel like he’s skidding across the floor but it feels to me more like you’re dashing through mud. This is more of a nitpick than a real, significant issue though - everything moves so quickly that even with a single dash charge, playing Hades looks a lot like speedrunning a different game.

This is all to say the game does a lot of things well. I think this game has an obvious appeal as a roguelite that still provides some variation from run to run with decent narrative integration. A lot of attention was dedicated to making sure the core Hades experience never slips away as you progress in a run. I’ve always appreciated roguelikes for those runs where you end up with some ludicrous, gamebreaking bullshit that looks completely alien to the start of the run - Hades isn’t that. Come in expecting the wild gameplay modifiers you can get from roguelikes and you’ll be disappointed. What exists here is a competent action game that feels more like a top-down spectacle fighter - instead of memorizing combos you're adapting on the fly as your static moveset gains slightly new functions.

What this means then is that the roguelite elements strengthen the experience overall with the exception of the length of the narrative. You have to sink a lot of time into Hades to actually get the full experience because a lot of the flavor of the game comes from repeatedly failing your way back to your dad’s extremely cool house. It’s cool that Supergiant managed to cram this much story in, but this experience would be much stronger with either a shorter story or more varied gameplay mechanics to keep things interesting for the story’s full runtime. Making the story longer to account for the fact that you can play it this much seems to overlook that a lot of people will attempt to play until the story is fully completed - if people keep playing the game after the story is done then it’s a testament to the strength of the gameplay, just trim the fat!

I have a lot of gripes about Hades - I’m willing to admit that a lot of this is because I let my expectations get away from me, and I expected something other than “the Supergiant spin on a roguelite”. It’s still one of my most recommended games - for most people it’s a game you can pick up quickly, put down after a short play session, and if you’ve played anything similar Hades is probably a better game with a more coherent vision. Given that I’m sitting here complaining about a decent game “not being roguelike enough,” I’m starting to think it’s time for poindexters like me to go get a sunburn for once.