Post-Game: HADES
Let’s talk about roguelikes. Come on a journey with me, Reading Friend.
The run-based genre has been a substantial fabric in our big gaming quilt for a while. They’re popular enough for multiple dedicated conferences, with a set of defining criteria called the “Berlin Interpretation.” That’s not a joke. You might be familiar with some of the recent hits: Dead Cells, Spelunky, The Binding of Isaac, on and on, cascading down into infinite, procedurally-generated mazes a-plenty.
Most of those games sit closer to being “rogue-lites:” roguelikes with overarching, run-to-run progression, and less aggressive forms of difficulty. They offer more approachable alternatives to the constant reset, usually by adding a drip-feed of “new stuff” into your randomized runs: items, enemies, types of rooms, or entirely new characters and playstyles.
You might be asking, “why all of this preamble, Dylan? This article is supposed to be about HADES!” Reading Friend, let me tell you why: HADES feels like the culmination of the roguelike design ideology, serving as a remarkable step forward for the genre. It’s one of my favorite roguelikes, and one of the best action games I’ve played in years.
“HADES
(Steam, EGS, Nintendo Switch)”
HADES puts you in the shoes of Zagreus, the maligned, misunderstood son of bureaucratic underworld baron Hades, and tasks you with one simple goal: escape the clutches of Hell and find your way to the surface. Across four gorgeous, lavishly detailed regions, broken up into fifty to seventy discrete rooms, you’ll fight wretched shades, monstrous hydras, and fallen champions of the mortal realm. Each of these realms ends in a boss fight, and a complete run will last, on average, about thirty minutes or so.
Developer Supergiant Games showcases every single one of their strengths from your opening run, establishing the stakes through Logan Cunningham’s gravelly narration before plopping Zagreus down into the pits of Tartarus. From there, an efficient tutorial introduces a handful of core currencies, as well as a potent plot twist: the gods of Olympus have heard Zag’s plight, eager to help him escape to their godly realm with Boons of their own. From there, it’s all uphill, as paths diverge and - eventually - you die, retreating back to the House of Hades to start your climb again.
It’s here that one of HADES’ core truths is revealed: a reactive, elaborate, and profoundly verbose narrative strings each and every escape attempt together. With each arrival in the House, conversations with its denizens shed light on their personalities and personal plights, side-quests in their own right. When you die in a particular way, Hypnos reacts accordingly, while Achilles lends advice as to how to avoid such a fate in the future. As you discover new boons and meet new members of the Greek pantheon, cthonic matron Nyx provides further insight into your own plans and the scheme to get you out of the underworld. Even after successfully managing to do so, there’s a lot of narrative to still uncover: an actual credits sequence doesn’t even roll until what felt like my tenth or fifteenth clear, and I’m still making additional runs with more of the story unfolding along the way.
The House of Hades itself serves as your hub and a treasure trove of between-run progression, and Friend: there are so many ways to progress in HADES.
You’ll build and customize additional rooms via the House Contractor - both in the House itself and in actual escape attempts - that add new mechanics and helpful stat tracking, putting multiple currencies to use and eventually offering the ability to convert them into others.
One of the Contractor’s projects leads to the Fated List of Minor Prophecies, a series of checklists and more obscure challenges that reveal themselves over time and offer upgrade materials for completion.
The Mirror of Night in Zagreus’ bedroom conveys a slew of buffs and options for the actual escape attempts, letting you steer the course of your runs in subtle ways. Additional lives, bloodstone Casts, or higher-quality Boons (among other options) add up to a very realized sense of progression as you move from run to run.
Keepsakes, earned by deepening Zagreus’ relationship with the gods of Olympus and the denizens of the House, earn experience and get stronger as you use them in the course of a run, with the unlockable option to swap them between regions of the Underworld. Use these to influence which gods will appear to offer boons, give yourself extra speed and strength, or a nice healthy chunk of extra life for particularly troublesome stretches.
Lastly, six different weapons rest just outside the starting gate, all capable of being strengthened with Titan’s Blood, and each with their own suite of alternate “aspects” providing radically different takes on their core functionality.
Oh, the weapons! From the longsword Stygian Blade to a straight-up gun (which the lore acknowledges as an inherently bad development), HADES’ combat is immediately approachable, weighty but fast: light and heavy attacks, a ranged “Cast” involving giant crystals of blood, and a dash-attack. To make things even crunchier and satisfying, each of these core attacks can be modified by godly Boons, with each Olympian leaning on a defined style of play. Some of the aforementioned aspects let you get wilder: an alternate, potent version of the bow lets you load your Cast into your basic shot, dramatically changing how you approach a given scenario. Another aspect of the spear drastically reduces your total health (and the effects of health-raising items in a run), but lets you leech a little bit of life with each hit of your spin attack.
With time, patience and multiple escape attempts, you learn what boon synergies work well in general, and what ones work for your particular playstyle. Ares specializes in delayed-damage Doom effects and swirling Blade Rifts, while Zeus’ lightning bolts arc and chain across fields of enemies, “jolting” enemies into hurting their comrades. Though there’s a dizzying amount of customization available, a single run is smartly constrained to a handful of potential gods. It never feels overwhelming to have to choose between these boons, and there’s a plethora of clearly defined tooltips for any otherwise confusing name or descriptor.
The most surprising, deeply appreciable thing about HADES is that it never feels like you’ve lost progress. A great run in a “traditional” roguelike that ends in some unexpected, blindsiding failure can sting, and leave you with next to nothing to show for it apart from forty minutes spent. When I die in HADES, I still get a little morsel of narrative every run. I get to pet Cerberus again, and hear the booming chides of Hades himself as I make for another quick exit. My collection of keepsakes expands and strengthens alongside my friendships and relationships with the myriad cast of illegally-hot gods, goddesses and otherworldly beings.
At the same time, when a run feels good, when you’ve strung together just the right balance of power and health, you feel incredible. Stumbling in to a great synergy (or being able to clearly form a build around an early-game choice) is so satisfying. A recent successful run had me leaning on my bloodstone Casts, which formed into frigid, laser-spewing turrets thanks to Demeter’s help. A series of complementary boons let me double those lasers, have their placement last longer and inflict a slowing Chill, which also happened as I dropped the Cast itself. The turrets kept enemies in such a fragile, lethargic state, that my gleaming, godly boxing gloves were able to swoop in and desecrate each and every last chamber. The result was my fastest escape yet, just a hair over the fifteen minute mark. Am I bragging? A little bit.
It’s worth mentioning that HADES handles difficulty very well. People who are new to or intimidated by roguelikes, but want to experience the narrative on offer, can find a toggleable “God Mode” that lets you play the game with inherent damage reduction that gets stronger the more you die, capping out at a staunch 80%. It’s not perfect, but it makes the concept way more amenable, and the fact that it’s toggleable means you can use it as a baseline or lean on it when certain challenges rear their ugly heads.
For folks who are looking for a sincere challenge, however, an initial clear unlocks the “Pact of Punishment,” a Slay the Spire Ascension-style difficulty grind that lets you customize the ways in which you want to amp up your challenge. Add more enemies per room, or give each boss a new slate of attacks and mechanics, each of which dramatically change the fights in question. Raise the cost of goods found in boatman Charon’s shop, or reduce the number of boons you can choose between each time you catch a god’s eye. Most importantly, each time you raise your Heat level via the Pact, you can unlock another batch of the game’s rarest boss-dropped currencies, giving completionists and challenge-seekers alike a steady, easy-to-understand difficulty curve.
HADES is a profoundly enjoyable video game. It’s dripping with style, full of smart writing, fantastic voice acting, and hours upon hours of remarkable little details. When the last enemy in a room falls, everything slows for the briefest second, and the battle music resolves down to a thumping heartbeat of a bass line, encouraging you to move on to that next room, to see what’s around the corner. It’s a hypnotic lull, and one I’m still engaging with on a daily basis. I want to see how the narrative resolves, how my friends and comrades in the House can see their own goals and ambitions brought to fruition. I’m still working to unlock every last bit of work the House Contractor has to take care of. I’ve deeply engaged with the Pact of Punishment, the first time a roguelike has really gotten me to delve into any sort of increasing-difficulty endgame mechanic.
It is, of course, a phenomenal game for people who like roguelikes and action games, but it’s also a stellar entry point for the genre. It leverages its narrative in a way that makes you feel like you never truly have a “game over” scenario, and the constant progression on multiple fronts is clever as hell. Every run moves you forward, and every step makes the prospect of escape that much more tantalizing.
Seriously: in the course of writing this, I went and made two escape attempts: one to get a handful of screenshots, and then a second one because it’s just too much fun. You should play HADES.
HADES: “Seriously Recommended”
HADES is available on Steam, the Epic Games Store, and Nintendo Switch.
Reviewed with a copy purchased from the Epic Games Store.
Over 100 escape attempts, with 28 clears and counting.
