‘Hades’ makes every act of narrative discovery feel like your own, even if you’re following a tidy script behind the scenesīut once you do reach the surface, the game makes it clear that you’ve learned only a slice of the overall story. None of this becomes especially pressing or required, save a few mirror upgrades, until after you’ve escaped. One of the more valuable resources is a drink called Nectar, which you can gift to virtually every character in the game to win their affection, earn equippable items called keepsakes, and eventually unlock hidden quests. You also have the aid of Nyx, your underworld matriarchal figure, who grants you access to the Mirror of Night, a list of permanently upgradeable skills and attributes that make you stronger every time you return to your bedroom and gift it a purple currency called Darkness.
It’s a handy primer on the Hades universe that helps you keep track of what you’ve learned, who’ve you met, and what your relationship to that person or quest item is. Your guide to the narrative is Achilles’ Codex. Each Olympian, with whom you have a distinct relationship, will chime in with clever anecdotes and even take note of which other gods you’re drawing power from - whether they have a history with or hold a grudge against them, for instance. Then you die and wake up back at dad’s house, destined to do it once more.Īs you move through the cycles, characters will comment on your specific failures and bosses will remember you and note your weapon choice. As the immortal son of the god of the underworld, a strapping young guy named Zagreus, you and your underworld cohort of sympathizers band together to help you run away, all just to spend a precious few minutes on the surface talking to your mother and learning more about the nature of Olympus, your origins, and your relationship with your father. Trying a new escape approach is literally baked into the story itself. Hades is a roguelike with hot gods to kiss and kill Hades turns death into a chance to try something new (There are, of course, many achievements, collectibles, and other tasks to strive for when you’re not progressing the story.)
And Supergiant encourages players to keep traversing down its many winding narrative branches time and again by laying out rewards for trying new combinations of weapons, upgrades, god boons, and difficulty modifiers. Yet while most games are content on building an endgame of achievements to strive for or monotonous tasks to fill out a quest log, Hades contains a huge, sprawling story that continues well after you’ve “beaten” it for the first time. Each time you kick off a run offers you the chance to use different weapons, swap out skills, and build a comprehensive arsenal of power ups, which in Hades take the form of “boons” gifted by one of eight Olympian gods who are best described as a weirdo cabal of your distant relatives. As a roguelike, it is naturally designed to be played over and over again. Hades’ endgame is the most cleverly designed interplay of story, reward mechanisms, and replayability I’ve seen in any game of its kind. That’s arguably Hades’ greatest achievement: taking what is traditionally a repetitive feedback loop and loot grind most RPGs don’t bother to dress up or obscure - what we call endgame - and making it a consistently surprising narrative vehicle. Those who’ve played the game in early access know this is a roguelike that deserves 100-plus hours of your time, all without ever feeling like it’s repeating itself. Its endgame is a masterfully designed interplay of story, reward mechanisms, and replayability