I picked Hades up about a year ago and I just couldn’t get into it. 


And yeah, I know. It makes no sense. 


The characters are compelling. Our main character, Zagreus, is dry-witted enough to be funny, but not so dry-witted that he becomes one of those characters that drags the mood down at every opportunity, like that annoying bint from Life is Strange: Before the Storm. 


His conflict with his dad is something I’m sure many people with emotionally constipated fathers can understand and relate to, and as you play through the game, you watch his relationships with the entire cast of characters flourish and grow. 


A lot of the side characters don’t get much time to be fully fleshed-out, but I don’t really care: since many of them are Gods, I like seeing them as the caricatures they absolutely are - especially Zeus, who plays the role of the classic smug but loving uncle. 


The art style is incredible. The 3D models look slick, the use of colour and visual detail means every single character stands out at a glance, and every action they take is completely unmistakeable. Animations are exaggerated for the sake of having visual clarity: you’ll never mistake one movement for another, they’re all so diverse and unique that they’d never be confusing. I think that’s so important in an isometric top-down roguelike.


The music is super catchy - I know it’s Supergiant’s classic style and they’ve been doing it for years, but - in my humble, tasteless, and ignorant opinion - it has Spyro vibes and so naturally it was something I ended up listening to on Spotify when I wasn’t playing the game. Big up Spyro by the way.   


The gameplay loop is well-structured and well-defined. Hades’ gameplay loop is made up of - loosely - six stages: the House of Hades, your hub area; Tartarus, Asphodel, and Elysium, which are comprised of several procedurally generated stages with random varieties of enemies and loot; The Styx, the final stage, which is one hub area with five available routes; and Greece, where you fight the final boss - your dad - and, depending on your progress through the story, catch up with your mum before Zagreus is promptly ripped back down to Hell like a moth in the bath.


Combat is slick; it’s seamless and chill enough to be a game you can wind down with, but it’s also challenging - particularly as you layer difficulty onto it with the heat levels you can unlock after beating the run for the first time. It’s something you have to pay attention to and engage with, whilst also having smooth and comfortable fun. 


But for some reason, me and Hades never really clicked. 


I think it had a lot to do with my own approach to games. As you guys will know, I love trophy hunting. I like playing games as they are - I’d never play a game JUST for trophies, I still want to be entertained and I still want a solid experience - but trophy lists become my to-do lists, my measure of how much of the game I have played, and how much of the intended experience I’ve covered. 


For those of you that have trophy-hunted on Hades, you’ll know it’s a bit of a mess. There’s a thousand plates to juggle, boatloads of RNG dialogue to rely on, and some steps of some storylines require poo-poo grind. To take one step into Hades with the intention of sweeping up all those trophies is to just be overwhelmed.


It’s no fault of the game - but I’m not simpering enough to say it’s a fault of mine either. I see speed-runners get a lot of flack for playing games too quickly and not enjoying it. Suck my taint. People have fun in different ways and mine is through obsessive and neurotic box ticking, which was unfortunately incompatible with Hades’ gameplay loop.


At first.


See, about 9 months after my initial effort with Hades, I decided to give it another go.


And I was hooked. 


I mean, when I say hooked, I played an hour or two per day, probably five days per week. But for me that’s fairly extreme. The gameplay loop consists of runs you take through Hades, so the end of a run is a pretty natural end to stop for the day, which makes it easier to put the game down (I think). But as I began to unlock more prophecies - something given to you randomly, or when certain invisible conditions are met - I was suddenly given a to-do list.


And the wheels of Hades rumbled into motion.


I really struggle to fault this game, I really do. Everything about it is so masterfully pieced together, so polished, and yet still with challenge. It does difficulty so well - a system I actually much prefer to the much more renowned Souls series, whose difficulty system has really bored me recently. 


It’s a “pick your poison” system of difficulty, where you can increase heat - and rewards - by adding a series of different constraints to your run - enemies move faster, enemies have more health, enemies spawn in greater numbers, bosses have ads, etc. 


The random generation of weapons, boons - powers - and loot means every run will be different. You are forced to use every weapon and definitely every different kind of power - if not every single power - in the game, which, as someone who sticks to what they know more often than not, ends up being SERIOUSLY welcome. It is the only game I’ve ever played that’s flung me out of my comfort zone and I ended up having a really fulfilling time because of it. 


My main complaint would be the absolute drip-feeding of story - usually one or two lines of dialogue per 25-minute run, per character - but also how this can sabotage other side-stories. If a main character has story dialogue queued and side-story A, B, and C dialogues queued, story dialogue will take priority - which is one run. Then, if you really want to be focusing on side-story C, you might need as many as three more runs just to push that storyline on by one single step. Then you might arrive and they’ll be absent, or talking to someone else - at which point you then need to do another run. Sure, you can do suicide runs, but it feels a waste of time when there’s probably SOMETHING you can be aiming for on a single run, but still. 


I found it frustrating, especially with characters like Nyx and Achilles, who are wound up in my side-stories and consequently their own stories took upwards of 80 or 90 runs to finally get out of them.


I went into Hades wondering what the fuss was about. I struggled with it for a while - at least until I’d finished my first successful run - but once I got the ball rolling, once I knew what I was doing, I was sucked in hard. I wouldn’t say I loved it - that’s a feeling reserved for cheesy garlic pizza bread - but it became an experience I was fully invested in, planning out my strategies for, and talking endlessly about with friends. 


So I guess it has more in common with cheesy garlic pizza bread than I thought.