I’ve been playing Hades for a few weeks now, and MY GOD it is a good game. So far, I’ve only managed to beat the game with Coronacht (the bow) and Malaphon (the gauntlets), but I am working my way to the final fight using the Stygian Blade. As fun as the game is, I’ve had to set it down a few times because some of the topics central to the game really do make you think for a while.
The core story of Hades revolves around Zagreus, the player character, attempting to battle out of the underworld (which is ruled by his father, Hades, who doesn’t like this) and meet his mother, Persephone, on the surface. The game takes place over four distinct sections (Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, and Styx), each of which is further divided into multiple rooms, which have random enemies and which you need to clear to progress. Hades is a roguelike, and the first one I’ve played, and part of the game involves improving your character’s skills, traits, and parameters after each run using the materials you’ve obtained. But herein lies the interesting part of the game – the game expects you to die.
You are going to die in Hades, and you are going to die a lot. But what’s worked masterfully into the story is the fact that this death is expected, woven down to the character of Hypnos, who meets you every time you respawn and gives you some wisecracks about the enemy you died to. Your father Hades repeatedly tells you of the futility of your mission, citing the fact that you will keep dying before you make it to the surface. Unlike other games where your deaths reset your story progression and timeline, Hades takes your death as just another fact in the game, something you are supposed to accept in the same way every other character does.
This endless cycle of witnessing your own demise starts to call into question some of the core aspects of playing the game, though. If the game itself is telling you that your actions won’t end up with you winning, do you really want to keep going? (Note: experience may vary, I personally want to keep going just to prove Hades wrong) But as you keep going through Hades, you start fighting in different ways. You change the way you approach certain enemies, try different blessings and potential boosts that will slowly but surely push you to iterate towards a better path. And you may not win immediately, but maybe you make it to another level, to another section of the game. Once you see your improvement, the fact that you can do better, you start to want to do better. In this way, Hades becomes a game not about how skilled you are, but about how much you can adapt to your environment and plan for what you know is ahead.
And so your deaths begin to feel less meaningless. You begin to think that instead of dying because you can’t make it to the surface, dying is just another step in your plan to make it to the surface. You begin to account for failure in your gameplan, you expect that you will not succeed, but that eventually you will hit it big. You learn that playing to win is a long-term goal, not one that can be accomplished in two or three tries (unless you play the game professionally or speedrun).
Then, once you win, you question what’s next. You wonder where to go from here, now that you’ve surmounted the seemingly impossible challenge. Hades is a story-driven game, and once you complete the story, what do you do next? Well, the genius of Hades has an answer: you keep dying. Once you beat the game, you die again, and you are left with more to pursue. Slowly and surely, you crawl your way to the surface again, and once again, you meet your inevitable demise. But the same challenge over and over leads to boredom. So, the game puts the onus upon you to challenge yourself further. It introduces conditions, ways in which you can boost the challenge you face both by improving the enemy and by handicapping yourself. It lets you continue to work for what you want. You’ve won, yes, but there’s so much more to do, so much more you can improve.
They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. But when you begin to adapt your strategy after going through the same sequence multiple times in a row, that’s learning – that’s evolution. And Hades is fundamentally a game about motivating yourself to evolve.