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[nenjin]

Currently in Early Access on Steam and EGS.

Hades is the latest game from Supergiant Games, of Bastion, Transistor and Pyre fame.

It's got all the hallmarks of their games: beeaaaaauuuuutiful art, rich quality voice acting, fun combat and engaging stories.

Hades is a roguelike action combat game. You play Zagreus, son of Hades, as he attempts to escape his father's dumpy old underworld to join the rest of the gods of Olympus in the sunshine.

You start in a hub at the heart of the underworld, where your father Hades holds court with his various retainers, notable spirits and a few Gods and demigods. Once you're ready, you slip out and assault Hell itself in a bid to escape to freedom. When you die, as the son of a god, you don't really die. You just respawn back in Hell, to be chided by your annoyed father and his exasperated staff, who wonder why can't you just be normal and happy.

If you've played Transistor or RUINER (another game that they didn't make) the combat will be pretty instantly familiar. You run around with the keyboard, and left click to attack with your weapon. Dashing makes up the majority of movement in the game, as you use it to avoid enemies, dodge through their attacks, deal damage or deflect projectiles.

The game itself is a series of randomly generated chambers, most of them with enemies in them. Avoid the various traps in each chamber, beat all the enemies and progress on until you encounter a boss fight. Beat the boss, and ascend up through Hell to a new area with new enemies, new traps and a new boss. Kick enough ass and you may yet see sunlight.



In Hades there are two methods of getting upgrades.

1. is the bog standard roguelike method. Each chamber in Hell has rewards for you. Some of these are cash to buy temporary powerups or life replenishment at shrines scattered around each level. Some of them are straight boosts to your health. Some of them are items that are useful when you return back to the hub. By and large though most of them are upgrades that belong to one of the various deities of the Greek pantheon. Each diety has several upgrades that affect how your weapon or spells behave. Zeus has lightning themed attack upgrades while Hermes has Dash based upgrades, and Ares has "Doom" themed upgrades...you get the jist. When you die and awaken back in Hell, all these upgrades are gone.

2. there's several meta-upgrade systems that persist between games. You earn "Darkness" which can be spent at a mirror in your room to buy ever increasing levels of different skills that you can use in your next run. There's "Gems" which you can give to the Contractor to build new stuff in the hub area, some of which has a gameplay impact and some of which are purely cosmetic. You can also unlock different advantages for use in different areas of Hell you fight through, like Healing Fountains that may or may not show up during your run. There's "Nectar" which you can give to various NPCs to unlock trinkets for use in your runs, and "Keys" which you can use to unlock new abilities to buy at the Mirror OR unlock new weapons for Zagreus to use.

Hades leverages its story as the reason to continually replay the game. As you play through multiple times you'll meet new NPCs along the way, each granting you various boons, and each little bit or challenge you take on nets you more resources to eventually unlock more NPCs, and more of the story behind why Zagreus just won't stay home.

Like most Supergiant games, the voice acting is superb and the story draws you in along with the art. At times the game's story seems almost like an anime, with plenty of tropes and references to reinforce that perception.

Combat is fast and flowing and chaotic, with projectiles flying all over the place, traps galore and ever escalating challenges. As indicated, there's oodles of upgrades, unlocks and levers to yank on to see new stuff.

I've only put a few hours in to the game but it's grabbed me pretty thoroughly. It's not finished yet but the next big content update is scheduled for June. No final release ETA yet.

If I have one complaint it's that the game's enemies aren't as interesting or well designed as everything else, they tend to go for the cutesy, bubbly, visually indistinct look.

And if you're wondering why you probably haven't seen much of this game before, it's because it went to the Epic Games Store first and has been there a while receiving not a lot of attention, and I think some Steam users were boycotting it based on that decision. For me, I've been watching it for a while but wasn't going to move on it until it came to Steam. Well, it's here now and it's pretty damn good.

[Folly]

I wanted to like this game. Combat is engaging, and the story kinda interesting.
But ultimately there is just not enough variety or progress between runs. Fight for 30-60 minutes, die, repeat. Try out a different weapon or unlock a perk that maybe gets you 10% further on successive runs, makes things barely interesting enough to justify one or two more runs, but ultimately I didn't put very many hours in and didn't feel satisfied when I gave up and moved on.

[nenjin]

Fair. I had the same reaction to Bastion. Story and voice acting was great but there wasn't enough going on to make me playthrough. I'd agree that the variability per run isn't as high as I'd like but I think the combat and the upgrades make up for it. I found some enjoyment in maxing out some upgrades for a weapon and finding that just one move became really broken.

Maybe that won't be the case in another 10 hours or so. But for what's there I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

I think what tickles me the most is it's basically the same Dark Souls raison d' etre but wrapped in a new package that works with the world they've built. Escaping out of Hell and dying a bunch is just a delicious inversion of the norm to me.

[Nighthawk]

I've been watching this game with anticipation for some time. Supergiant's previous titles were always very cool, but they never quite nailed the gameplay for me. Bastion was fine but also rather generic as top-down action goes. Transistor was stylish and different, but the Turn() mechanic felt like a game of cat and mouse and I got tired of it real quickly. Pyre was a very weird and interesting take on basketball, but ultimately there wasn't enough going on and it didn't feel challenging.

Hades looks to be the challenging, blood-pumping combat I'm looking for in a game, and seeing the overwhelmingly positive reviews thus far in Early Access have me believing that this might be the first game of theirs that really sinks its teeth into me. Here's hoping.

[ZeroGravitas]

I always meant to make a thread about this game. Still in EA, but it's fucking fantastic. Already put like 100+ hours in, and it's great.

It's worthwhile even if you just play until you escape once, a few dozen hours. at $25 it's a great deal.

[ZeroGravitas]

I wanted to like this game. Combat is engaging, and the story kinda interesting.
But ultimately there is just not enough variety or progress between runs.

in all seriousness, i will say that a lot of the important combinations don't become obvious until later, so unless you're paying a lot of attention to the systems, it can seem like you're just flailing around. eventually you start to get some vastly more effective combos and make it farther or to a higher heat than before.

this is all beyond the normal roguelike progression of learning enemy moves, boss patterns, etc.

also, the character interactions are so damn thematic. it's great stuff.

[nenjin]

I just lost to Theseus a couple runs ago. The bastard.

There's just a lot to like, and the combat is addictive once you start getting familiar with what the weapons can do. It's got that "just one more run" appeal to me.

Combat doesn't seem all that complex or nuanced at first, but after a while of just simply mashing guys in to paste you start noticing things. Like bashing guys in to walls, or cornering them are actual mechanics to be exploited. Traps can be exploited. Deflects can make a huge difference.

It's the kind of game where fighting the urge to panic and spam attacks and dashes can help you. The cooldown on your dash is so brief that you honestly can use it for movement almost entirely. But it can also put you in a lot of bad situations if you're overzealous or just forget that you can walk when the situation calls for it.

It's also got like, various entry points of difficulty. You can take as long as you want to beat any room by default, or place extra limitations on yourself in various ways for better rewards. Like using a Keepsake that rewards clearing rooms fast, or getting Chaos boons and really toeing that risk / reward line. I just had a run pretty much doomed from the outset because I took the Chaos boon that was like +398% trap damage for some buff. I thought "I can stay out of traps pretty easily, this should be no sweat." Go in to the Megara boss fight and proceed to repeatedly dash in to spikes taking 20% of my health off a time.

For me it's a little like Binding of Isaac where you have a sort of go-to setup you know can take you so far. Starting out, when you stray from that setup that is working for you, one run can seem vastly harder than another. Like, Divine Dash makes the game so much easier to handle because you can just dash straight through a lot of attacks without a problem. But then you go into a run without it....and start taking damage left and right.

And you just kinda gotta play for a while to get the lay of the land as far as all the different boons go, what the weapons do and what the upgrades do for them, so you stop flailing at the upgrade system and start targeting what works. Like, I thought your Casts were pretty useless because I never took any upgrades to it. But once I realized you get the "spell points" back as soon as an enemy dies, and tossed like 2 or 3 fruity upgrades on it.....it got pretty damn effective. So far I can't decide if it's better to just lay in to one kind of attack with as much as you can, or generally spread yourself out among the different upgrades. Like Binding of Isaac, I think seeing how broken you can make something is part of the fun of the game. I compare it to BoI but I don't want to give the impression it mixes and matches all its stuff as well as that game. It's more focused and prettier and weeby here, but more limited in scope.

And there's just this really nice synchronicity between repeatedly throwing yourself at the challenge and what the story is about, like Dark Souls. The story and the theme itself becomes a motivator for keeping at it. This is a game I want to beat just on principle. You can't tell me what to do DAD!

All in all pretty nice. The only thing I'd poo-poo so far is that I wish the enemies were cooler. But they're not. They're just kinda cutesy and lame.

Not gonna lie, I kinda wish now I'd waited until the full release so I could take it all in at once, but I'm enjoying it quite a bit as it is. I'm sure once I hit the end of the current build, since it has no end game I'll put it down for a good long while.

[ZeroGravitas]

One of my first escapes was a cast run, actually. Yeah, at first it seems bad, but then it's like... wait, I can use the Ares cast upgrade with some of the Artemis ones, and what's this, there's a Duo Boon? Oh and add some of the +cast legendaries on and, wait, casting can be my main source of damage? Crazy.

It all builds together very well, and there's so many in-game tools to review and show stuff off, like the new archives and the post-run summary. Just insanely well polished game.

I'm taking a break until release myself, but even if I never played again, great purchase.

I just lost to Theseus a couple runs ago. The bastard.

First time I got to Theseus, I was like, how is this fight possible.

A few weeks later I was doing Theseus with the boss upgrade pact and was like, nope nope nope, this is so much worse.

[Sindain]

Ooo we got a thread for this now? I really really like this game.

I'm a pretty big fan of Supergiant's previous stuff (though I didn't really get into Pyre) so I had my eye on this for a while, and bought it shortly after it was released into EA. Played a good 100 hours, beat the game 30 or so times. Got to the point were I felt like I did pretty much everything, so now I plan to start with a fresh save at full release. Haven't played since a bit before the Night update.

I feel like the game does a pretty good job of providing variety between runs. Between all the different weapons and boons there's tons of builds to mess around with. Furthermore they have pretty good variety with the enemies and the punishment contracts you progress. If they continue to add more stuff I think the game will have plenty of content to get through a few hundred hours at release.

And the writing is pretty fantastic! not that surprising since it's Supergiant, but its a bit of an oddity among roguelikes. One of the reasons I'm looking forward to restarting at full release is to go through all the story again with it complete.

One of the things I don't like is very much a personal preference thing; I'm really not a big fan of all the meta-progression. I prefer my roguelikes to have minimal meta-progression, like Slay the Spire, FTL or most traditional roguelikes. This is something that really ruined Children of Morta (a similiarish action RPG roguelike), with it's meta-progression it felt like farming was more impactful than actually getting better at the game.
One of the first punishment contracts I turned on was the one that limits you to 2500 darkness, and I largely ignored the weapon upgrades outside of unlocking the variants.
I also feel like the game should just give you some of the darkness upgrades at the start, as I think the game is just less interesting without some of them (like back stab, boiling blood, or privileged status), though I guess starting with nothing is nice for learning.

A few weeks later I was doing Theseus with the boss upgrade pact and was like, nope nope nope, this is so much worse.

The Theseus boss upgrade is amazing, really inspired design that.

[nenjin]

I feel like the game does a pretty good job of providing variety between runs.

I think Binding of Isaac kinda ruined us on this front. There's so much variability per run in that game (IMO) that most other roguelikes have a hard time keeping up with it.

with it's meta-progression it felt like farming was more impactful than actually getting better at the game.

I've actually had this feeling too with Hades. Like, was I able to get to the top of Elysium because I got better....or because I had two rezzes, 40 more health, double dash.....I'm sure you can beat the whole game with no upgrades, but I sure as hell am not capable of that.

[nenjin]

Well after 14 hours according to Steam (it's probably more like 12) and, interestingly, 14 attempts, I have escaped.

I feel like I should spoiler why I won because it almost felt like cheating:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The Fists of Malphon are just straight broke, yo. I've used all the weapons except the rifle now for at least a few runs, and the Fists by far have the shortest TTK and recovery compared to all the rest. All it took really was two Daedalus upgrades, one for health on kill with the special, the other +Damage and AoE, and then pretty much any other boon that increases special damage or crit rate, and it was two shotting most everything up to the Styx. Health stopped being a problem. My Hermes keepsake just kept leveling up, I think I was 14 or 15 by the end. Cleaned out Troves with almost perfect scores, did Chaos boons no problem, yadda yadda yadda.....my very first time using them. Divine Dash stopped being as useful because it was literally faster to just upper cut guys to death and regen the HP than it was to dodge around.

It definitely felt like that moment in BoI when you happened on a truly broken combo. But at the same time, the whole weapon is just that good and you can use it every time. I think with just about any upgrades this thing destroys, way faster and better than every other weapon. To have struggled up to this point to beat Elysium (I did get all the way to Hades with I think the Shield prior to the Fists run, so I would have done it eventually) only to beat the game in 34 mins felt.....kind of anticlimatic. I think this thing needs a nerf. I know I was just saying that the fun is comboing up something broken, and I'm sure you can make any weapon broken with the right combo but this thing took like, zero effort to turn it not just in to a win, but a total steam rolling. I didn't need to learn practically anything about how it works, I just hit special and watched dudes take 200+ a swing.

Not sure I like the Pacts of Punishment. On paper it's fine, but it immediately reminded me of Bastion and why I kinda veered away from it. SG really seems to like listy challenges where you have to use all their weapons. I spent a lot of time on those challenges in Bastion before they kinda burned me out. It's not quite the same deal here in Hades, but when I saw the Pacts screen somewhere inside I gave a little instinctive groan.

A very enjoyable 14 hours though and I like that the story telling and what not continues on beyond the end of the game. And the extremely well-narrated 4th wall breaking as they try to make it work. It's definitely got a weird vibe though, after you beat Hades.

[Iduno]

Bastion didn't have enough going on for me. Transistor seemed better about that, but they made a lot of decisions that punished experimenting with different combinations of weapons/powers. You can only make changes in certain locations, and have to go through several battles dealing with underpowered equipment if you choose poorly. I quit when I couldn't beat the first boss because I had tried some weird power combination that I couldn't make good use of, and the save point was after having changed powers. I would have to completely restart the game to try again, and lost interest.

[nenjin]

You can only make changes in certain locations, and have to go through several battles dealing with underpowered equipment if you choose poorly.

There is a small amount of that in Hades. You can only change "Keepsakes" i.e. trinkets at the start of each level in Hades. Keepsakes are fairly minor in their usefulness to the whole run, so if you forget to change it out it more of an "oh shoot" rather than an "oh shit." Likewise you can sell or overwrite some boons that you don't want anymore or that aren't working for you. As for the weapon you choose, it's set for the run and they're not, like, leveled up or anything to the point choosing the wrong one dooms your run. More it's which weapon you jive with.

But yeah, Bastion is one of those games I enjoyed but I didn't feel the need to finish because as many people have said "there just wasn't enough going on." In Hades, I feel like there IS enough going on, relative to your tastes of course. Individually no one part of it carries all the water for the game. By itself the Darkness upgrades aren't all that special. By itself, the Contractor upgrades aren't that interesting. By themselves, the Nectars and the Keepsakes they earn you aren't earth shattering changes to gameplay. But taken as a whole, each run offers a lot of stuff to go for and choices to make. "Do I get that Cthonic Key because I need 6 more to unlock a new weapon back home, or do I get a Boon instead to make this run more successful?" "Do I get that health upgrade or do I go to the shop instead which may have a health upgrade and some other stuff?" The game does a good job of presenting you with appealing options and asking you to make the hard call what's more useful to you at this moment. Sorta like when BoI Afterbirth+ made some treasure rooms offer two options instead of one. That's basically almost every chamber in Hades.

[Aoi]

I pretty much feel the opposite about Hades vs Bastion; I liked the play in Bastion and I would've put up with a lot to listen to the narrator through to the end (I think I ended up with like 95% completion, including challenge stuffs). Hades... much as watching the characters bounce off of each other is a delight (particular Megaera and Dusa), three wins later I don't really want to touch it anymore, despite a ton of stuff still locked.

[nenjin]

If Hades didn't have the mixing and matching of weapons, moves and Boons then I might be satisfied with a few wins and calling it a day. But I like what they've done vs. feeling somewhat underwhelmed by Bastion as a game (narrative and execution withstanding.) Bastion kinda had something like that, but much simpler to the point after trying it just once I felt like I'd seen all there would be to see.

I would like about 1 or 2 more levels per playthrough in Hades though, which I'm lead to believe will be the case by full release.