Hades: Game Review

Gameplay strategy and story spoilers featured in this article

Storytelling & Characters

Utterly enjoyable. There you go, review done. Oh, you want more information into why I think it’s so good?… Well, for a friend like you, go on then…

My dowdy self quote above there is as casual as the dialogue you’ll see between the protagonist Zag and the other characters in the game (save a select few such as Nyx), for the most part who’re companions or family members. When combined with the voice acting, the dialogue evolves to have a present day tone and I even found myself chuckling once or twice. The modernist pally family attitudes of the uncles, aunts, cousins and nephews complements the (seemingly mostly) British voice acting within the game, particularly Zag himself.

In Greek mythology, all of these gods are almost silent forces of inhumane elements of power, yet the pleasant juxtaposition of giving them all a first hand contact point removes the veil of mystery in an entertaining way as if you were watching the family of gods and goddesses communicate on Gogglebox (a British TV show about families with mildly interesting, yet usually mundane banter as they watch even more mundane TV).

The chirpiness of the characters (all save Hades himself - which his bitterness fittingly adds to his uniqueness) set the tone of the game for if a blind person were to listen to them all interact, they feel the light heartedness of the situation. Even Cerberus, the family dog who you adore and never fear, where despite the 3 headed cute beast is blocking the exit to Hell itself you fittingly never contest any authority with and simply district him with a bone wretched smellling sack of of food. Even death, the grim reaper personified as Thanatos is your old mate.

This is the right move, particularly for a stylised game, a classic family feud with Mum and Dad, almost a becoming of age trial for Zag. It has the enough lore to support all in game mythology extending to the lesser known aspects such as the ruling of the Titans between heaven and Earth. This is a roguelike not an embodied RPG, it bodes well with me that I’d never find an audiolog or book with lore which is never mentioned anywhere else in the game. The narrator wisps exist for additional flavour throughout the environments should the player choose to listen for a moment. The perfect amount of lore for me.

The game chooses it’s time in dialogue appropriately respecting the player’s time. Arguably the most encountered NPC in the game is Charon, who is the muted groaning shopkeeper. It could’ve been so easy for the devs to add waffle flavour text to him about each biome he appears in, and I’m glad they didn’t. I’d like to highlight the first boss’s narrative choice as I believe it’s a smart design. You meet Meg, one of the 3 Fury Sisters (which inadvertedly has a tone of the Poe Sisters in Ocarina of Time about it), for whom you can get to meet after defeating Meg. Similar to Charon, Alecto and especially Tisiphone aren’t as fleshed out narratively as Meg but their existence is warranted with recycled and modified mechanics from other enemies to support replayability as you’ll never encounter a boss fight as frequently as the first one. They’re also never allowed in the House of Hades; yes they’re that mental even the God of the Dead doesn’t want them knocking about, it makes sense from a production point of view to cut their presence.

Gameplay

Combat Style & Weapons

There are more optimal walkthroughs out there where you can min max the economy with pro strats on an insane heat (post game difficulty multipliers). This is simply my experience, preferred strategy and loadout should you curious.

This was my first win on run 22 with about 16 hours of gameplay.

You are slowly granted new weapons from the infernal arms at a fair pace allowing enough practice time to try out what works best for you. For me, I like to kite and keep my distance with ranged weapons, and so my early game revolved around the bow. I was happy with the Power Shot’s output of 70, whilst reducing my ability to be engaged in combat. Building on the ranged playstyle I prepared unknowingly for the final weapon, the Adamant Rail, unlocked at an affordable 8 keys. Forget it’s primary fire and exclusively use it’s special at a base of 60 damage for an AoE. This means my base was on average 120 or 180 per shot, all whilst being able to kite and dash away between shot cooldowns maintaining a high DPS.

Character traversal is a pillar of the character controller development where many variables are based around those laws. It’s a time consuming balancing act to find a default base that feels good with the scope of a buffed end character feeling like a god (with steady progression throughout a run). Being invulnerable whilst dashing aids melee strats such as Backstab . For me, dashing became the most used tool for me to stay alive as opposed to using it as a reactive ability. Using the Adamant Rail meant that Zag’s location nor line of sight nor had any influence (mostly) or how I would wear enemies down.

Environmental pillars become your friends, particularly with the 2 cylindrical ones when fighting Hades himself (remembering to dash through all pulse waves). To every challenging room I used my Geometry Wars looping strat of following an infinite circular path, adapted by double dashing between pockets of safety popping bombs.

A noteworthy mention goes to the Shield of Chaos, not only because it was dynamicly fun to play than a hack and slash weapon (albeit easily overun by chariots in the third biome), but because it was Chaos’ personal weapon.

Powerups

The fun begins when we stack powers together focusing on damage multipliers of Bombard with boons (core powerups), poms of power (level your boons up), and Daedalus Hammers (always pick without a doubt. Here’s an image to reinforce what you do anytime you’re presented with this situation).

From the hammer’s upgrades you’ll want Hazard Bomb to do +300% damage to an enormous radius which if caught in, damages you. Consider this negated as your play style allows you to be near untouchable with constant dashing (level up Greater Reflex). If you can pair that with Targeting System you’re doing very well.

Stick to as few deities in a run (ideally 2 for 20% damage Priviledged Status affliction perk). Pick boons which produce damage for your special, dash or cast pending the deity you get and level up those boons with poms. Max out a few from the same person and you’ll get a chance for a Legendary. Alternate boon improvements towards level 6 to capitalise on threshold gains.

• Chaos boons are my favourite type in the game. They’re an investment into your future as the curses wear off often after 4 encounters. If you can, take Flourish for at least an average of 50% damage, Eclipse when you smartly use darkness as a health resource with Dark Regeneration, or Soul which can save you picking up 2-3 hearts, meaning more boon upgrades you can have instead.
• Artemis is great for her critical damage benefits (that’s at least 300% of your base) and working up the casts to leave sunk into bosses.
• Dionysus gets them drunk with Hangover allowing for damage over time for the weenies you won’t be bothered to pick off.
• Demeter slows down enemies up to 40% with Chill allowing your targets AoE shots to land with a higher success rate.

If you can stack % multipliers efficiently and focus on damage over health gain, you can dish out what started off as 60-120DPS to 800-1800DPS all at a safe kiting distance. I didn’t use the call meter, I omitted it entirely in favour of my special.

Resources

In the interest of your time, don’t choose gems at the reward branch after completing a room. They are mostly a decorative currency. I have the same attitude towards Charon’s coin too as it’s not long term and should be reserved for food. I begin runs with the Chthonic Coin Purse and ditch it after the sister fight. The Old Spiked Collar is great early game, but damage over health is better when you stack it as you begin to breeze through Asphodel without it.

As aforementioned, always choose power unless you’re on your last leg of health. You can beat Hades on 200-250 total health (with a Death Defiance), meaning by mid-late game you’ll only want to pick up around 4-5 Centaur Hearts throughout a run. If you can score a couple hearts from a Thanatos encounter after doubling his kill count due to your insane AoE loadout, then you’re profiting on resource economy well.

Darkness fuels the Mirror of Night, which has alternative talents you’ll want to switch to being:

• Fiery Presence - As we don’t care about Backstab
• Dark Regeneration - To become a Darkness millionaire quicker
• Golden Touch - To afford Charon’s wares in late game runs such as in the Temple of Stx such as the Anvil of Fates
• God's Legacy - Duos are hard to come by, any % to increase their liklihood is worth it

The concept of using Darkness as health is a great way to earn a lot of persistent currency as you level up the mirror. Pair this with minor health producing opportunities such as the Harpy Feather Duster for 10 health drops at 6%, taking all Infernal Troves that reward Darkness and you should do well enough.

A final resource tidbit is knowing that you should always take ! doors, with Patroclus waiting before the Elysium boss fight to restore all Death Defiances with a Kiss of Styx Premium.

Level Design

At a healthy 11.38GB, as a predominantly flat shaded game (save for characters), working with a dimetric camera makes sense for tile reusability and has proved Supergiant success in the past with Transistor. Below is an image of the bones with repeating sprites as highlighted. The layering of sprites is complex enough to appear bespoke, with lighting and parallax silhouette layers of candles and pillars to break potential points of visual repetition. Comps are easier when working with a perpetual camera angle.

Within the gameplay space you’ll only find interactables, walls, traps or negative spaces such as pits or lava. You’re introduced to all concepts the game mechanics has to offer in the first biome in a fairly distanced manner. In the second biome the focus is on valid floor space, where lava will cause environmental damage. This is tested and mastered with the boss as he has 5 additional snake heads with very small pockets of space to briefly breathe in before you move onto the next one (with AoE bombarding you on top). The third biome densely packs traps which tests your ability to juggle multiple timings of microtasks (enforced with enemy self-revival if you don’t properly kill them). Other enemy type combinations such as suicidal chariots make this ever more tricky. The trials of the fourth biome are brief but are packed into a series of very small rooms. This is a good way to force players into close quarters and manipulate their behaviour on what are mostly vermin and satyr cultists. Enough to wear you down before Hades substantially if you don’t adapt your play style.

The character controller never feels frustrating when dashing due to the ghost mechanic of passing through any obstacle providing that the ending dash location is habitable space. With predictable enemy behaviour and clear attack cycles (with time as roguelikes require) your ability to dodge and wear down a room presents a challenge, which never makes you feel as if the game has robbed you due to some small tolerance not in your favour.

Visual Design

My very initial impressions of the art style were a little sloppy with any colour being available to use in the colour gamut. After experiencing and soaking in the game for some time I changed my mind. I simply hadn’t been exposed to this particular style for some time, and naturally I was skeptical of anything new as we do in psychology, hence why trends in fashion from clothes, media and food exist to appeal to the established market.

However, this style is used in eastern art where black is embraced as a hard shadow in addition to the typical outlining use case in western art. Here’re some examples. Grey doesn’t exist, as if a comic line artists handed over inked copies art to digital colourists to fill in. When you need to pair a game as metal as hell, gods and family feuds, with gameplay of a hardcore roguelike, knowing it’s stylised to compliment the contemporary theme, this becomes a fine choice.

Each biome has a distinct palette and theme from starting at home with the crypts of Tartarus, into the belly of hell with lava in Asphodel, then into the gardens of Elysium of where noble souls of hell live craving more death in a Roman like amphitheatre. The journey physically makes sense all connected by the River Styx. As you approach closer to the mortal realm you begin to see the cogs and machines which keep hell ticking, with richer metallic materials and reflections with grandeur, purple and gold complimentaries.

Which segues nicely into the use of colour which certainly isn’t a subdued palette, featuring chaotic flecks of random colour which are so vivid they took me by surprise (as highlighted above), and quickly began to accept. Fundamentals are still in place such as the backgrounds being lighter and desaturated with interactables, enemies and characters having the most saturation. The heavy use of black acts as a stylistic warden allowing the contentious vividity of the game to exist, for without it, they’d be a lot of noise fighting for the attention of the viewer as the inmates clash with everything on the screen. Due to the scale spacing of the environments to the player, readability even in the deepest and most chaotic of combat, the inmates are still kept in line.

The environments follow an austere complementary schema such as Elysium here using red for key elements. Usually dappled light has a noise to it and lights the character dynamically as they pass through it. With the vast majority of lighting in Hades, it follows the harsh lined ruled of implying block shading with the light having a dodge tool feel, increasing saturation and vividity rather than revealing more of the albedo to the material. This vividity technique is used frequently in stylised games overextending what happens in reality.

What also works well is that in this Temple of Styx chamber the lighting has gone from a beige to a burnt orange, with no concern for HDR or or overexposure. Forms wise, having enormous thrones, chunky pillars and floor patterns compliment the modularity of the tileset, with no concern for any detail smaller than a fist.

This hard edged rule follows true for VFX too, with linear smoke trails on candles (with an element of jagged chaos), embodied with a jelly-wave based hard heptagonal shape, subliminally supporting 777, instability and other hellish concepts. Nice to see a vertical gradient used here to imply the attenuation.

The character portraits are gorgeous pieces of art that would work great as duochromatic inked pieces too I reckon. Here, Eurydice has a large ration of her skin and canopy covered with muted greens, with yellows to assist and imply autumn, with orange-reds being reserved for tertiary highlights such as earrings, tattoos and her acorn. Slight chaos like the environments of purples and blues on her accessories tell me that this is a Hades piece of art. Usually when you see a non block colour filling which isn’t a shadow and implies a highlight such as the teal silver laurel strip on her abdomen, or the golden UI frame on the right of the shot, is when the artist wants you communicate that the material is a metal. Highlights are used sparingly as it’s easy to detract from their quality when overused and creates unwarranted noise.

Audio

You can tell when a studio has hired an experienced musician who understands the requirements that the game needs to emote and can expend the resources to make it happen. Naturally, the final boss fight has to have a metal soundtrack (with a phase 2 mode to it), with NPC interludes having their own themes fittingly well too, feeling the raw fingers slide along the strings of a guitar knowing it’s not a computerised reconstruction. I’ve praised the voice acting a lot, but as voice over work is often left until latter phases of the project, the script writers had the right amount of content to get through enough runs without repeated voice lines after 16 hours of gameplay, and without it feeling like an artificial afterthought.