Hades is a Hell of an Indie Roguelike

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus managed to cheat death several times before being condemned to rolling a rock up a mountain for all eternity. He really thought that he too could get away with it, ridiculing the gods and living forever. It's amazing that he was able to pull it off. as far as he did and probably even had a little fun doing it, but despite his cunning he was eventually caught by Zeus and his punishment in the underworld never ceased. Every time he thought his goal was about to be reached, the rock fell into waterfall down the mountain again and the torment would begin again.

The most ingenious part of Sisyphus' punishment is that there was always a faint glimmer of hope that it would all end eventually, but that hope was dashed at the last possible moment every time. Anyway, this is a video. about

hades

yes, glory goes to the winner

hell

o everyone and welcome back to another new episode of the completeist where we don't just win the games, we complete them. Hades is a very special game because at our india land 2020 charity event last year I reached the milestone that allowed everyone to determine which

indie

game I would complete for the show and Hades was that game and what game it is so today it's promo time Guys, I'm excited to announce that Indyland 2021 will take place in full force on September 24th. until the 26th with a kick-off event that will take place on Sunday, September 19 for several days we will be playing freedom planet 2 shovel knight pocket dungeon paparazzi 30xx renane guys there are more than 50

indie

games that will also be joined by the developers who worked on them In addition to having some exclusive world premiere games on streaming, I'm very excited.

Mark your calendars and watch indie land 2021 on twitch.tv the completeist and just like last year, you too can stream and enter directly to win not only this amazing t-shirt, but challenge coins and other exclusive items that only streamers who participate in the campaign and raise money can earn. All that information is in the box below as our campaign officially launched as of today, so let's raise some money for dementia research. While I was celebrating amazing indie games, but let's get back to Hades now in all transparency, I was hoping to have Hades completed by December of last year and, well, you know how Prometheus had his liver eaten once a day as punishment for giving fire to humans.

Have you ever heard of that? Did you ever hear about the time the YouTube personality who was cursed to play

roguelike

s every year because he was trying to do something good with his life, isn't it cool, let's get started, Hades, was officially released last year in September 2020. That winter, the game couldn't. It stopped winning awards, it was an absolute awards juggernaut and the super juggernaut game developer should be proud, but the journey to these laurels was a long process because while it may seem like Hades came out of nowhere, that's not the case. Big picture, what is Hades?

A

roguelike

, isometric action game, hack and slash dungeon crawler with a Greek mythology theme, players control Zagreus, the handsome son of Hades, the lord of the underworld, Zagreus is on an impossible quest to escape the four levels of the underworld and see the surface to do so. He will fight every cursed soul that stands in his way with a variety of infernal weapons and abilities and along that journey he will die a lot, but death is not the end and that aggression must begin in the house of Hades with each defeat he throw. He faces the challenge in hopes of realizing the dream of escaping from it, unlike other games of this genre.

Hades focuses relentlessly on making the player feel like they are constantly moving forward similar to the Dead Cells I completed last year. Watch my video. Don't worry, I constantly felt like I was progressing even when I was defeated, unlike Dead Cells, I actually cared about the story and what was happening, but I'm getting ahead of myself to talk about Hades, let's take a look at it. story

hades

is the fourth game from super giant games a bay area studio that has apparently never released a serious flop they have only made four titles but what a catalog of bastion transistor pyre and now hades now i completed bastion in 2015 and although I've only touched on the transistor empire.

I can say with confidence that no one else is making games like Super Giant and there are a few reasons why let me tell you I don't know any of these people personally. This is simply based on observations from interviews and Of course, the excellent no-clip documentary about Hades Super Giant is a fairly small studio with a bastion of staff retention that recently celebrated its 10th anniversary and was made by a team of just seven people, all of whom stayed with the company and eventually worked in

hell

, there's an astonishing consistency between Super Giant's titles. I think a lot of the quality comes down to the philosophy of the studio.

Super Giant is one of the most sought after places to work in the gaming industry because of the way they treat their staff. There is a focus on employees taking care of themselves not only physically but mentally. The company focuses on sustainability. This takes the form of a lot of little things like not receiving work-related emails on weekends and requiring that employees take care of themselves. the staff take 20 days off a year something that caught my attention was that super giant is a studio that doesn't make crunches, this is surprising when seeing the games that hades faced at the game awards and other shows. hades was made by a studio that cares deeply about the well-being of its employees and I think that alone is worth celebrating greg cassaven the creative director of supergiant games has said that every new game the studio makes is a reaction to their games previous hades came after pyre and although the games share a narrative theme of escaping purgatory, they explored that theme completely different gameplay pyre is a kind of fantasy sports game, but hades is an isometric action game with a lot of different weapons and abilities to experiment with amir rao the head of the super giant studio says we were ready to have a game where you fight some guys that hades didn't It didn't come out of nowhere, the game had enjoyed over a year of access anticipated in the epic games store.

The super giant is known as a studio with a unique development process and with Hades, the studio wanted to pull back the curtain and give players a taste of what development looked like by asking for feedback from players, this early access program back and forth was a great success. Players loved having early access to a new Super Giant game and Super Giant was able to polish and polish and polish until Hades shined brightly. Hades was the first time. The studio created a game with early access features and Cassavant himself had said that the process was so successful that it will likely affect how Super Giant releases future titles.

What I've been playing on Switch since last fall is tuned just like you would. I don't think so, it feels like a supergiant created hell with the intention of erasing the weaknesses that plague other roguelikes. There are still heartbreaking moments of loss when a great streak ends in defeat, but death always seems to lead to something new, even if it's as small as a funny dialogue even though the threat of starting from scratch is ever present, the pennies eventually giving players the tools to influence their careers in unique ways. I know the game just recently came out for PlayStation and Xbox and apparently the dual sense has haptics. feedback and magical controller lighting when interacting with the Greek gods and goddesses, but I wasn't about to restart the game from scratch just for a list of achievements and some fancy controller antics.

What I played on the Switch is the same extremely well-designed game minus a handful. of technical bells and whistles, but regardless of the platform you play Hades on, you will have a great time because not only is Hades incredibly fun to play, but there is also an ocean of completion to swim in, so when I began my journey to complete Hades. I came to understand the immensity of what was presented before me. Roguelikes are always huge, but Hades really feels like it could be a game that will last forever. Its completion is built into the very fabric of Haiti.

Zagreus meets Athena. She is an Olympian relative separated in her first escape. He tries to get her to give him a powerful blessing, but she is only the first of many gods who want to help him. I soon met Ares Aphrodite and even Zeus himself. There are 10 gods who provide blessings and knowing them all was absolutely necessary. Each deity offers many. of useful perks to choose from, but only three at a time, which meant seeing each perk. I would have to get lucky over the course of several races. Furthermore, at first there was no guarantee that he would see the same gods or goddesses.

During a run, there are a total of 190 booms, including duo ones, which wouldn't even appear unless you had the right combination of two gods, and remember that none of these buffs carry over to the next run. I can only bring a certain coin back to the House of Hades after death, this is not a bad thing. I felt excited by the promise of newness, as I would be playing Hades over and over again to get to the surface. Each new blessing led to new strategies to use in battle. and with thousands of combinations available, it would be a lot of racing before you could experience them.

The entire structure of Hades is divided into two main parts. There's the House of Hades, where Zagreus can talk to npcs and play with menus like the mirror. of the night where Zacharias improves his abilities. I think of the House of Hades as the quiet narrative section and then it's the actual racing or escape attempts part where most of the game happens during a race. Zagreus clears the chambers by fighting enemies and bosses who accept blessings. from visits from the gods to item shops and basically doing everything in his power to not die, although the attempts to escape are not very smooth, there is still a lot of narrative during these heavier sections of the game, plus, Haney's It's a game about choices during each run.

I had to make dozens of decisions that would all play into each other. Best of all, every choice had an influence on the ending. Choose which chamber to enter next after clearing the previous one. I was almost always faced with options. Would you go after the blessings of a specific god or choose? I'd rather earn darkness or gemstone coins that can only be spent in the house of Hades on cosmetics and upgrades or maybe I'd go visit an NPC like Eurydice or Petroculus to earn increasingly powerful rewards for that specific run and deepen our relationship to Basically the future went back and forth between going as far as possible during one run and then doing everything I could in Hades' house before doing another run, this meant I spent a lot of time with the house's contractor, an npc with A Huge list of cosmetics that I would eventually have to buy, all with precious stones and diamonds.

This list of products offered by the contractor constantly expanded the more I played and eventually they even sold me the entire soundtrack of the game, all 30 tracks to be precise. I played whenever I wanted now, the contractor also sold me the faded list of minor prophecies. This is essentially a roadmap of smaller objectives to constantly work towards during races, things like finding every Olympian god who reaches the surface with a certain weapon and defeating 10,000 enemies over time. or winning a fight against an amazing secret boss several times in a row fulfilling each prophecy earning huge rewards that I would then turn around and spend on other npcs.

There are 55 prophecies in total that were slowly revealed to me throughout the game when I arrived. certain thresholds when I wasn't scanning the things the contractor was offering me I was figuring out how to gain more darkness to pour into the mirror. Early upgrades like an extra dash or the ability to resurrect during a run don't cost much darkness first, but to max out the mirror I would have to gain over 35,000 darkness in total, this just scratches the surface of what I had to do to complete Hades. You'll notice that I've barely talked about the game itself.

Know? Part of the Hades game. I knew I had to buy everything from the contractor and the mirror. It also had an increasing variety of weapons to upgrade, but this all adds up to finishing the game, like starting at level one and beating the area boss. etc, etc, until I surfaced, after all, Zagreus isn't just trying to escape hell just to earn cosmetics and complete the giant underworld codex in some menu in this entire game, although it's about doing the same cycleand again. It's full of urgency, yes, it's an incredibly intense action game, but there's also family drama here.

Zagreus and his father Hades have an extremely conflicted relationship, something I can instantly relate to. Zagreus is tired of putting up with the abuse of his sad father, Hades. He's proud of his job, proud of the fact that it's impossible to escape the underworld, but Zacharias is absolutely sick of being made fun of or bullied, so yeah, it's fun to go through the list of prophecies and see the little things I need him to know about. busy me, but in the back of my mind I was always trying to escape the golden cage that Hades built, damn it, get out of my way dad in myths the burning fields of asphadel are reserved for ordinary souls these souls They are trapped in asphodel to which they cannot ascend elysium and are not heinous enough to be punished in the depths of tartarus, but are tormented by the simple fact of being trapped for so long.

That was me, I felt trapped and couldn't see any way out while completing this game. For a painfully long time I was in a bit of a rut with Hades, but this was all due to my focus on completing all the tacky things to spend money on for every character I could meet and relationships I could find for every trinket I could find. I won at working to upgrade every awesome weapon I could unlock and upgrade, none of that mattered unless I could actually beat the game because at heart Hades is a dungeon crawler, it doesn't matter how much time I spent in Hades' house , I spent much, much, much more time in the four levels that make up the underworld of this game than I have ever played. a lot of games like this helped give me an edge.

Zagreus has four main actions, a basic attack, a special move, an organized throw with limited ammo, but after some help from the Olympians, the variations and combinations begin to completely change the shape of the game. plays, it took me a bit to learn that almost any combination of gifs is viable if you know what you're doing at the beginning, although I was obsessed with gaining as much darkness and gemstones as possible during the first few runs instead of choosing cameras that I would take to blessings that could help me, you know, win fights. I'd look for a coin I could spend around the house, and I managed to master many of those early cosmetics and skills in front of the mirror, but at the cost of being strong enough to do so.

Until the end of the game, I found myself getting through the first two areas with relative ease and then getting completely trampled in Elysium, so I had to make a change in the way I played Hades instead of playing for money. I had to learn to play. win sometimes these kinds of things happen when I try to complete a game I get a little lost in the maze and I don't understand the point, but it is necessary to do everything. Meanwhile I was too focused on completing other tasks, the point is after I finally started focusing on progression in elysium, there is a big obstacle called Theseus and losing to this is really demoralizing.

Sometimes I'll start a race, get a promising set of boons, and get trashed in this boss fight within seconds. The third boss is actually two. bosses theseus the hero of odysseus and asterius the bull of minos aka the minotaur is a wild couple if you know anything about greek myths side note did anyone else have to read and internalize all the greek myths in high school like i did I? american upbringing thing or strictly a southern california thing now i'm not sure now i'm curious let me know anyway the point is these guys are brutally hard to beat and it started to feel personal and don't get me wrong it's a good fight against a well-designed boss, I even appreciated the irony of Theseus receiving a blessing from a rival god once he loses half his health, the Greek gods were looking to undermine each other in such a canonical way that it makes a lot of sense that if Zachary has started to approach the emerge with the help of a god that another god would see that and use Theseus, the champion of Elysium, to crush Zagreus and take down that god.

In both the story and the game, it works, it's just devastating to lose to an apple like that, not hysteria, he's a Sweet guy, Theseus, man, I grew to hate that guy, but like everything else in Hades, eventually I figured out the patterns that were presented to me and learned how to overcome them, dealing with the final area, the temple of Styx is a piece of cake compared to elysium and those. horrible butterfly orbs and of course at the end of styx is Hades himself as the final boss. Hades is incredibly epic, he is strong, relentless, he taunts Zagreus.

Losing to Hades is humbling, but I never felt upset when he defeated me. I try to take those initial defeats as lessons in hades death is not the end no matter how miserable his demise zagreus always emerges from a pool of blood in the house of hades he is no worse off every aspect of the game is based on death even Progression Story beats and relationships move forward When Zacharias dies The game wants you to return to the House of Hades to see what's different. I came to appreciate the slight changes in the house each time I was sent back after a while.

I didn't even mind listening to hypnos give me dumb advice, but I wanted that victory because when a player finally beats Hades, that's where the real game begins. I've played enough roguelikes to know that the end of the game is just the true beginning. Defeating Hades for the first time grants Zagreus access to what he always wanted: surface and the chance to visit his mother Persephone, but after a few brief moments, Zagreus is called back to the underworld and the house of Hades. . It's a heartbreaking story and also indicates the next phase of the game after that first fight against Hades every time thereafter. run asks zacharias to raise the temperature to a certain level fulfilling the punishment pact.

Now the pact is basically an optional menu that I can enter before returning to tartar where I can activate different difficulty modifiers, each activated modifier adds more heat and If I wanted better rewards, I had to turn the temperature up higher and higher after each victory, so not only was the heat a factor to deal with, I learned that there was more history to learn and also beating Hades wasn't the big reveal I thought it would be. be persephone asked me to visit her again but the only way to get to her was to go through hades again turns out she would have to beat hades 10 more times to see that true ending that's not 10 more attempts it's 10 more victories and each the victory it would be much more difficult because of the pact to be clear i didn't have to fulfill the pact to uncover the mystery of zacharias ancestry i could have opted out of the pact stuck on what i knew would work to get past hades and i just tried to replicate that 10 times more, but I still had that nagging feeling of wanting to be more efficient, so I turned up the heat as I worked to figure out why Hades lived below and why Persephone lived above and what that meant for Zacharias.

It doesn't seem like much, especially since I already achieved victory once, but there was so much ahead that I started to feel that tension. I didn't want to become indifferent to Hades because I knew I would spend hundreds of hours. playing it, but the longer this game stretched before me, the more I appreciated what Hades was trying to do. You know, I often feel like I'm in a purgatory that I've created for myself with these completist videos, so as not to sound broken. record here, but there's almost always a moment where I tell myself what the fuck I've gotten myself into when I see the road ahead of me, but with Hades this felt a little different because even though there were hundreds of tasks that do each and every one of them.

It was so meticulously designed and so tied to its completion, but I could never be mad at it. Elysium may still be part of the underworld, but it's also a sort of eternal reward. With the punishment pact active, he could finally earn enough rare items. that would help me complete the character arcs and max out my weapons the more time I spent in Hades, the more developed the characters would become. Not only did the Olympians I developed relationships with the residents of the House of Hades need some love and Attention also at first I could only give nectar to these characters and have limited interactions with them, but earning the rarest ambrosia could unlock much more so when I was gifted, but it wasn't like I could store up a bunch of ambrosia and give it to him entirely in Once, Hades set a specific pace by only allowing me to have one or two conversations per visit to the House of Hades, no matter how much I wanted to. find Dusa, the monstrous but adorable housekeeper, and give her all the gifts he had won during the battle.

I didn't have to be patient like I said before, progression is tied to Zacharias' death, either during a race or his eventual death after escaping, speaking of death, this is probably a good time to mention god mode. God mode is the Haiti version. accessibility option instead of an easy mode where Zagreus is invincible or something. God Mode increases Zagarius' resistance to damage by approximately 20 percent, as long as he is active with each kill that damage resistance increases by two percent. Now God mode is a wonderful feature. and doesn't prevent players from seeing important story beats. It's there to help players get over the hump if they start to feel burned out by the grind.

There's nothing to be gained by maxing out that damage reduction, which caps at 80 percent, I experimented. with this as a tool and in some ways it reminded me of assist mode in celestial, more ways to see the end of a story is always a good thing the more death I experienced, the more I went to see relationships develop relationship clues in hades. of similar social links in Persona 5, where every gift of nectar or ambrosia advances that track, almost every character has a relationship track, and the way relationships progress is really excellent. The characters are well written, funny, and honest if you're a fan of Greek.

Myths, most of these relationships will ring very true, although they feel like they have a more modern feel. Zagarius's twists, as the player character obviously has a front-row seat to everyone else's business, but also brings others together by watching Achilles and Patroculous reunite in the Afterlife is a beautiful story that I felt like had a hand in every character let alone every relationship feels incredibly strong thanks to the excellent writing every step of the way, completing relationship clues felt like a reward in itself, but there were material rewards there too. Additionally, maxing out some relationships earned me pets that I could then summon in battle for surprising results.

Look at this derpy little mouse. All thanks to who would have thought that death itself would have such an adorable invocation. Something I loved was that sometimes these npcs would appear during races and also seeing Thanatos during an escape attempt feels like an old friend who just arrived unexpectedly. Well, he tries his best to kill everyone on screen, but it's still a pleasant surprise and friendly competition and I've been saving up. Until now, but part of the reason I never got bored of this game is the stunning art direction on display throughout. The Gen Z art director is at the top of her game.

Here the portraits of the characters are sumptuous and full of details in life, even in the smallest. Interaction stuff like Skelly having a coin in his mouth to indicate that he could pay Carron's fee is something I only noticed after dozens of hours. I keep seeing new details in whatever chaos has happened. The Z style is immediately distinguishable and seeing how her art has remained incredible from bastion to this is incredible, in addition to the art, there are bold corpses, the music is incredible, a driving force towards completion. I love that part of the finishing process was purchasing each song from the house contractor so I could listen to it whenever I wanted.

I wanted a special shout out to the song Good Ridance, which has three versions in the game that are equally excellent and I'll never forget the triumphant, blood-thundering song that plays when the credits roll, God, what a rush, and speaking of Corb, he Learning that it's the voice behind Zagreus himself and Skelly the training dummy, I was blown away by the voice acting and the overall musicianship on display, I loved that completing it required me to see almost every combination of blessings. working in specific combinations to obtain duo blessings, it was something unexpected. he delights and helped me appreciate the structure of Hades even more.

Some combinations like the Aries Aphrodite combo I would never have imagined would be so amazing and powerful, butthat list of prophecies prompted me to try something new in other roguelikes. There is always potential for stagnation. Fortunately, Hades does. Do everything possible to combat this and push players towards completion. There are only six weapons, sword, spear, shield, bow, gloves and of course gun but each weapon has hidden aspects that change the way that weapon is used and there were often rewards for reaching it. the surface using specific aspects even If I didn't feel particularly skilled with a weapon, there would sometimes be a buff that granted additional darkness for choosing it.

Best of all, the weapons have unlockable hidden skins that hint at a larger universe outside of Hades. Myths and folklore from around the world are clearly folded into hell and it never really feels out of place maxing out every weapon with titan blood, another currency that is only earned by turning up the heat higher and higher is difficult and time consuming, but I found it satisfying because it meant I had mastered the underworld relationship clues progress and weaponry adjustment was incredible. Reading great writing and listening to fantastic music felt like a great reward for completing it.

In fact, I came to appreciate that watching the full story of Zagreus Hades and Persephone required me to beat Hades ten different times. Another permanent status change where Persephone actually returns to the underworld after living on the surface for years. After that, there's an extra secret that ends a lavish party with all the Olympians where I had to max out every relationship and receive a blessing from every god. I really felt like I was being taken to a rich and rewarding experience of completion, but of course I encountered things that would break me and remind me that even though I was having a heavenly time, I was still in hell, in hades, the temple of styx.

It is a place, an entire kingdom, not just a river, but in classical mythology, Styx is part of eternal suffering, the further down the river a soul is transported, the longer and more severe its punishment, although Hades, the game does everything whatever is within your reach to be fun and interesting. and taking the last few steps towards completion proves that I must have done something wrong in a past life because the endless grind almost broke me during one of my many races where I was trying to earn titan blood or diamonds or whatever I have increased. the heat to eight when i defeated hades i realized that there was a statue in skelly's chamber a small reward for accomplishing such a difficult feat it was then that i realized that there were two other statues that were covered the implications were clear there rewards to be I won if I kept the heat up, so I did what anyone else would do: I increased the heat from 8 to 16 without increasing it at all and then, because you know there's something wrong with me, I did it again from 16 to 32 .and you know I took that heat like it was a day in the sauna.

There is no easy way to sweeten this heat of 32. It is a miserable experience to earn the The statue at 8 degrees is not so bad after so long as I dumped it in Hades, it would be fine. 16 degrees is challenging but rewarding, at that point I knew what blessings I could use to my best advantage and they were trinkets and pets that would give me the best advantage by that I mean it's time to pay homage to Poseidon aka brother Seiden , a perfect storm of incredible character design, impeccable vocal performance and absolutely operational gameplay mechanics if I started running and early on found Poseidon special, which grants invincibility and overwhelmingly powerful attacks for a strangely long time.

I knew I could probably get out of that final area. Those are strong thanks to Bro Seiden. You made that 32 Heat Skelly statue shine even brighter. I may have pushed myself towards the limits of luck and skill for that statue, but the game is extremely explicit that 16 heat is more than enough, in fact there are no achievements beyond 16 heat, it's actually very refreshing to supergiant do this, you know players love to say that "I've gotten all the achievements or trophies and most likely series 16 will be tough for an average player with a series 32 and anyone who breaks the top series and yeah , you can take the series beyond 32, but there's nothing more to gain than rewards and bragging rights.

So, like God Mode, the game is designed for players to push themselves as they see fit and after. As the second statue is revealed and the achievement chimes ring, players may feel like they've done everything they needed to do with Hades, but that's not enough for me, there's one last set of challenges that seem small but are. They are actually the most time-consuming aspect of the entire Hades experience. After beating the game, after gaining access to every chamber in the House of Hades, after learning what makes it all tick, there is another shadow. to interact with the resource director you will find in hades room a harmless character who gives zagreus badges for some resources when you first encounter this tone there is a short flavor text that explains zagreus's new job as a specialist in security it does nothing more than confer insignia.

The characters do not recognize the insignia and they serve no functional purpose. There are 50 badges to earn and they cost more and more. Obtaining titan blood, diamonds and ambrosia may seem difficult, but in reality it is darkness that became my enemy to obtain the invisible rank. in batch number 50, I would need a total of at least 325,000 darkness and this in addition to spending darkness for other things in the rest of the game, my entire identity was focused on farming darkness, as opposed to higher heat runs where I focused on the ability. and figuring out how to achieve a victory against Hades by any means necessary, the only thing I cared about was how much darkness I could gain during a race.

This was the last thing I worked on in Hades and it turned this dungeon crawler into sort of a laser focused experience rather than experimenting with different gods blessings weapons trinkets and pets everything I did revolved around darkness what a real statement Gaining the most darkness became a matter of maximizing my boons from Poseidon and Chaos. Both gods have boons that increase rewards gained from clearing chambers, including boss fights, so instead of gaining a measly 10 darkness per cleaning a chamber, you could earn significantly more, but only with the right combination of blessings, this beautiful and varied experience became a repeat memory.

I went back to the way I played Hades during my first few runs and forced myself to make decisions that would maximize my rewards rather than choices that would practically ensure victory. It became almost paralyzing, although I appreciated that there were some things I could do to gain more darkness, the mirror of the night, my beloved. The skill tree had had thousands of darkness poured into it throughout the game, so to get those last few darkness mods, I respect Zagreus with a cathode key and retrieve what was in the mirror. I did this as often as I could.

I spent dozens of hours working, but being able to respect and reclaim the darkness saved me some precious time. What really started to plague me was that all the other currencies in the game - gems, keys, nectar, diamonds, titan blood and ambrosia - can be exchanged for each other at varying rates. In the restored hall there is a hellish corridor that will happily exchange currency for another currency but no darkness with the exception of some limited time offers darkness that I had to earn with blood, sweat and tears of frustration I wish the super giant had given the runner Some way to fix this currency problem but again the game leaves very clearly I was only doing this for myself, the resource manager, and the ranked badges are intended for those who have literally done everything in this game and want a reason to do it.

He comes back to it over the years. It's a routine, but a different kind of routine than the difficulty of working with different levels of heat instead of being burned alive over embers of impossible difficulty. Haney becomes a very different game. The contrast between these last two. The challenges couldn't be more different and I approached them differently. I accomplished the high-temperature races by putting my head down and raising the temperature as high as I dared, and by earning the resource manager badges I basically turned that sprint into a marathon. I would get up early, work for an hour or two to earn a couple thousand darkness, and continue with my life just as I did with Hyrule Warriors for many months.

This may sound boring and I thought it would be too, but in the end. It wasn't that bad rethinking my expectations is something I've had to learn to do several times throughout my career, let alone within this game, I found ways to make Hades still feel fun and interesting even though ultimately , the routine was not very satisfying to complete. After hundreds of escape attempts, dozens of victories, thousands of enemies slain, and hundreds of thousands of darkness spent on Hades completed, though Hades rewards players every step of the way during a basic playthrough with new dialogue and small interactions with the characters, completing the final challenges is really easy.

For bragging rights, it puts me in a weird state of mind when a game is as good as Hades on every level. I'm happy to complete it, even if one of the most important things in the game is some nonsense just to give people something else to do when they've already maxed out everything else, all six weapons, I maxed out all four aspects to level 5 with pleasure, the 25 relationship tracks were an absolute blast, I felt like I was being given beautiful dialogue and voice acting at every turn, there's even an extremely interesting romance that happens when you max out the relationships with Thanatos and Megura, the fury and death same can have an off-camera threesome with Zagreus in her room, the dialogue leading up to it feels thoughtful but still hot and I was really surprised when it played out and of course I can't forget about the underworld codex.

Completing this required me to visit all seven locations in the game's included secret areas multiple times. I had to defeat the 35 basic enemies and 13 mini bosses dozens of times each and I would be remiss not to mention catching the 18 varieties of river inhabitants. I was constantly rewarded with more knowledge every time I met one of these conditions. It's a lot, but it never got on my nerves. This is the sticking point, no matter how much it seems and I complain about having to grind forever to complete the requirements for the resource director badge, the whole Hades experience is a great time and the fact is that there is a small reward in the form of a cosmetic that is always next to my health bar as proof that in this file I made this stupidly impossible task, so it counts for something even if no one else in the game recognizes it now before someone jumps to my throat yes, I played Hades in hell mode 2. hell mode requires a new save file because in this mode heat is active from the beginning and god mode is completely disabled in hell mode there are 5 mandatory conditions that are always active enemies deal more damage they appear in greater numbers and i have more health plus on top of that zagreus' recovery is nerfed meaning any health i regained was greatly diminished.

Probably the most significant change is the Personal Responsibility modifier that removes Zagarius' i-frames after taking damage completely, but I had already been playing this game on High Heat anyway, which meant I was doing everything I could. so as not to take any hits when I began my journey of completion. The research I did led me to believe that hell mode was just removing god mode and starting the punishment pact. accessible from the beginning, I was wrong, however, when evaluating the cost of my time, I had already spent hundreds of hours completing Hades in my first save file.

This was another Persona 5 conundrum: was I going to spend several hundred more hours on another one? game save for something that does nothing more than prove that I did it and by proxy never post a video about it or should I realize that I did everything the best I could at the end of the day and move on based on your previous comments, both in the comments like on my patreon, you, my audience, I have come to the decision that I think you would want me to take care of my well-being first and foremost before pushing the rock back up the mountain just to make it come back down again and again Once with all that said, I beat Hades in Hell mode, in fact I did it twice just to make sure my first try wasn't a fluke, but beyond that I hope everyone does in the comments. prove that they are the eagles that eat my liver for something like this hell mode isdifficult and it only gets more difficult.

It wasn't going to take another year to unlock everything again. It doesn't unlock anything extra, but it's a great way. To stretch yourself and your sanity when I think about my 365 hour journey with Hades, I won't think about trying to maximize my darkness output, I will remember the little details because a lot of care was put into them. Zagger are the steps that are melting. the snow on the surface or the fact that there is an entire button to pet Cerberus. I'll remember how a cork pops every time Dionysus appears or how Dusa emerges from every awkward social interaction screeching and climbing to the rafters, a move I'm definitely going to steal.

I'll remember Logan Cunningham's deep, booming voice as he delivers Haley's epic commentary. I'll remember the clever twists Supergiant made with Greek mythology that make it feel fresh even though the theme has been well explored in several others. games even though completing hades is truly a Herculean task or, as Zagreus might say, his ecclesiastical task, I came out of it less like Sisyphus and the classical myth and more like Sisyphus in this game defeated, but still, I'm a guy positive that he knows that yes, he was wrong. That's why he is chained and forced to move bravely, but can still offer advice and help others to avoid the madness of his arrogance.

I've been thinking for a long time that I have to find a more interesting way to talk about roguelikes like Hades, is it crazy to complete them? Oh that's a big yes, I had a great time overall completing Hades, also a big yes, I grimaced grinding out hundreds of thousands of darkness for a badge that ultimately makes no sense, you guessed it, Yeah. I feel like every component leading up to that was a masterclass in game development. Hell yeah, Hades is wonderful in every way. It's action-packed, heartfelt and epic. Each ending element felt like it was descending from the depths of hell to the peaks of Olympus. but honestly if you want to watch the credits maybe do a handful of extra challenges, you can absolutely have the experience without doing every little thing, if there was maybe one more thing at the end of the day I'd say otherwise but since that's the way it is how I feel, with that in mind, guys, I give this game my finish-it, finish-it runner-up rating.