Hades is the Best Game Ever Made

As a lifelong enjoyer of video games, the question of whether or not I identify myself as a gamer has been a weirdly fraught one. There are many things that make identifying yourself with video game culture a little difficult (Gamergate, toxic misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc…) but the one I want to discuss today is a conversation around video game difficulty.

In many spaces, video game difficulty is a sort of badge of honor, especially surrounding notoriously-punishing games like Dark Souls. Fans of these games bond over a shared struggle of overcoming the overwhelming difficulty of the game they’re playing. Newcomers asking for advice are met with the age-old wisdom “Get good.” (I.e., we’re not gonna help you, you have to struggle to figure this out yourself. After all, that’s what I had to do!)

This conversation becomes relevant nearly every time someone brings up a conversation around video game difficulty and its relationship to accessibility. Unlike other mediums, video games require skill in order to be enjoyed in their entirety, with end story beats essentially barred from being seen if you don’t perform at a certain level. And for these notoriously difficult games, they require a lot of skill, not to mention time needed to perfect said skill. This barrier means that a ton of people are literally gatekept from experiencing many of these games – why would they pay money to lose over and over and never actually experience the content they paid for.

This is not necessarily a blanket disparagement. There’s plenty to be said about the artistic value of difficulty. Going back to Dark Souls, the punishing difficulty of the series has a direct connection to the dark, ruined world the game is set in. If it were easy and empowering to play the game, it would lose the emotional impact. But I think it’s a debate to be had, and I imagine many creators of games have this debate at the forefront of their mind as they consider how to make their games accessible – and thus, marketable – to the widest audience possible.

So how does this all tie into the greatest game ever created? Well.

Hades is a 2018 roguelike created by Supergiant, beloved indie developer of games like Bastion and Pyre. It centers around Zagreus, the son of the Greek god of the Underworld, Hades, who, at the climax of lifelong resentment toward his overbearing father, decides to bust out of the Underworld and flee to live with his other relatives in Olympus. In order to escape, Zagreus must travel through the ever-shifting rooms of the Underworld, fighting Hades’ ghostly denizens and gathering up power-ups from the other gods, aiding him in his mission.

Hades bears many of the traits of its genre, the roguelike, games created in the spirit of the 1980 ASCII game Rogue. The genre generally features randomized levels and permanent death – two features that makes them among some of the most difficult games. Because of the randomized level layouts, players cannot rely on learning the demands of individual levels with practice, and because of the permanent death, players lose all progress and have to start over again if they die.

This means that roguelikes, as a genre, also tend to foster the types of difficulty-focused fandoms I mentioned before. Beating a roguelike is often worn as a badge of honor, earned after many grueling hours of losing all your progress again and again and again.

Certainly this is one way to create achievement in a game, but many of the problems with punishing difficulty are especially potent in roguelikes. While in theory the inability to keep any rewards gained as you play after dying might seem to foster a gaming environment where only pure skill is rewarded – in practice, the other key feature of roguelikes fights against this. After all, when everything is randomized, boosts, bonuses, and in-game rewards tend to also be randomized. This means that once you get to a certain level of play, the difference between a successful run and one doomed from the start can sometimes come down to how lucky you get with these randomized rewards. Players at certain levels even begin completely restarting runs if they determine their item drops have doomed them to failure.

Game features that would seem to reward skill actually only succeed at highlighting the power of luck – and completely kill the intrinsic motivation that comes from “Getting good.” Interesting scenarios that may arise from players having to improvise with the items and bonuses they happen upon are thrown out the window as players attempt to scramble for playing as efficiently as possible. After all, there’s no benefit to playing out a losing run.

Hades is different. Sure, it has randomized bonuses along its randomized levels, and it’s true that players can absolutely get lucky on some runs and completely cursed on others. However, there’s something unique about Hades, something that has both nothing to do and everything to do with its gameplay – its incredible story.

The part of the game where players attempt to break out of the Underworld is only half of Hades. The other half takes place after they lose a run, and Zagreus is dragged back to the House of Hades. There, he can interact with a cast of interesting and colorful characters – building relationships with them and helping them along their own mini stories. Many figures from Greek mythology show up here – for example, Zagreus can meet, befriend, and ultimately reunite doomed lovers Orpheus and Eurydice. He can heal the broken relationship between his mentor, the legendary hero Achilles, and his lover Patroclus. And, he can discover the mystery behind his own broken family.

The key is this – unlocking these parts of the story only comes when Zagreus dies. While the ultimate storyline of Hades does depend on the player eventually beating all of the randomized levels, the other storylines only progress when they experience failure. This is a far more motivating experience – when you die, you get a new and fresh chance to learn more about the world and characters. Plus, this aspect of the game is a great motivator of going out on another run, with the full knowledge that even if things go wrong, there’s going to be something new around the corner to discover.

This ties back into another aspect of Hades. Unlike many other roguelikes, the player doesn’t actually lose all of their progress if they lose a run. Sure, they lose all of the boons from the gods, and any coins gathered for use on the randomly-generated shops along the way, but several other currencies stay with the player even if they die. These currencies can be used at the House of Hades to fund permanent upgrades to Zagreus’s abilities, which stick with him no matter what. This is another major key to Hades accessibility – for those players who die a lot, they accumulate currency that earns them extra power-ups to make the runs a little easier.

For players with a ton of skill right off the bat, Hades is a difficult, precision hack-n-slash with a ton of nail-biting difficulty. For players without that amount of skill, Hades might be long, but it’s a rewarding experience as players unlock more and more of the story and slowly grow Zagreus’s abilities (alongside their own). For both groups of players, Hades is motivating and welcoming.

Add that to excellent character and world design, well-written and fully-voiced dialogue, and plenty of things to discover, and Hades is a masterpiece.

Though it released in 2018, Hades is more relevant than ever, especially as Supergiant recently announced the sequel. I’m so glad they did, because it motivated me to pick up this excellent game again. I’ll be honest, I talk about all of this because I was not very good at Hades when I first got it. I repeatedly died to the very first boss.

But now, I’ve beaten the game 6 times – and I keep coming back for more. For me, the benefits of its careful and well-considered approach to difficulty are obvious.

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