Critical Play: Hades
Hades (2020), developed by Supergiant Games and available on PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox, is an action game in which the player controls Zagreus, son of Hades (God of the Underworld), as he attempts to escape to the surface and reunite with his mother, Persephone. The game is designed primarily for players aged 18 to 35 who enjoy action games with strong narrative components, though its Greek mythology backdrop pulls in a wider audience. On the surface, it looks like a game about fighting through the underworld and dying (a lot). But I argue that the real design achievement is not the combat. Supergiant built a world where caring about its people is the game itself.
Hades earns player investment by making the act of caring mechanically inseparable from getting better at the game. In most roguelikes, death is a neutral reset: you lose your progress and start over. In Hades, dying sends you back to a cast of characters who remember where you were and what happened, turning failure into an exciting occasion to connect. The Nectar gifting system gives that relationship-building a tangible cost: Nectar is scarce, found only mid-run, and spending it on a character is the only way to unlock their story. By grounding everything in Greek mythology, a world where many players (like me!) first encountered through stories like Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the game earns emotional investment before a single run begins.
The first time Zagreus dies in Hades, something unusual happens: he comes home. The House of Hades is not just a loading screen between runs. Nyx is waiting. Dusa is floating around with her mop. And critically, every character has something new to say, something specific to what just happened on that run. After 22 deaths before my first clear attempt, each return had stopped feeling like punishment. After run 15, I remember thinking to myself “why in the world am I actually looking forward to dying just to see what Nyx would say?” [see Fig 1].
This is the mechanic-to-aesthetic pipeline working perfectly: the mechanic of death produces a dynamic of evolving NPC dialogue, which produces the Fellowship aesthetic, the pleasure of feeling connected to a shared world. This is what separates Hades from roguelikes suchas Dead Cells or Enter the Gungeon. In Dead Cells, dying resets your progress. In Hades, dying advances the narrative, and the House becomes proof that the world was paying attention.
Fig. 1 — The House of Hades, with Nyx waiting by the door.
The Nectar mechanic extends this idea further. Nectar is a resource collected mid-run that players gift to NPCs in exchange for deeper dialogue, personal storylines, and Keepsakes, the passive abilities Zagreus carries into his next escape attempt. The purpose of this design is that each Keepsake mechanically reflects who gave it. Achilles’ Keepsake grants a death-defying ability, a last-second save that mirrors the hero’s mythological refusal to accept an ordinary death. Nyx’s taps into darkness and shadow. After a few runs, I started saving my Nectar specifically for Achilles, not because his Keepsake was the strongest option, but because I had read about him in the PJO series and grew curious. “Finally, I got Achilles’ Keepsake!” I shouted in my room, so excited to unlock a personal goal I had been working toward since discovering the character.
Fig. 2 — Gifting Nectar to Achilles unlocks deeper dialogue and his Keepsake.
What Hades does well is give players a reason to invest in its characters, not just emotionally but mechanically. The Keepsake system makes the relationship and the reward the same thing: you cannot optimize your run without also deepening a bond. Designers often think about players’ need for connection as something only multiplayer can address. Hades proves a single-player game can satisfy it just as fully, provided the NPCs are written with enough depth to feel like they have something at stake too.
Underpinning all of this is a design choice that most developers cannot make from scratch: Hades was built on a story players already know. It is an evocative narrative, one that borrows emotional weight from pre-existing mythology rather than asking players to build investment from zero. The moment Achilles appeared in the House of Hades, quiet and a little tired, I already knew who he was. I had read about him in Percy Jackson and the Olympians as a teenager.
What also surprised me playing through the game was the visual design of the Gods themselves. They do not look like the marble statues or Renaissance paintings typically associated with Greek mythology. Ares is dark-skinned and imposing; Athena’s design feels culturally ambiguous in a way that suits a Goddess of Wisdom rather than any one heritage. For a game that works on the power of myth, drawing from a broader cultural memory rather than a narrow one strengthens the evocative pull. It means more players can arrive at this world carrying something personal.
Hades works because it solved a problem most roguelikes never address: how do you make a player care about a world they are going to leave and re-enter dozens of times? Supergiant’s answer is to design death as intimacy, relationships as mechanics, and familiarity as foundation. After 30 runs, the underworld does not feel like a game space. It feels like a place you keep returning to because the characters there remember you came back.
Ethics
In Hades, physical traits are biological by default. Zagreus’s immortality, his combat capacity, and his ability to receive divine Boons all follow from his parentage. Boons augment his body per run but reset entirely at death. His baseline is fixed by blood. This sits in slight contradiction to the game’s more progressive choices around sexuality and representation. A meaningful mod would allow some Boon effects to accumulate partially across runs, shifting the body’s potential from something inherited to something built through experience. This mirrors the logic of Ancestry and Culture, which separates biological ancestry from cultural identity. If the body could grow rather than reset entirely, the game’s central theme of failure as progress would hold true in the mechanics, not just in the story.
