For this week’s critical play, I chose Hades because it has been on my list to play for a very long time. Hades was developed by Supergiant Games and was released in September 2020. It is a single-player, roguelite game available on PC (I played on Mac on Steam), Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and Steamdeck. I think that the main audience is players teen and up who enjoy fast paced action games with strong narrative components. Its Greek mythology theming probably pulls in a broader audience, but also adults around our age who grew up reading Percy Jackson books. Hades has such strong world-building because of both the beautiful graphics that keep you within in the magic circle and the fact that mechanics in the game are structured around building relationships with the people around Zagreus.
Most roguelikes treat the world as set dressing, where you move through the procedurally generated rooms, collect power ups, die, and begin again with nothing carried over. Hades is different in this entirely by incorporating story interactions throughout the run and making dying in a run produce more narrative. When Zagreus dies, he returns to the House of Hades, where characters like Nyx, Hypnos, Achilles, and Dusa are around. Although dying is frustrating, having more narrative and relationship progression with characters makes it feel more fun. This loop made me compelled to play more than I thought I would for this critical play as I wanted to continue exploring and also hearing new dialogue from the hub’s characters. I have seen videos on how expansive the dialogue system is, almost never repeating itself, which means that every return can deepen the understanding of everyone’s story in the House. In the runs too, receiving powers from the gods has a new piece of dialogue that contributes to our understanding of them. Running into them multiple times also leads to more information being unlocked in the codex.
The nectar gifting system is where this world-building really shines. Nectar is scarce and collected during runs, and spending it on a character is the only way to unlock their personal storyline and receive their Keepsake. This is a passive item Zagreus can equip for his next escape attempt, which means you cannot optimize your build without also choosing who you want to learn more about and build a relationship with. After giving Achilles enough Nectar, he begins opening up about his past and his regrets. Even within Charon’s shop, you can gift him nectar to start building a relationship with him, although he only responds with various groans.
The objective of escaping the Underworld is itself a world-building mechanism, and the game is designed to where you get closer and closer to achieving this goal while still keeping Zagreus trapped. Every time you get closer to the surface, there is a tension between leaving and staying, since the people he has built relationships with are all down here. The formal objective and the reality of the game are in opposite directions, and that friction is what makes the world feel deep and lived-in. In most games, completing the objective ends your relationship with the world, but in Hades, each successful escape sends Zagreus back anyway because the story is not finished. The escape attempts function structurally as a procedure for generating new dialogue and new reasons to stay, which means the objective exists less to be achieved and more to be repeated, and the world deepens because you keep leaving and coming back.
Hades excels at tying emotional investment into a meaningful system so that learning more about a character and getting better stats in the game are directly tied together in each loop. Within the magic circle of the game, you start to care about characters over the course of all the runs because the game made you earn every conversation.
In terms of ethics in Hades, the main character’s body is defined by Zagreus’ lineage within Greek mythology. He is immortal and can somehow receive boons from the gods because of his divine parentage. He can also revive during runs, probably due to him being a demigod. I am not sure that these traits are beneficial nor harmful because they reflect mythology and magic which does not exist in the real world. However, there are also a lack of different body types within the cast of gods and deities. This could be argued that this is due to the fact that gods would be stereotypically hot, but still leaves a lot to be desired in terms of representation. I think that a mod I would like is removing the full Boon reset on death and instead lets one Boon of the player’s choosing persist into the next run, framing that carry-over as muscle memory or lived experience, so that the body changes the same way the dialogue system does.
