Hades is a rouge-like dungeon crawler available on Switch and Steam, and it’s one of my favorite games of all time. The actual gameplay, at its core, is actually pretty simple: you play as Zagreus, the son of Hades, and are trying to fight your way through Tartarus, Asphodel, and Elysium to reach the surface and find your mother Persephone. When you die, you have to start again from the beginning, so the goal is to make it to the top in a single run. A couple of key mechanics in Hades include upgrading skills and weapons, choosing ‘boons’ from gods that provide buffs, and attacking using basic + special moves and a dash. Especially since the game is repetitive in the sense that you fight to reach the surface over and over, I think that these mechanics come together well to provide an opportunity for players to experiment with different strategies and combinations of weapons/buffs, which makes each playthrough of the game feel different every time. For example, the gods that you see on each run are usually random, so the first god that you encounter and the corresponding boon that you choose might impact all of your subsequent decisions for the rest of the run in order to maximize the synergy between different boons and buffs. Certain weapon special attacks also have good synergy with specific boons, so you might choose a weapon, enhance it with a boon, and center your strategy around maximizing the effect and power of your weapon’s special attack as much as possible instead of e.g. your weapon’s normal attacks or your dash. The endless possibilities and combinations that you can experiment with make the game really fun and engaging, and it’s also cool to figure out which strategies work best for you and which don’t.
