There were a lot of high-profile, boundary-pushing video game releases in 2020. The long-delayed Cyberpunk 2077 finally dropped, heavily bugged, surprisingly dangerous, and to mixed reviews. A remake of Demon’s Souls, the 2009 cult hit that spawned some of the finest games of the 2010s, was the headline release of a next-gen console. Another remake, this time of the most influential game of 1997 — Final Fantasy VII — dropped early in the year. Animal Crossing became a huge hit in quarantine. The Last of Us Part II, Ghost of Tsushima, and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla were all gargantuan releases with gorgeous graphics and massive, ambitious stories. And yet, in my opinion, none of these high-powered, big budget, AAA games even came close to being the best game of 2020. Because Hades happened.
“I told you nobody gets out of here, whether alive or dead.”
Technically, Hades release starts in 2018. Supergiant Games, a studio known for deep writing and worldbuilding and so-so gameplay, released their Greek mythology-inspired roguelite for early access in December of 2018. For nearly two years, the studio used feedback to patch out bugs, refine the gameplay, and add depth to the story. When the game was finally ‘officially’ released in September of 2020, it was polished to a mirror sheen.
In Hades, you play as Zagreus, son of the titular god of the dead. Initially, it seems like you want to escape the underworld and join the rest of the Greek gods on Olympus. Quickly, this gives way to a deeper goal: You want to find your mother, Persephone. Why did she leave the underworld. More importantly, why did she leave you?
In order to do so, you have to fight your way through the wretched shades of Tartarus, the burning pits of Asphodel, and the heroic hordes of Elysium to reach the surface world. The Olympians have your back; all the forces of Hades stand in your way. When you die, you return to Hades’ court, embarrassed but with more knowledge and power than you had previously. And then you go again.
“I eventually managed to get home the painful way after all.”
That right there is part of what makes Hades special. One of the weirder aspects of roguelikes — genres in which you explore procedurally generated levels that change (and force you to start from the beginning) every time you die — is the conceit. Why is death having no effect on me? Rogue Legacy, which helped popularize the roguelite subgenre made it so that each new run was with the child of the last person, but that is typically about as far as most of these types of games go as far as narrativizing the gameplay loop of death and rebirth. There’s no character.
Not so here. In Hades, you can’t really die. Or, well, you aren’t really alive. You’re the son of the god of the underworld; death is no stranger. You return to your father’s court, which is where you grew up. You visit Cerberus, your pet dog. Say hi to Achilles, your trainer. Nyx, Dusa, Orpheus — you know these people. And a surprisingly deep and resonant part of the game looks at how your escape attempts affect those relationships. Megaera, an early boss, might taunt you when you see her in the Court after she defeats you; get a couple wins on her, and her response will be decidedly more sour. It took more than a hundred hours, dozens of plays through the game, and beating it repeatedly before the dialogue started to get repetitive.
Hades takes life and death seriously. Not by making it more impactful, but by making it less. Here, death is a normal part of life, a chance to see your friends and family again. That turns out to be just as vital to the charms of the game as its impeccable gameplay.
“I was just checking up on you.”
Zagreus is a staggeringly rare kind of protagonist in video games: He is a good person. He’s thoughtful, polite, and complex. He has real relationships with characters, and he actively tries to make the lives of his friends better. In most games, you have a ‘good option’ (don’t kill someone) and a bad option (kill someone). Here, instead, you just try to make the world a better place, one person at a time. There are resources in the game that have no real purpose other than to be given as a gift. Giving them pushes the story of your relationship forward, giving you a deeper look at a more maturing Zagreus. Sometimes it comes with gameplay benefits; it always comes with story ones.
As I raced towards a hundred hours of Hades, I realized that part of the appeal really was the pleasantness of it. Animal Crossing is pleasant, but it’s frictionless. Your character wants nothing and your relationships mean nothing. You are functionally alone on the island. In Hades, the flavor of your relationships change, both with time and by character. You may need to push your mentor to overcome his fear, while a former lover might push you to trust them to make their own decisions. In that way, Hades sometimes reminds me of a short story collection, each character getting their own narrative arc.
I tend to find ‘moral choice’ in video games to be meaningless. Do you say the nice thing or the mean thing? Do you spare one person (of the thousands you kill) or not? And, more importantly, the story in the game necessarily ignores your ‘moral choices’. Whether you are a good guy or a bad guy, you’ll still fight that final boss. In a way, the choice is often one of cosplay: Do you want to dress up like a fascist or like a martyr?
There’s no moral choice in Hades. Instead, radically, it asks you to be a good person. Not a hero. Not an adventurer. But someone who builds up their community. There’s a lesson we can take from that.
“You cannot possibly hope to know what you’re doing with those things.”
Of course, Supergiant has released plenty of games with excellent writing. I’ve never particularly connected with any of them previously. And that’s because Hades is a radical step forward for the company in terms of gameplay.
Combat in Hades starts off as a typical hack-and-slash brawler. You have a sword, a spell, and you have to fight legions of undead. Right away, players notice something: It feels good. The motions of the sword are fluid and quick, its two different attacks distinct. Your dash is easy to see and execute. Then you get a Boon, a special power from an Olympian. Perhaps Athena makes it so that your dash deflects damage. Zeus might make it so that every attack sends chain lightning across the room. Soon, every move you make has a cornucopia of neat effects popping off, creating a gorgeous but easy-to-follow light show. But you’ll probably still die on your first run. It’s okay, it’s a challenging game.
Then you learn there are multiple weapons. Six of them. They all feel radically different, but every single one is as smooth. And you find Daedalus Hammers, which change something fundamental about your weapon. Titan’s Blood, which lets you unlock new aspects that further change them. New gods appear, with newer, more complex Boons. What started as a simple hack-and-slash has become a surprisingly deep combat game with thousands of possible combinations of abilities. Somehow, the game let you take enough short steps in shallow water that you adjusted to the depths before you even realized your feet had left the ground.
And, inexplicably, it all feels great to play.
“Death is your only family. Death, and I.”
Playing Hades is like that first time you played Dark Souls or Player Unknown: Battleground and thought: This is the future of gaming. Roguelikes and roguelike elements are only becoming more popular, but the recursive storytelling in Hades takes the genre to a new level. I played and enjoyed Risk of Rain and The Binding of Isaac. Hell, Slay the Spire made my Best Games of the 2010s list. But Hades takes them to a new level, bringing narrative depth and complexity to a genre already known for immaculate gameplay.
Beyond that, it introduces a superior form of branching dialogue to games. The BioWare model that defined the last two decades was a Choose Your Own Adventure story. You played the game, then you picked a branching dialogue path. The two were separate. The Hades model branches the dialogue based on your actions, not a dialogue menu. It feels better, more naturalistic. It also eliminates the ludonarrative dissonance that came with the old model: Kill hundreds, even thousands, but you’re still a good person if you spare the boss. It’ll take a few years, but expect to see more and more games mimic this style of storytelling.
And Hades — with its generous powerups and lack of negative boons — is a great introduction to the roguelike genre. It’s challenging but not unforgiving. It has a story hook to keep you coming back for run after run. And the whole time, you are learning how to play games like this better. It teaches you to think about builds, to consider the risk-reward balance of forgoing a reward to rest for a room. Hades isn’t just a great game in its own right; it is the rare game that teaches you how to appreciate an entire genre.