Game:

Hades (2020)

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Review

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Hades is a roguelike action role-playing video game developed by Supergiant Games. The game was released for Microsoft Windows and Nintendo Switch on September 17, 2020, which followed an early access release from December 2018.

Players control Zagreus, the son of Hades, as he attempts to escape from Underworld to reach Mount Olympus, at times aided by gifts bestowed on him from the other Olympians. Each run challenges the player through a random series of rooms populated with enemies and rewards, and the player uses a combination of their main weapon attack, dash power, and magic ability to defeat them while avoiding damage to progress as far as possible. While Zagreus will often die, the player can use gained treasure to improve certain attributes or unlock new weapons and abilities to improve chances of escaping on subsequent runs.

Hades was developed following Supergiant's Pyre, a game in which they wanted to explore procedural narrative storytelling, but due to the nature of the main gameplay, found that players did not play through Pyre multiple times to explore this. The roguelike structure of Hades gave them the opportunity to tell these branching stories to the player over the course of multiple runs.


Gameplay
The player takes the role of Zagreus, the prince of the Underworld, who is trying to escape the realm to get away from his dispassionate father, Hades, and reach Mount Olympus. His quest is supported by the other Olympians, who grant him gifts to help fight the beings that protect the exit from the Underworld. He is also helped on his quest by notorious residents of the Underworld, such as Sisyphus, Eurydice, or Patroclus. The game features four "biomes", or locales of the underworld, such as Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, and the Temple of Styx.

The game is presented in an isometric view with the player in control of Zagreus. The player starts a run-through of the game by trying to fight their way through a number of rooms; the room layouts are pre-determined, but their order and the enemies that appear are randomly determined. The player has a primary weapon, a special attack, and a magic spell which they can use to take out enemies. Upon starting a run, one of the Olympians will provide a gift, a choice of three persistent boosts for that run that the player can select from; the gifts are themed based on the Olympian, for example with Zeus providing lightning damage effects. Subsequently, after clearing a room, the player will be shown the type of reward they may earn if they complete the next room or choice of next rooms, ranging from additional Olympian gifts, restorative items, in-game currency, a store to purchase improvements, or keys that can be used in the meta-game to improve Zagreus' initial attributes for the next run. Should Zagreus' health points drop to zero, he "dies" and ends up facing his father, removing all gifts granted from the last run.[1]

Between runs, Zagreus can explore the Underworld before setting on a new quest. Here, the player can use the keys to unlock permanent upgrades for Zagreus or order construction of new support features for the Underworld, or obtain new weapons. They can also have Zagreus interact with the various characters of the Underworld, which provide narrative elements to the game but may also provide quests with additional rewards.[1][2][3]

Development
Following the release of their previous game, Pyre, Supergiant Games was interested in developing a game that would help to open up their development process to players, so that they would end up making the best game they possibly could from player feedback. They recognized that this would not only help with the gameplay approach but also with narrative elements, and thus opted to use the early access approach in developing Hades once they had established the foundation of the game.[4] As Supergiant was still a small team of about 20 employees, they knew they could only support early access across one platform, with the intent to then port to other platforms near the completion of the game. Supergiant had spoken to Epic Games and learned of their intent to launch their own Epic Games Store, and felt the experimental platform was an appropriate match with Hades. Supergiant's decision was made in part due to Epic's focus on content creators, as Supergiant had developed Hades in mind to be a game favorable to streamers, which would be benefited through the Epic Games Store.[4] Supergiant anticipates that Hades will take about three years to complete, comparable to the development time of their previous titles.[4]

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