Report 36: Things that are not Skyrim
“Oof, I want to play something less lenghty”, he said, launching Hades. How little did he know.
Hades is the newest game by Supergiant games that ticks almost all the usual boxes. The artstyle is similar, the gameplay is (somewhat) similar, the soundtrack is similar. Thankfully, all the “similar” here means equally great quality, as with the previous games.
This is a roguelike that involves dying many, many times. Supergiant Games actually managed to fit in the death/rebirth mechanic pretty nicely, and when you lose, it doesn’t feel like losing most of the time, since you’re making progress every time you die.
Now, don’t get me wrong. The characters are fantastic and entertaining (also, as Zero Punctuation said, “all the voice acting sounds like it’s coming from very sexy people), the amount of variables in dialogues with bosses and netherworld residents is mindblowing… but the plot is easily the weakest part of the game. Even if the lore is good, it’s mostly picked from greek mythology and the whole thing just looks like some fanfiction. But it’s not that bad, actually, before you get to the ending… and then to the epilogue… and realise there’s not much to it besides that. The ending is so underwhelming it feels like a joke (the epilogue is probably even more pathetic). The amount of effort you have to put in the game to see them is not comparable to what you get at all.
And don’t get me started on the sub-quests. It’s not even grind at this point, it’s just repetition. Every time you return to the hub, you pray to god that you’re gonna trigger the needed conversation with the person of interest. But that’s if you lucky and your person of interest doesn’t talk to someone else/just straight up dissapears, so you have to go for a new run to reset the hub. Patroclus quest was pure pain, and even after getting all the achievements, 65+ hours in, I STILL didn’t trigger Hypnos’ loyalty quest.
Despite all that, the game was really good (well, maybe besides the last few hours where I just grinded the hell out of it to get to the ending).
This is a pretty hard side-scroller shoot-em-up with a surprisingly dark plot and lore. It is very dinamic and almost all the bosses feel entirely different from each other.
It is frustratingly hard even on normal (at least for me) and there’s a ton of replayablity involved, but even getting through it was hard enough for me.
Funnily enough, there’s no achievement for beating the game.
There are things that transcend time. Such is a humor of this game, at least for me. It’s pretty much a choose-your-own-adventure cartoon with the extremely simple premise and story.
There’s no rules and barely any sense in most of the stuff happening, and there’s barely any jokes with a strong punchline, it’s mostly using physical comedy and videogames references. But it overflows with the kind of humor it DOES have, and it always reminds me of simpler Newgrounds times and stuff.
I actually laughed at the MLG noscope montage joke in 2020.
The newest, final chapter made specifically for Steam release is amazing, just as the previous ones.
It’s an absolute treat filled with nonstop-fun.
It’s a pretty weird sequel to the first point’n’click game. It’s way shorter (2 hours versus 7 for the first one), uses a lot of assets from the previous game, and the plot makes little to no sense whatsoever now.
At least it’s still filled with dumb (the kind I like) jokes to the brim.
Backlog progress status:
Hades was really a fun game indeed. I played only about 26h but yeah this game is a massive grind! Still, it’s so good I kept playing until it felt too hard for me (like 2 or 3 stars) and I got discouraged seeing all the goodies you can buy vs all the money I had…
If you’ll ever return to it, I highly recommend you turning on the god mode in the options. The only thing it does is giving you a very small damage resistance boost every time you die. It won’t affect your gameplay much at the beginning either way, but will come really handy for the later game, when all you’re doing is grinding. I’d be really struggling without it, since I had to do runs over and over for Patroclus’ quest and it was just Tedious with a capital T.
Congratulations on all of your assassinations! So many people on my friends list are playing Hades, I’m tempted to jump on the bandwagon after I finish a couple more games.
Just be ready to get stuck with it for a while, especially if you’re achievement hunting.
Supergiant makes pretty good games and I have enjoyed them. Hopefully I’ll get to play Hades someday too.