I don’t know who this game is for.
Roguelikes are unique in how well they fit the disparate ways casual and hardcore players engage with games. Runs can be enjoyed in short, non-committed sessions, or repetitively for hundreds of hours. Deep mechanics combined with high variability through randomness provides quick novelty for newcomers, and experts are challenged to adapt and get creative with the situation they’re given. However, in an attempt to streamline itself, Hades changed the formula in ways that make it less appealing to both sets of players. The amount of variety has been reduced dramatically from standard roguelikes, with the progression of areas being constant, the cast of enemies being small, and the synergies between boons being much tamer than in something like Synthetik or The Binding of Isaac. Even its meta-progression confounds both groups, requiring a heavy time investment to get to the point where gameplay can evolve beyond its most basic version. The weapons are an especially good example of this, since fully upgrading a new weapon’s unique bonus requires fifteen of a resource primarily gained by successful completion of a run. The most unique forms of each weapon are also locked behind upgrade investments in different weapons, along with dialog triggers the game never cares to communicate, meaning most players won’t be able to use them all until the fifty hour mark at best.
Fifty hours of investment doesn’t seem too bad in the context of a roguelike, but the aforementioned lack of variety in the boons makes it a drag. Each god has a theme for their boons, like Poseidon’s causing knockback and Ares’ spawning whirling blades, with very few surprises. Active effects also can’t stack, and simply fill in a slot to change your attack, dash, magic cast, et cetera. You’re not allowed to create a build where your magic is buffed with all the active effects you could find to hilarious results, the only option is to pick which god's predictable modifier should fill which slot. With only ten gods who can give boons, the ability to reroll, and knowledge of which god will be in each upcoming room, filling up on the active effects you want is fairly trivial. The passives can provide a nice boost, but provide comparatively small advantages that usually don’t change how you approach combat. After coming to grips with the game and getting a few completions, playthroughs are less of an interesting experience on their own and more of a formality to unlock other content. The most indicative example is the game’s difficulty-modifying Heat system, where completion rewards are earned for each unique level of Heat. In other words, you don’t get a ton of rewards for completing a run with the maximum amount of modifiers, you only get the same as if you had completed a run with just one change. This hurts the hardcore demographic the most, who are punished for immediately trying to challenge themselves. It’s a waste of time compared to completing a run at rank 1, then 2, then 3, and actually getting rewarded in a way that will eventually make playthroughs more fun.
The elephant in the room I have yet to mention is Hades’ story, which is the part that received the most consistent praise. However, it’s subject to the same problems that the gameplay suffers. Completing a single run is hardly the end of the story, and the credits only roll after ten victories, which is already expecting a time investment of around twenty hours. However, the epilogue, where the central conflict of the story is actually resolved, takes about ninety hours to reach. Players need to rank up affinities with the gods and collect a seemingly arbitrary list of dialog lines reliant on other unspecified criteria to unlock it, and I wouldn’t blame people who didn’t even realize the game has an epilogue at all. Who does a structure like this really reward? For casual players who just want to see how the story ends, they have to play the time equivalent of about ten standard single-player campaigns, when only about 30% of people bother to finish most games at all. The length is so gratuitous that the only players who get to experience the complete story are the ones who never needed that aspect to motivate them in the first place. I have to give Supergiant Games credit for voicing so many character lines and writing so much dialog for these characters, but when the majority of it is inconsequential commentary on your gear, boons, or current status instead of the actual narrative progression that players want, it can’t help but feel like so much wasted effort.
So to bring us back to the start, who is this game for? For casual players, the amount of time investment to see the complete story and get the full gameplay variety is way too high. For hardcores, the action is too strategically stagnant and the higher difficulties too unrewarding to compete with other roguelikes. The best I can guess is that it appeals to people in the middle, who enjoy the story details as they come, but not enough to where they want to actually complete the game, or enjoy the action enough to play for a while, but not much longer than the credits. This seems to be backed up by the achievement statistics, where only one in five people get the ten wins required for the credits, and only one in twenty will see the epilogue. It’s not that Hades is necessarily poorly made, but the shallowness and high time investment means that the vast majority of people will just get bored and quit before the game has shown everything it has to offer. I would have much preferred it to either be about a third of its current length, or to just be restructured as a linear action game with weapon switching and selectable buffs, like the studio’s previous game Bastion. Either approach would have made the shallowness less of a problem, and actually give the story-motivated players the conclusion they deserve. Obviously though, in spite of a (hopefully) reasonable argument, saying this game doesn’t appeal much to anyone is a laughable thing to state, given its universally positive reception. So, while I have to give up on knowing who this game is for, I can be certain it isn't me.
Roguelikes are unique in how well they fit the disparate ways casual and hardcore players engage with games. Runs can be enjoyed in short, non-committed sessions, or repetitively for hundreds of hours. Deep mechanics combined with high variability through randomness provides quick novelty for newcomers, and experts are challenged to adapt and get creative with the situation they’re given. However, in an attempt to streamline itself, Hades changed the formula in ways that make it less appealing to both sets of players. The amount of variety has been reduced dramatically from standard roguelikes, with the progression of areas being constant, the cast of enemies being small, and the synergies between boons being much tamer than in something like Synthetik or The Binding of Isaac. Even its meta-progression confounds both groups, requiring a heavy time investment to get to the point where gameplay can evolve beyond its most basic version. The weapons are an especially good example of this, since fully upgrading a new weapon’s unique bonus requires fifteen of a resource primarily gained by successful completion of a run. The most unique forms of each weapon are also locked behind upgrade investments in different weapons, along with dialog triggers the game never cares to communicate, meaning most players won’t be able to use them all until the fifty hour mark at best.
Fifty hours of investment doesn’t seem too bad in the context of a roguelike, but the aforementioned lack of variety in the boons makes it a drag. Each god has a theme for their boons, like Poseidon’s causing knockback and Ares’ spawning whirling blades, with very few surprises. Active effects also can’t stack, and simply fill in a slot to change your attack, dash, magic cast, et cetera. You’re not allowed to create a build where your magic is buffed with all the active effects you could find to hilarious results, the only option is to pick which god's predictable modifier should fill which slot. With only ten gods who can give boons, the ability to reroll, and knowledge of which god will be in each upcoming room, filling up on the active effects you want is fairly trivial. The passives can provide a nice boost, but provide comparatively small advantages that usually don’t change how you approach combat. After coming to grips with the game and getting a few completions, playthroughs are less of an interesting experience on their own and more of a formality to unlock other content. The most indicative example is the game’s difficulty-modifying Heat system, where completion rewards are earned for each unique level of Heat. In other words, you don’t get a ton of rewards for completing a run with the maximum amount of modifiers, you only get the same as if you had completed a run with just one change. This hurts the hardcore demographic the most, who are punished for immediately trying to challenge themselves. It’s a waste of time compared to completing a run at rank 1, then 2, then 3, and actually getting rewarded in a way that will eventually make playthroughs more fun.
The elephant in the room I have yet to mention is Hades’ story, which is the part that received the most consistent praise. However, it’s subject to the same problems that the gameplay suffers. Completing a single run is hardly the end of the story, and the credits only roll after ten victories, which is already expecting a time investment of around twenty hours. However, the epilogue, where the central conflict of the story is actually resolved, takes about ninety hours to reach. Players need to rank up affinities with the gods and collect a seemingly arbitrary list of dialog lines reliant on other unspecified criteria to unlock it, and I wouldn’t blame people who didn’t even realize the game has an epilogue at all. Who does a structure like this really reward? For casual players who just want to see how the story ends, they have to play the time equivalent of about ten standard single-player campaigns, when only about 30% of people bother to finish most games at all. The length is so gratuitous that the only players who get to experience the complete story are the ones who never needed that aspect to motivate them in the first place. I have to give Supergiant Games credit for voicing so many character lines and writing so much dialog for these characters, but when the majority of it is inconsequential commentary on your gear, boons, or current status instead of the actual narrative progression that players want, it can’t help but feel like so much wasted effort.
So to bring us back to the start, who is this game for? For casual players, the amount of time investment to see the complete story and get the full gameplay variety is way too high. For hardcores, the action is too strategically stagnant and the higher difficulties too unrewarding to compete with other roguelikes. The best I can guess is that it appeals to people in the middle, who enjoy the story details as they come, but not enough to where they want to actually complete the game, or enjoy the action enough to play for a while, but not much longer than the credits. This seems to be backed up by the achievement statistics, where only one in five people get the ten wins required for the credits, and only one in twenty will see the epilogue. It’s not that Hades is necessarily poorly made, but the shallowness and high time investment means that the vast majority of people will just get bored and quit before the game has shown everything it has to offer. I would have much preferred it to either be about a third of its current length, or to just be restructured as a linear action game with weapon switching and selectable buffs, like the studio’s previous game Bastion. Either approach would have made the shallowness less of a problem, and actually give the story-motivated players the conclusion they deserve. Obviously though, in spite of a (hopefully) reasonable argument, saying this game doesn’t appeal much to anyone is a laughable thing to state, given its universally positive reception. So, while I have to give up on knowing who this game is for, I can be certain it isn't me.
7 Comments
I would suspect a lot of where these issues come from, as I put in my own review, would be the studio's lack of previous experience not only in making roguelikes or roguelites, but in making games of this scale at all. Comparing this to their previous outings, Pyre was their longest at around 12 hours to fully complete (and only a couple more hours to 100%). They pretty much wrote Hades and had its narrative unravel just like they did with any of their previous games, but they put in too much writing content for how little depth the gameplay itself had to offer. This is a big part of why there's such a glaring 90-hour problem of having to grind for specific dialogue. For as much as people do praise the narrative design of this game (which I personally consider vastly inferior to Bastion/Transistor/Pyre), the way it's doled out just shows how terribly bloated it really is.
As someone who really liked this game, I thought I would provide some thoughts on why I think it worked out so well for many people and who this game appeals to. I think one particular thing I want to point out is something that seems presented as a downside in this review, but I would argue is a strength of the game:
"I have to give Supergiant Games credit for voicing so many character lines and writing so much dialog for these characters, but when the majority of it is inconsequential commentary on your gear, boons, or current status instead of the actual narrative progression that players want, it can’t help but feel like so much wasted effort."
I think that boiling down a game's writing and story down to "actual narrative progression" is rather shortsighted, particularly in a game reliant on a roguelike formula that will have a slower progression. I would argue that more than NARRATIVE progression, what the game gives you of interest is CHARACTER progression. I am going to take the character of Achilles' as a prime example of this. Strictly speaking, Achilles isn't narratively "required" for the game, Zagreus could easily just break out on his own and the weapons have another in-story justification that could casually be used to explain him getting geared up. Instead, what is important is Achilles' personal story and his interactions with Zagreus.
At the start, Achilles' is a tired mentor figure, with Zagreus not particularly aware of the storie and sullen history of him. They get along well, but I feel like there is a strong sense of wistfulness in your interactions with him. The nature of the game, where unless you are an expert you will lose a multitude of runs early on before ever getting to Elysium, ensures that the player and Zagreus will build up a visible camaraderie with Achilles. He helps you out with various game mechanics, helping weave it together outside of the actual narrative, until you finally meet with Patroclus. At that point, you gain a new complexity on the relationship you've already established. And this does play into the overall structure of, for example, contrasting between Hades' ridiculously harsh and even cruel parenting or Nyx's more hands-off mysterious helpfulness. In establishing this, it establishes the life and character of Zagreus that you are unraveling.
At first, it isn't even something that actively leads to something, as Achilles is a bit cage-y about it, until you start to really dig into what makes him tick as a character. And in doing so, if he is a character you connect with (like me), you create yourself a sub-goal in your runs: I want to reunite Achilles and Patroclus. In doing so, I would even intentionally take paths I thought were not most likely to help me finish an individual run in order to gain things that work towards that goal, such as acquiring Nectar over things that would power me up on that run. The end result is that I want to do that as much as I want to finish the game's main narrative.
Similarly, I suspect that appeal extends to many people, especially as one of the things that seemed to capture the heart of many people was individual characters. Someone might not care to get all 10 endings, but they do care about seeing all the dialogue from someone that they connect with, and so they seek to gain as much of that as possible, perhaps even dropping the game after finishing 2 or 3 runs because they've exhausted the sub-goal they set for themselves. And I think we can see such things when looking at, for example, the howlongis.io of it:
https://howlongis.io/app/1145360/Hades
Note that the 50th percentile play this game for over 40 hours and the average player at over 40, which conveniently is roughly the average playtime for a "Main + Extras" playthrough of the game on How Long to Beat. Thus, I wager that many players of this game sought to beat it a few times and reach specific player-intristic goals for themselves, rather than the carrot-on-stick being a complete game resolution...although it is absolutely possible to beat the game to the epilogue in 40~ hours, which suggests a subset of people who seek the main story at the exclusion of the numerous collectible elements.
And going onto the point I first made, I feel like the game's focus on moment-to-moment characterization is a plus for this. In doing your runs up to the first few completions, you'll get a strong sense of every character in the game before you even get to the epilogue, the way the gods and goddesses bounce off of them, little things like Hypnos' little crush on Meg or the like, that give a sense of a very complete and lived in world. Even before getting to the end of it, I think most people will feel like they have a strong attachment and sense of the characters and the narratives around them. Immersing themselves in the little chatter of day to day life or enjoying the new dialogue you obtain upon dying helps keep up that addictive "one more run" mentality, or at least it did for me.
I'd also say the casual-hardcore spectrum is VERY wide and dividing it so cleanly is generally not going to yield an approach conforming to reality, especially since quite long games are still fairly popular, and Hades has a very pick up and play nature that will appeal to casual players. This is especially true when, say, Hades can be loaded onto a laptop or a Switch and brought around portably, allowing you to simply fire up a run while waiting around or traveling: For a casual player, the fact that it doesn't have extremely obtuse mechanics or a very high degree of luck in each run will allow them to grab it at any time without feeling lost. Players trending towards the hardcore have a good chance to enjoy not having to deal with a ton of luck in each run and that the game still does pack quite a lot of options when you consider that your boons can have very different gameplay effects depending on the weapon you choose. I ended up going through a lot of different styles in my multitude of runs. It is probably not enough to satisfy the very hardcore players who want the highest mechanical roguelikes, but I'd argue that it's appeal has always been to people who want a more character-driven roguelike (after all, that is what Supergiant Games is more known for) rather than a mechanically intensive one.
"The length is so gratuitous that the only players who get to experience the complete story are the ones who never needed that aspect to motivate them in the first place."
I also, personally, find this an odd point to make. You'll get to the end of Hades in around 40-50 hours and maybe grind out some stuff for the epilogue. That's around the length of a large amount of very popular RPGs, many of which have been played for story: Most Final Fantasy games run 30-50 hours, The Witcher 3 runs at around 51 hours without including side quests or DLC, Persona 5 just came out as hyper popular and runs at around 100 hours! I can go on and on, but I would personally argue story is in fact a VERY strong motivator, and I'd say the fact Hades is one of only two roguelikes (Slay the Spire being the other) I've sunk a ton of hours is a testament to that to use a personal example, as the characters and narrative is a big part of me doing so. The length is not particularly gratuitous except to those who would largely desire bite-sized narrative experiences, The Last of Us for example, and I would argue that those people in turn make up a larger majority who either would not want to try this game (as they are less likely to enjoy Roguelikes to begin with if they want fast experiences), or who liked the game less than the majority of people.
I don't know if this really came out quite as coherently as it could and I feel like I have many thoughts left on the table (maybe I'll return to them), but just as you hoped you have a reasonable argument to your position, I hope I was able to shed some potential light on why Hades has a strong appeal, even if I didn't proofread this after spending like an hour on it lol. Hopefully I didn't mess up my own arguments. Have a nice one!
"I have to give Supergiant Games credit for voicing so many character lines and writing so much dialog for these characters, but when the majority of it is inconsequential commentary on your gear, boons, or current status instead of the actual narrative progression that players want, it can’t help but feel like so much wasted effort."
I think that boiling down a game's writing and story down to "actual narrative progression" is rather shortsighted, particularly in a game reliant on a roguelike formula that will have a slower progression. I would argue that more than NARRATIVE progression, what the game gives you of interest is CHARACTER progression. I am going to take the character of Achilles' as a prime example of this. Strictly speaking, Achilles isn't narratively "required" for the game, Zagreus could easily just break out on his own and the weapons have another in-story justification that could casually be used to explain him getting geared up. Instead, what is important is Achilles' personal story and his interactions with Zagreus.
At the start, Achilles' is a tired mentor figure, with Zagreus not particularly aware of the storie and sullen history of him. They get along well, but I feel like there is a strong sense of wistfulness in your interactions with him. The nature of the game, where unless you are an expert you will lose a multitude of runs early on before ever getting to Elysium, ensures that the player and Zagreus will build up a visible camaraderie with Achilles. He helps you out with various game mechanics, helping weave it together outside of the actual narrative, until you finally meet with Patroclus. At that point, you gain a new complexity on the relationship you've already established. And this does play into the overall structure of, for example, contrasting between Hades' ridiculously harsh and even cruel parenting or Nyx's more hands-off mysterious helpfulness. In establishing this, it establishes the life and character of Zagreus that you are unraveling.
At first, it isn't even something that actively leads to something, as Achilles is a bit cage-y about it, until you start to really dig into what makes him tick as a character. And in doing so, if he is a character you connect with (like me), you create yourself a sub-goal in your runs: I want to reunite Achilles and Patroclus. In doing so, I would even intentionally take paths I thought were not most likely to help me finish an individual run in order to gain things that work towards that goal, such as acquiring Nectar over things that would power me up on that run. The end result is that I want to do that as much as I want to finish the game's main narrative.
Similarly, I suspect that appeal extends to many people, especially as one of the things that seemed to capture the heart of many people was individual characters. Someone might not care to get all 10 endings, but they do care about seeing all the dialogue from someone that they connect with, and so they seek to gain as much of that as possible, perhaps even dropping the game after finishing 2 or 3 runs because they've exhausted the sub-goal they set for themselves. And I think we can see such things when looking at, for example, the howlongis.io of it:
https://howlongis.io/app/1145360/Hades
Note that the 50th percentile play this game for over 40 hours and the average player at over 40, which conveniently is roughly the average playtime for a "Main + Extras" playthrough of the game on How Long to Beat. Thus, I wager that many players of this game sought to beat it a few times and reach specific player-intristic goals for themselves, rather than the carrot-on-stick being a complete game resolution...although it is absolutely possible to beat the game to the epilogue in 40~ hours, which suggests a subset of people who seek the main story at the exclusion of the numerous collectible elements.
And going onto the point I first made, I feel like the game's focus on moment-to-moment characterization is a plus for this. In doing your runs up to the first few completions, you'll get a strong sense of every character in the game before you even get to the epilogue, the way the gods and goddesses bounce off of them, little things like Hypnos' little crush on Meg or the like, that give a sense of a very complete and lived in world. Even before getting to the end of it, I think most people will feel like they have a strong attachment and sense of the characters and the narratives around them. Immersing themselves in the little chatter of day to day life or enjoying the new dialogue you obtain upon dying helps keep up that addictive "one more run" mentality, or at least it did for me.
I'd also say the casual-hardcore spectrum is VERY wide and dividing it so cleanly is generally not going to yield an approach conforming to reality, especially since quite long games are still fairly popular, and Hades has a very pick up and play nature that will appeal to casual players. This is especially true when, say, Hades can be loaded onto a laptop or a Switch and brought around portably, allowing you to simply fire up a run while waiting around or traveling: For a casual player, the fact that it doesn't have extremely obtuse mechanics or a very high degree of luck in each run will allow them to grab it at any time without feeling lost. Players trending towards the hardcore have a good chance to enjoy not having to deal with a ton of luck in each run and that the game still does pack quite a lot of options when you consider that your boons can have very different gameplay effects depending on the weapon you choose. I ended up going through a lot of different styles in my multitude of runs. It is probably not enough to satisfy the very hardcore players who want the highest mechanical roguelikes, but I'd argue that it's appeal has always been to people who want a more character-driven roguelike (after all, that is what Supergiant Games is more known for) rather than a mechanically intensive one.
"The length is so gratuitous that the only players who get to experience the complete story are the ones who never needed that aspect to motivate them in the first place."
I also, personally, find this an odd point to make. You'll get to the end of Hades in around 40-50 hours and maybe grind out some stuff for the epilogue. That's around the length of a large amount of very popular RPGs, many of which have been played for story: Most Final Fantasy games run 30-50 hours, The Witcher 3 runs at around 51 hours without including side quests or DLC, Persona 5 just came out as hyper popular and runs at around 100 hours! I can go on and on, but I would personally argue story is in fact a VERY strong motivator, and I'd say the fact Hades is one of only two roguelikes (Slay the Spire being the other) I've sunk a ton of hours is a testament to that to use a personal example, as the characters and narrative is a big part of me doing so. The length is not particularly gratuitous except to those who would largely desire bite-sized narrative experiences, The Last of Us for example, and I would argue that those people in turn make up a larger majority who either would not want to try this game (as they are less likely to enjoy Roguelikes to begin with if they want fast experiences), or who liked the game less than the majority of people.
I don't know if this really came out quite as coherently as it could and I feel like I have many thoughts left on the table (maybe I'll return to them), but just as you hoped you have a reasonable argument to your position, I hope I was able to shed some potential light on why Hades has a strong appeal, even if I didn't proofread this after spending like an hour on it lol. Hopefully I didn't mess up my own arguments. Have a nice one!
I guess the character progression stuff didn't land very well for me for one very subjective reason, and one more mechanical one. The first is how, by being mythological characters I was already very familiar with, most of their characterization felt a story I had already been told. Although the Roman and Greek pantheons are a lot more different than people realize, I spent many years studying Latin and had to translate or otherwise read a loooooot of mythology (it's one of two reasons my tag is Uni!). The more mechanical reason is that the same progression grind applies to someone like Achilles in the same way it applies to the main game. You do a run, hope he has new dialog, get back, and he just comments on how you died using a spear instead of a sword. You get lucky enough to find Patroclus and talk to him, but then you get back to Achilles and he has nothing to say. You go on another run, don't find Patroclus, Achilles isn't even home. The slowness and randomness frustrate attempts if you're just trying to complete the objective in a focused way; the best way to engage with it is to do so along the path of grinding out normal runs, which themselves have a problem of rewarding players with a meaningful form of progression. Ideally, the variety in characters would mean that at least one would have something to share with you each time, and it usually works like this until you reach the credits, but from that point it falls off a cliff. As I went through each run, I would get a growing sense of despair at missing chances for that sort of progress, reaching Megaera and realizing I didn't get a chance to see Sisyphus, to the Bone Hydra and realizing I didn't get to see Eurydice, etc.
As for the length, I disagree with the comparing a roguelike to something like Persona 5. That may be just as long of a game, but it has a set progression path both for the characters and for the central narrative itself. You don't have to repetitiously grind dungeons in order to level your confidants, they just call you and you can accept. Even during off days with no direct plot progression, you're still moving forward, since the bonuses you get for leveling up your relationships makes you more effective in battle. The stakes and depth constantly escalate, and the game ends as soon as it runs out things to show you. I'm not trying to say "length is a bad thing", but that the unique content on offer in Hades is disproportionate to the amount of time required to experience it, in contrast to a linear RPG.
The spectrum between hardcore and casual is something I certainly recognize, but the goal of it was to just highlight the different reasons someone might pick up a roguelike. I guess the better way to put it would be in terms of perspectives, of what people are buying this game in order to receive. What I was intending was that whichever perspective you come in with, you get stymied by the other factors, i.e. character development hampered by repetitious runs, repetitious runs hampered by lack of mechanical complexity, mechanical complexity kept low so people could enjoy the character development, etc.
As for the length, I disagree with the comparing a roguelike to something like Persona 5. That may be just as long of a game, but it has a set progression path both for the characters and for the central narrative itself. You don't have to repetitiously grind dungeons in order to level your confidants, they just call you and you can accept. Even during off days with no direct plot progression, you're still moving forward, since the bonuses you get for leveling up your relationships makes you more effective in battle. The stakes and depth constantly escalate, and the game ends as soon as it runs out things to show you. I'm not trying to say "length is a bad thing", but that the unique content on offer in Hades is disproportionate to the amount of time required to experience it, in contrast to a linear RPG.
The spectrum between hardcore and casual is something I certainly recognize, but the goal of it was to just highlight the different reasons someone might pick up a roguelike. I guess the better way to put it would be in terms of perspectives, of what people are buying this game in order to receive. What I was intending was that whichever perspective you come in with, you get stymied by the other factors, i.e. character development hampered by repetitious runs, repetitious runs hampered by lack of mechanical complexity, mechanical complexity kept low so people could enjoy the character development, etc.
Also I could see this discussion easily spill over into more comments which (I think?) would ping ping ping people so if you want to PM me on twitter, I'll give you my ID on Discord where less effort has to go into editing
Comments with that much effort should be preserved as a review, not hiding in a comment section where only three people get to see it!
Comments with that much effort should be preserved as a review, not hiding in a comment section where only three people get to see it!
I would love to PM you on Twitter, but when I just tried it said "@unis_verse can't be messaged". I guess you have PMs blocked? You can shoot me a message on Twitter (it's in my profile) if you want for the same reasons, or just tell me if you unblock them and i'll shoot you one.
This for me is the perfect summary of my thoughts about Hades, thank you for writing it so I don't have to. The one thing I'd add is that I personally found this game to be piss easy. I beat it for the first time on run 13, and I believe it was approximately run 30 when I got to the credits. This massively amplifies the core issues of the static and same-y core loop, as you don't even particularly have the enjoyment of overcoming some big challenge that many others seemed to have. You're just left with a game that is a largely mindless button masher and plays very similarly regardless of weapon or boon choice (which I know because I constantly chose different options during the game to complete prophecies). That being said, despite the core loop being not particularly exciting, something makes me want to pick it back up and keep going. I just find myself sad that there's not anything meaningful to keep working towards as far as the gameplay itself goes.
DJSCheddar
3 years ago
You've just described exactly who this game is for: professional video game reviewers