The best roguelites are all about toying with choice, expectation, and consequence. The very best games the genre has to offer often forces players to choose between an item or a weapon, a damage boost or a health pickup, a dangerous encounter with better loot or a safer encounter with a lesser outcome. They force you to make tough decisions and live with those decisions, with even early-run items and mechanics can have lasting consequence until the end of a run.
Hades is one of the most linear games I've ever played and it results in a game that barely feels like a roguelike. Each run features a fixed number of rooms that you move through, and a small variety of hand-crafted rooms that start to feel very retreaded after a handful of runs. Every run feels the same because there's no way to go beyond what the game expects of you with structure.
My favorite roguelikes feature very dynamic level design or offer a variety of additional challenges like bonus floors or areas, specific challenges to make the game have extra longevity, and secret bosses or bonus modes.
Hades is able to spice up a bit of its variety with options like the pact of punishment, but these are merely difficulty modifiers that tune numbers or force you to play more cautiously or quickly. According to Steam I spent around 22 hours in this game, and I reckon that's closer to 19 or 20 once you shave off extraneous dialogue and the few cutscenes the game has. Throughout those 20 hours I played about two or three dozen runs. None of them stand out. Every run felt the same.
A common complaint with roguelites is that they are often unfair and success relies on getting a good item that will win you the game. I understand these complaints but the genre is often deliberately designed to be unfair to make runs interesting. When a game forces you to play through the same components dozens or hundreds of times, it's essential that runs feel interesting and diverse. There are many runs I've had in games like Enter the Gungeon where I got screwed over by lack of good items, but for every one of those, there's a run where I got some incredibly unique gun or item that made the game extremely fun to play. Those runs stick out and are the reason why the best roguelites are paragons of good game design.
Because levels don't fundamentally change, all of Hades' variety is dependent on boons. Some boons make the game feel different, like Athena, whose boons are largely defense-related, or Hermes, whose boons alter speed and dodging. However, every other Olympian's boons usually have to do with a specific status effect. Chill. Doom. Jolt. Drown. Drunk. Charm. All these statuses are different names for the same general effects. Once you pass the opening hours of Hades, the smoke and mirrors dissipate and the game's façade of variety falls apart.
That's not to say that Hades is a bad game--it's an alright game. The art is gorgeous, and combat feels good to play in the most direct fashion, but combat is also extremely simple, with pretty much every enemy except the last two bosses being defeatable by spamming attack and dodge. The music is fantastic as it always is for a Supergiant game. Surprisingly, I felt like the story left a lot to desire. The thing that has always drawn people to Supergiant games is their stunning art, music, and writing--all the elements of games that other studios and developers often fail with.
The story in Hades is actually really underwhelming largely because there isn't really a story. There's no general plot and everything is communicated in through dialogue. The narrative is carried by loose relationships between thinly-defined characters, and as such feels like pretty much any other roguelite without a story. Early on I felt impressed by the fact that there was no repeating dialogue (which is certainly a feat), but after enough time I realized that this was just another gimmick. Non-repeating dialogue carries no importance when characters use a multitude of words to say nothing at all. Every dialogue or conversation feels identical to the previous and by the time I got to the end of the game I found myself skipping, or skipping through, most of these encounters.
It's really quite a bummer that I didn't enjoy this game more especially because of how much I enjoy world mythology and how much a strong impression the game made in the opening hours; but just like Doom 2016, even the most thrilling gameplay loops can stagnate without innovation.
Hades is one of the most linear games I've ever played and it results in a game that barely feels like a roguelike. Each run features a fixed number of rooms that you move through, and a small variety of hand-crafted rooms that start to feel very retreaded after a handful of runs. Every run feels the same because there's no way to go beyond what the game expects of you with structure.
My favorite roguelikes feature very dynamic level design or offer a variety of additional challenges like bonus floors or areas, specific challenges to make the game have extra longevity, and secret bosses or bonus modes.
Hades is able to spice up a bit of its variety with options like the pact of punishment, but these are merely difficulty modifiers that tune numbers or force you to play more cautiously or quickly. According to Steam I spent around 22 hours in this game, and I reckon that's closer to 19 or 20 once you shave off extraneous dialogue and the few cutscenes the game has. Throughout those 20 hours I played about two or three dozen runs. None of them stand out. Every run felt the same.
A common complaint with roguelites is that they are often unfair and success relies on getting a good item that will win you the game. I understand these complaints but the genre is often deliberately designed to be unfair to make runs interesting. When a game forces you to play through the same components dozens or hundreds of times, it's essential that runs feel interesting and diverse. There are many runs I've had in games like Enter the Gungeon where I got screwed over by lack of good items, but for every one of those, there's a run where I got some incredibly unique gun or item that made the game extremely fun to play. Those runs stick out and are the reason why the best roguelites are paragons of good game design.
Because levels don't fundamentally change, all of Hades' variety is dependent on boons. Some boons make the game feel different, like Athena, whose boons are largely defense-related, or Hermes, whose boons alter speed and dodging. However, every other Olympian's boons usually have to do with a specific status effect. Chill. Doom. Jolt. Drown. Drunk. Charm. All these statuses are different names for the same general effects. Once you pass the opening hours of Hades, the smoke and mirrors dissipate and the game's façade of variety falls apart.
That's not to say that Hades is a bad game--it's an alright game. The art is gorgeous, and combat feels good to play in the most direct fashion, but combat is also extremely simple, with pretty much every enemy except the last two bosses being defeatable by spamming attack and dodge. The music is fantastic as it always is for a Supergiant game. Surprisingly, I felt like the story left a lot to desire. The thing that has always drawn people to Supergiant games is their stunning art, music, and writing--all the elements of games that other studios and developers often fail with.
The story in Hades is actually really underwhelming largely because there isn't really a story. There's no general plot and everything is communicated in through dialogue. The narrative is carried by loose relationships between thinly-defined characters, and as such feels like pretty much any other roguelite without a story. Early on I felt impressed by the fact that there was no repeating dialogue (which is certainly a feat), but after enough time I realized that this was just another gimmick. Non-repeating dialogue carries no importance when characters use a multitude of words to say nothing at all. Every dialogue or conversation feels identical to the previous and by the time I got to the end of the game I found myself skipping, or skipping through, most of these encounters.
It's really quite a bummer that I didn't enjoy this game more especially because of how much I enjoy world mythology and how much a strong impression the game made in the opening hours; but just like Doom 2016, even the most thrilling gameplay loops can stagnate without innovation.