Really great and fun game and I love the way they try and synthesize the roguelike with the social elements, but I do think it gets a little tiresome the further you get. For me it got particularly frustrating when the npcs you want to speak to aren't available, and you have to do another run (30 - 45 mins) just to have a chance to advance your relationship with them. That, or an npc has so much queued up dialogue that it takes a dozen runs until they give you something that you need, which was a frequent issue for me during the orpheus and patroclus quests.

I also think that this game has really superb characters that I loved on their own, but the actual story itself was pretty weak. The best moment of the story for me was the first win, and I thought that ending was really beautiful and super well done, but as the game went on the story really just got weaker and weaker, and I felt exceptionally disappointed by the epilogue, which really failed to provide a meaningful catharsis to the tension of the story.

Despite all this, the gameplay is just fun and beyond addictive. The boons are quite transformative and while some can feel underwhelming at first, there's generally a synergy that you haven't realized that can make each of them extremely potent. I did feel a little uninterested in the heat system - I think I prefer something like slay the spire's ascension which has a fixed order of rising difficulty to the heat system, since heat 32 can be a mild challenge or agonizingly difficult, depending on your selection of modifiers. This is also just personal preference but I'd prefer a definitive peak difficulty that, while still challenging, is doable by those willing to put in the time, which in turn could be acknowledged by the game's characters. Heat 64 is so impossibly hard that the final boss doesn't even acknowledge it, since I imagine the devs felt no one would ever survive it!

Overall, this game is spectacular and I'm amped for Hades II. The devs seem like great people and I hope that they can take this already winning formula to even greater heights!