Hades - Video Game Review

For the past decade indie games have begun to get more recognition throughout the video game industry, especially in the past few years. With so many mainstream companies like EA, Ubisoft, and 2K focusing on milking people out of every penny they got there have been some studios that have risen to fame through smaller works. Warframe from Digital Extremes has become of the best free-to-play games ever made, Re-Logic has turned Terraria into the most approved game on the Steam store and continues to be very popular, last year Among Us became a phenomenon for it's extremely fun coop games despite being an initial failure when it first released, and there is of course Minecraft. Last year though a certain indie game came out of early access and quickly became one of my all-time favorite video games of all time: Hades.

Hades is the story of Zagreus, the son of Hades. He's young, rebellious, tired of his father, and wants to get out of Hell, which is said to be impossible to do. It doesn't matter to the young god though as he leaves his home in the very depths of the underworld to be on the surface and possibly live with the gods of Olympus. And then he dies, bringing him back to where he started. This doesn't stop him though and he keeps trying again and again and again. But as he keeps bashing against the denizens of the underworld he learns there is more to his journey than what he initially planned for.

That is all you, the player being as Zagreus, fighting your way through the lands of Hell to get away from your edgelord daddy, Hades, in this epic rouge-like RPG. While I didn't play too many new games last year Hades instantly became beloved to me and my number one game of 2020 because it does so many things right! In fact it went above and beyond what I was expecting and gave me an experience I have never felt before in a video game in a long time. There are so many things I have to talk about with this game: The art style, the voice acting, the challenge/ difficulty, the excellent pacing and progression, and the ever-exciting story. All of this done without crunching or overworking the employees of Supergiant Games! Hades should be set on a pedestal as a guide to making an exceptional video game.

But before any of that I have to go a bit into the early access I mentioned earlier. While the game was fully released on September 17th of last year, Hades was originally released in early access on December 10th, 2019. It wasn't a small betas the lasted a few weeks each, but the whole game being out and given updates throughout the whole early access period. There was a lot of feedback on the game and Supergiant used it all to refine the game to the masterpiece it is now. Sadly I never was a part of that because it was originally an Epic Store exclusive and I refuse to help that company because the endless crunch time put on the people who continually update Fortnite and how the online store is just the bare minimum in terms of features (and also because it stole Borderlands 3). I feel very guilty that I didn't participate back then, but it's out now and it's become one of my best video game purchases ever.

So let's get into Hades with the first thing this game excels at: Progression. Dying has never felt so... unconcerning. You will die a lot in Hades because it can be hard at first and it took me 29 runs in order to beat it the first time. However I never felt angry or lost my temper when I died because even though I had to started right at the beginning and lost all my coins and upgrades I still had some items saved from that run. These items such as bottles of nectar, darkness shards, and titan blood (to name a few) could then be traded for upgraded passive abilities, cosmetics to the House of Hades (the hub of the game), and new weapons and weapon upgrades. But more importantly every time I died I was given a bit more story out characters in the House of Hades, along with some very touching moments that made me really care about the world.

The characters are definitely one of Hades biggest strengths. All of them are very fleshed out and stand out in appearance, personality, goals, and voice. From the towering, grumpy, dead-serious god of the underworld, Hades, to the shy, workaholic maid, Desa (Maid-Desu, get it?), to the wise-cracking, Al Pacino-like punching bag skeleton, Skelly, there is just so much life in this world of the dead that I was eager to see them all when I returned from a successful or unsuccessful escape from Hell. That's all just in the house, there's also a number of Greek gods that you'll interact with and be given powers and abilities by during your escape attempts, along with other smaller characters from Greek mythology. Some of them interact with one another in interesting ways, sometimes with Zagreus in the background, that pull out new character traits from one another or hint at certain things in the story.

Zagreus especially is done really well, making him very likeable and witty, yet having some flaws in him that players can relate to. He can be rash and too relaxed when he talks to others and his youth and inexperience with higher beings can get him into trouble. Researching Greek mythology there isn't much to go on for Zagreus so Supergiant had to add more personality and flare to this deity, to which they were successful. I couldn't stop trying to help him escape his home to the surface because I really could understand why he wanted out. He just didn't fit in and his father is really hard on him, so of course he wants out. Plus the gods on Olympus are very friendly to him and want to assist him. And yet he also grows as the story gets more complex.

This leads me to the biggest thing that Hades surprised me with: The voice acting. All of the characters in the game are voiced and I knew that when I bought the game. What I didn't know though was amount of dialogue the characters would get. Never before have I hear so many different conversations in a video game before. It took over 20 runs of the game to hear a voice line repeated in the game. In most video games there's often like 4 or 5 different lines for characters that you meet over and over again and it becomes quite boring when you hear the same lines over and over again. But with Hades, even over 80 hours in the game, I don't hear repeated dialogue very often. Even if I did though difference of runs from when I previously heard it to the current run is so large that I wouldn't notice if it was a repeated line. The voice actors went above and beyond to give us players a ton of conversations between characters!

This amount of variation in dialogue adds onto the continually shifting playthroughs of the game because they're never the same. Each run only has a select number of Olympian gods that'll give you powers and combine that with the amount of weapons you can use, from a simple sword to fists of fury to a frickin' gun, the combinations are endless. There are a lot of different area builds for the three levels of Hades: Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, and the Temple of Styx. They can repeat in different runs, but the enemies that spawn in them are different. But the biggest thing that can change up your playthroughs is the Pact of Punishment. Once you beat the game for the first time you gain a list of conditions that you can add to each run to increase the difficulty. Each one adds a rank of difficulty and each rank rewards you with new loot. You can only gain go up a rank at a time for each weapon, which really adds a sense of progression in my opinion.

Let's go deeper in the combinations of weapons and abilities that Hades can provide players. There are six weapons in the game, including the ones I've already mentioned, but there are in total of ten gods you can receive upgrades, or in this case, "Boons," from. These include the obvious and rather pompous Zeus, the ruler of Olympus, who gives you lightning based boons; the dutiful and reclusive goddess of the hunt, Artemis, with her homing boons that deal extra critical damage; and chill and party-loving god of wine and madness, Dionysus, happily willing to give boons that intoxicate/ poison your foes, along with ones that improve your health/ healing. There's plenty more different boons you can collect, including legendary boons from each deity, along with duo boons in which two gods "share" an boon given to you. With the right combinations you can slaughter your foes with ease or die early and easily, you just got to be careful what you choose. But even so it's insanely fun what I've been able to do with my combinations.

Now I really have to talk about the art style of Hades because it is perfect in so many ways. It's stylized in just the right amounts with beautiful uses of palette colors to reflect the levels of Hell you go through and bringing life to the whole game. Supergiant Games has always have distinctive visuals to their games, using a lot of bold coloring with character designs that are both very exciting to look at while using their looks to easily convey to the player what the character's personality and beliefs are. Transistor for instance starred a woman named Red, who wore a dress that had some fur on it, had red hair, and was graceful in her movement. It instantly told me she was previously a singer and was thrown into a situation that was out of the norm for her. Hades does this too with its characters! For example Nyx, the Goddess of Darkness, is imposing, with stars in her black hair, a beautiful face, and flowing clothes. That told me she was quiet and mysterious, but motherly in her treatment of Zagreus and a push for him to go on his adventures. Another example in Hades is Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. In order to add that flare to her design, she's entirely naked, but her long, pink hair censors her body in just the right ways to really show off her curves without showing any naughty bits.

Even with all of this though the game kept on giving me more and more options of what I can do for fun. It was like those old Billy Mays commercials where he suddenly goes, "But wait, there's more!" Except in Hades it just kept happening and I kept getting more and more excited about what I could do. First I found out I could form relationships with other characters in the game and the more I did that the more gifts and dialogue I got from. Through that I learned I could romance certain characters and soon learned this romance can lead to you-know-what. My current main romance is with the Dusa character I mentioned before and I just love how she's crushing on Zagreus. That to me says I have to give her love in return! After that though I found out I could fish in the game! Yes, I can fish in hell and it's fun and gives me fish that I can trade for items. But then I saw how fun it was to spruce up the House of Hades and began to add a proper dining area, drapes to the walls, new furniture for Zagreus's bedroom, and more! I just so shocked at how much Supergiant put into this single player game!

Hades is a game I can keep playing over and over and not get bored with it. The only times I've really stopped was when I realized it was 2am and I had work in the morning. The grind at times might bother some people, but all the story, flare that characters give off, the power you can wield while fighting out of Hell, and more will easily overwrite that slight irritation of grinding to victory. All that plus the beautiful art style, fantastic difficulty, and overall sense of progression has quickly made Hades one of my all-time favorite video games. Guys... if you're a gamer, go buy Hades. Especially since the company has really been treating its employees very kindly to the point that they force people to take at least two weeks off of work every year. Supergiant Games respects its workers and its customers and they deserve all the praise because of that.

Tentative Score: 10/10

Definitive Score: 10/10

And best of all, this game is only $25 USD. That is an absolute steal in terms of video game prices. Again, I've played over 80 hours of this single player RPG with no signs of boredom. So stop what you are doing and go buy Hades now.