Hades (video game)

Hades is presented in an isometric view, with the player controlling Zagreus (center) as he fights his way out of the Underworld.

The player takes the role of Zagreus, the prince of the Underworld, who is trying to escape the realm to get away from his dispassionate father, Hades, and reach Mount Olympus. His quest is supported by the other Olympians, who grant him gifts to help fight the beings that protect the exit from the Underworld. He is also helped on his quest by notorious residents of the Underworld, such as Sisyphus, Eurydice, or Patroclus. The game features four "biomes", or locales of the underworld: Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, and the Temple of Styx.

The game is presented in an isometric view with the player in control of Zagreus. The player starts a run-through of the game by trying to fight their way through a number of rooms; the room layouts are pre-determined, but their order and the enemies that appear are randomly determined. The game has a hack and slash combat system.[1] The player has a primary weapon, a special attack, and a magic "cast" which can be used from long range. Upon starting a run, one of the Olympians will provide a gift, a choice of three persistent boosts for that run that the player can select from; the gifts are themed based on the Olympian, for example with Zeus providing lightning damage effects. Subsequently, after clearing a room, the player will be shown the type of reward they may earn if they complete the next room or choice of next rooms, ranging from additional Olympian gifts, restorative items, in-game currency, a store to purchase improvements, or keys that can be used in the meta-game to improve Zagreus' initial attributes for the next run. Should Zagreus' health points drop to zero, he "dies" and ends up facing his father, removing all gifts granted from the last run.[2]

Between runs, Zagreus can explore the Underworld before setting on a new quest. Here, the player can use the keys to unlock permanent upgrades for Zagreus, order construction of new support features for the Underworld, or obtain new weapons. They can also have Zagreus interact with the various characters of the Underworld, which provide narrative elements to the game and may also provide quests with additional rewards.[2][3][4]

Zagreus, the son of Hades, seeks to escape his father's realm in the Underworld. He is aided by his adoptive mother Nyx, who gives him a special mirror that empowers him with various abilities via collected Darkness; the Gods of Olympus to whom he has reached out, who provide him with Boons that give him special powers, and his mentor Achilles, who provides him with the Infernal Arms, weapons that possess powerful and hidden aspects of their past, present, and future wielders. Hades hinders Zagreus' progress by unleashing the Underworld's various residents on him, including the Fury Megaera, Zagreus' ex-lover (and later on her sisters Alecto and Tisiphone); a Lernean Bone Hydra; the legendary Theseus alongside his new partner Asterius, and finally Hades himself.

It's eventually revealed that Zagreus wishes to escape the Underworld to find Persephone, his birth mother whom he never knew, having always been told he was the child of Nyx. Hades refuses to even allow her name to be spoken in his House and it is said that unimaginable punishment should befall anyone who disobeys his order. Nyx, on the other hand, decides to help Zagreus find the truth about his real mother for himself by putting him in contact with his relatives on Olympus. After finally defeating Hades for the first time, Zagreus finds Persephone in Greece. After a tearful reunion, Zagreus discovers that since he is bound to the Underworld like his father, he cannot survive long on the surface. Despite this, he promises to keep escaping to spend time with Persephone and learn the truth of her absence.

Over the course of these visits, Persephone explains that she had a loving marriage to Hades (which the latter states was a result of Zeus having "given" her to Hades as a gift for taking charge of the Underworld, something which Hades thought was incredibly disrespectful and never forgave Zeus for) until Zagreus was stillborn due to the Fates having decreed that Hades would never sire an heir. Persephone ran away in grief but refused to return to her birthplace on Olympus which she disliked due to the constant bickering and posturing of the Gods. However, Zagreus was eventually brought back to life via Nyx's powers in an extremely lengthy process. Persephone refuses to return to the Underworld because she fears retribution from the Olympians towards Hades and the Underworld should they discover the truth about her disappearance, especially her mother Demeter who has covered the mortal world in an endless winter in grief for her daughter. Zagreus eventually convinces her to return by reminding her of the bonds of family and they finally sail down from Greece towards the House of Hades on the River Styx ferried by Charon. Persephone resumes her duties as Queen of the Underworld and Hades, now with a renewed respect for his son, allows Zagreus to continue his escape attempts under the guise of finding security vulnerabilities in the Underworld.

In an epilogue, Persephone comes up with the idea of reconciling with the Olympians by inviting them all to a feast in the House of Hades. There they claim that Hades and Persephone eloped and had Zagreus, but avoided telling them about Persephone's resentment of Olympus and further add a false claim that due to her having eaten Underworld pomegranate seeds, she can only leave the Underworld a few months out of the year. The Olympians readily accept this explanation, though it's implied they know what really happened and simply wish to move on. Everyone now reconciled, Zagreus' new duties to escape his home continue.

Following the release of their previous game, Pyre, Supergiant Games was interested in developing a game that would help to open up their development process to players, so that they would end up making the best game they possibly could from player feedback. They recognized that this would not only help with the gameplay approach but also with narrative elements, and thus opted to use the early access approach in developing Hades once they had established the foundation of the game.[5] As Supergiant was still a small team of about 20 employees, they knew they could only support early access across one platform, with the intent to then port to other platforms near the completion of the game. Supergiant had spoken to Epic Games and learned of their intent to launch their own Epic Games Store, and felt the experimental platform was an appropriate match with Hades. Supergiant's decision was made in part due to Epic's focus on content creators, as Supergiant had developed Hades in mind to be a game favorable to streamers, which would be benefited through the Epic Games Store.[5] Supergiant anticipated that Hades would take about three years to complete, comparable to the development time of their previous titles.[5]

In terms of the game's narrative and approach, the Supergiant team had discussed what type of game they wanted to make next, and settled on a concept that would be easy to pick up and play, which could be played in very short periods, and had opportunities for expanding on after release, driving them towards a roguelike game, which have generally best utilized the early access approach.[5] The roguelike approach also fit well with their past gameplay design goals, where they aimed to continue to add in new tricks or tools for the player that would make them reconsider how they have been playing the game to that point.[5] Pyre had been an attempt to create a branching open-ended narrative, but once the game was released, Supergiant recognized that most players would only play through the game once and thus lose out on the branching narrative perspective. With Hades established as a roguelike, the team felt the branching narrative approach would be much more appropriate since the genre calls for players to repeatedly play through the game.[6]

For the setting, Supergiant considered revisiting the worlds from their previous games but felt a wholly new setting would be better. Supergiant's creative director Greg Kasavin came onto the idea of Greek mythology, a topic he had been interested in since his youth.[5] Originally, it was planned to have the game set in the ever-shifting mazes of Minos to support the roguelike facets but found it difficult to incorporate the branching narrative factors.[6] This led to them the overall concept of Zagreus attempting to escape from his father Hades. Kasavain compared the gods as "a big dysfunctional family that we can see ourselves in", and that by having Zagreus repeatedly try and fail to escape from Hades, it would provide both the type of slapstick comedy that he felt captured the relationships in this "family", as well as the player experience typically associated with roguelikes where one moment the player may feel invincible only to be quickly defeated and brought back to the start the next moment.[5][6] The Greek God narrative also easily informed the benefits that the player obtains as they progress through the game, representing the different powers of the gods, and various gameplay elements such as Trials of the Gods, emphasizing the fickle relationship the gods had with each other.[6] These bits of dialog are advanced with each run through the game, thus making each attempt to escape meaningful compared to traditional roguelikes, which Supergiant felt would help draw more players into the game.[7]

In contrast to Bastion and Transistor, which were more linear games and thus had more control over how the player progressed, Hades presented the challenge of writing dialog for the multitude of routes the player could progress in the game. Kasavin and his writers draft out about ten hours' worth of dialog between Zagreus and the non-player characters based on a large number of potential chained events that could happen to the player. For example, while in a run, the player may encounter Eurydice, and on return to the main hub after failing the run, meet Eurydice's husband Orpheus, who, because of that prior meeting, asks the player to deliver a message to Eurydice the next time they encounter her.[6] These dialog events also tied into improvements at the hub once the player saw through the chain of events.[6]

Hades was announced at The Game Awards 2018 on December 6, 2018, and confirmed as one of the first third-party titles to be offered on the newly-announced Epic Games Store.[8] According to Geoff Keighley, the host and organizer of the Game Awards show, Supergiant's Amir Rao and Greg Kasavin approached him at the 2018 D.I.C.E. Summit in February about Hades and their intention to release it as an early access title on the same day of the Game Awards.[9] Hades was a timed-exclusive on the Epic Games Store, later releasing for Steam on December 10, 2019.[10] Supergiant officially released the game out of early access on September 17, 2020, coinciding with the release on the Nintendo Switch platform.[11] Though cross-save between the Windows and Switch version had been planned at that point, Supergiant had to put this off until a patch that was released in December 2020, with crosssaving enabled through the Epic Games Store account platform.[12]

Hades received "universal acclaim", according to review aggregator Metacritic.[13][14] During its nearly two year long early access, Hades sold seven hundred thousand copies. Within three days of its official release, Hades sold an additional three hundred thousand copies for a sales total of over one million.[20] In particular, critics praised Hades for its combination of smooth gameplay, deep loot systems, and captivating story, remarking that the game offered dozens of hours of unique gameplay.[21][22][23]

Hades won over 50 awards for numerous independent and action genre achievements, including Game of the Year alongside with The Last of Us Part II. Several publications regarded it as one of the best video games of 2020, including Polygon,[24] Giant Bomb,[25] IGN,[26] USGamer,[27] Destructoid,[28] Time,[29] The Washington Post,[30] Slant Magazine,[31] and Entertainment Weekly.[32]

• Official website