Hades

In one of my earlier blog posts, I defined the quality and enjoyment of a video game by whether or not it has you making interesting choices. Consequential, meaningful, and impactful choices. It doesn’t matter what the game is, what you do, who you play as, or what the story is. Does it have you make interesting decisions, and is there a payoff to those decisions in some gameplay or narrative form? Well, I’m here to tell you that Hades has topped my Game of the Year list by allowing you to make the best choices ever offered in a video game.

When you begin Hades, what you notice immediately is that it’s different. There is no formal tutorial. There’s nothing that tells you “Press Y to attack” or “Press B to dash”. You sort of just hit the buttons yourself and figure it out. As you progress, you see icons of gods and other miscellaneous items everywhere. Again, it’s never explained what these are. You simply need to acquire them to see what they do. Right off the bat, the game is making a statement that it’s a different type of beast. It’s telling you that you need to learn and memorize certain things in order to have a chance at success. And it’s this lack of traditional tutorialization that makes the rest of your decisions so meaningful.

Like any other traditional roguelite, you progress through an entire area in Hades before moving on to the next. The twist in Hades is that you’re still making decisions that have a direct and very consequential impact on your run throughout your progression of that area. Clearing every “chamber” in each region offers you a choice of two to three other chambers to enter, each containing a reward or a god boon that can help you immensely during the run. While other roguelites focus on the hack-and-slash intensity of combat to keep you engaged, Hades asks that in between those intense combat encounters, you continue to make decisions that feel easy in the moment but have a big impact on your run. This back-and-forth of intense combat encounters bookended with meaningful decision making is not unlike chess-boxing, where a physical show of force and adrenaline pumping punches are frequently interrupted by quick sessions of chess moves before resuming the aforementioned punching.

Even within the macro-decisions, Hades has you making tons of decisions within those decisions. Every god boon offers you three choices to pick from, with differing rarity levels (chaos boons complement this by offering an irresistible high-risk high-reward choice to mix things up). Every item shop offers you three choices to pick from. You get to choose which people to gift nectar to. On an even higher macro level, you get to pick which weapon to do the run, along with an optional form of that weapon.

After clearing the game once, these choices get even deeper with the game allowing you to self-impose certain difficulty modifiers (“pacts”) for a chance to earn even more rewards. And on the micro level, the game has the randomized chambers with different enemies every time, giving you a ton of flexibility in how to approach the combat encounter based on the build you’ve got in that moment.

That’s a lot of decision making in every run. And somehow, all of it feels incredibly satisfying. Even a screwed up run doesn’t feel bad because you get to go back to the House of Hades and improve the furnishings of the place or chat with the characters to find out more about the world and the story. You get to pick which weapons to upgrade, which mirror talents to upgrade, which prophecies you want to fulfill in the next run, which keepsake to choose and level up, and so much more. If I haven’t made it clear by now, decision making is basically the name of the game here.

And despite all this, the game somehow manages to feel accessible and simple. I have no idea how the brilliant minds at Supergiant pulled this off, but this is by far their greatest accomplishment yet. I’ve seen non-gamers get sucked into the “just one more run” mentality that every roguelite strives for. Despite all the complexity and chaos of the game, it manages to be easy to jump into and play a run in the middle of the workday during yor lunch break. It even has that elusive and highly sought after effect in game design where when you’re not playing the game, you’re constantly thinking about ways to strategize and organize your build in the game.

I haven’t even gotten to the build diversity in the game yet. As you do more and more runs, you learn a lot about what it takes to beat the final boss. And as you play over and over again, you get to learn and improve on how to actually create the ideal build. You might find yourself picking Poms of Power more often than you used to. You might find yourself equipping keepsakes that you once thought were useless. You might end up loving boons from certain gods that you once hated. It’s all so incredibly well crafted that it really blows my mind.

When the game was in Early Access, I briefly toyed around with it here and there, but didn’t get far enough in the gameplay loop to actually get the core experience. Now in v1.0, I’m sort of addicted to it. It’s been out for less than a month and I’ve already put in over a 100 hours into it. It’s such an addicting and enjoyable experience end-to-end. I cannot believe that in a year when a Half-Life game and a Last of Us sequel came out, in a year where incredible games like Doom: Eternal, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Animal Crossing, and Ghost of Tsushima came out, that Hades is currently my top contender for Game of the Year. Granted, Cyberpunk 2077 has yet to come out, but my endless runs of Hades have been keeping me occupied from doomscrolling to find out what fresh hell is roiling out in the world. Goes to show the power of indie games made by extremely talented small teams. Well done, Supergiant, and congrats!