Saturday Morning Gaming: Hades

Death.

This is one of the things that is difficult to work into any given video game. For the most part, video games tend to run with the “you died, you weren’t supposed to, here’s a short cutscene, now let’s take you back to the most recent checkpoint.” Like, say, the Batman Arkham games. You get into a fight, you get overwhelmed, and a bad guy waltzes out and says something cutting and then, tah-dah, you’re back at the most recent checkpoint and you get to try again.

“It didn’t happen”, is what the game says.

That certainly makes the game more fun to play but it’s kinda got a verisimilitude problem.

The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War games fixed this up by having your character be a deathless wraith who, quite regularly!, died. And after the orc killed you, you got a cutscene of the orc saying something like “I’m going to get a hat! They’ll call me Blarg the Hat!” and, yep, next time you saw this orc, he had a hat on. And his name was Blarg the Hat. And, yes, you resented him just that much more.

This game not only made dying no longer be something that didn’t really happen, it turned the death into something that changed the game.

Well, Hades is a game that has death built into the game loop. Dying is part of it.

You are Zagreus. Son of Hades Himself. You have decided to leave Hades Itself. You start at the bottom and you are fighting to get outside and go to the surface. You’re a level one schlub and you have 50 hit points and a sword and that’s pretty much it.

And you have to fight your way out through Tartarus.

Along the way, you’re going to get in fights. Your sword has a handful of attacks. Tap X three times to do a stabby combo against monsters. Hold Y down to do a smashy area attack and do damage to everybody in a radius of a short distance away from you. Press B to cast your powerful ranged attack (it’ll cost you a gem to cast it… you can regain it by just running over and picking it up, though… watch out, it’s also likely to get lodged in most of the monsters you hit with it). And you can dash with the A button (best defense: don’t be there).

And now you’re off. Fight monsters. Don’t get hit. I got hit and it did 10 points of damage. Holy cow! That’s, like 20% of my hitpoints!!! Then get your reward. Then go into the next room. Get in a fight. Don’t get hit! Get your reward. But after this fight, I had a choice of options:

That on the left was the symbol for Artemis. That on the right was a Pomegranate. My choice was whether I wanted a boon from Artemis or to upgrade one of the boons I already had (I have a boon from Athena and a boon from Dionysus at this point) and I chose to get the new boon from Artemis:

And then I got to choose which boon I wanted… which then improved me enough that I was able to fight all the way to the End-of-the-level boss of Tartarus! And, in short order, this happened:

That’s that. I died. I ended up floating along the river Styx (like the band!) and made it back home.

Whereupon I wandered over to my father who promptly told me “Told ya so.”

I walk around, talk to a handful of people, visit my own room where I encounter The Mirror That Can Change Things:

Wander out and see that there are some weapons other than my sword…

I note that some of the weapons are locked and I’ll have to collect keys to unlock them and then I go out and do it again. And again. And again.

Here’s where the game is so very devious. You see how you get to collect keys to unlock weapons, right? Well the game is chock full of that sort of thing. There are so very many things you can buy and so very many different types of currency that you are always juuuuust this close to reaching a milestone of some sort.

Like, as you play, you pick up Charon’s Obols. These are gold coins that you can use to buy stuff in the various shops along the way to the surface.

As you can see there, I had coin enough to purchase either a pomegranate or an HP boost (the food) but not enough gold to pick up an additional boon from Athena.

Back home, I can use the keys I find to unlock weapons and unlock further things that can be changed in the Mirror That Can Change Things. As you can see in the mirror, you buy those changes with a currency called “darkness”. In the shot there, you see a handful of things but I want to point out that Chthonic Vitality gives you one HP as you leave any given room. One HP?, I hear you ask. That ain’t barely nothin’! True, it’s not. But if you lose 10 HP in a room, you can buy Chthonic Vitality and get 10% of that back when you leave. Upgrade it again, and get *TWO* HP when you leave. Death Defiance is an ability to, after you get reduced to Zero, come back where you are with 50% of your HP and keep fighting. Hey, this just might get you past that miniboss that is so very troublesome.

And you go and you fight and you unlock and you gather and you buy upgrades and then you see that there are little small cosmetic upgrades and, eventually, you can do stuff like buy a towel rack for when you walk back out of the river Styx.

No, you don’t interact with it. It’s just there. But now you know that, if you *NEEDED* a towel when you got out of the river Styx, you’d have one.

And you fight and you upgrade and you learn the different fighting styles from the different weapons…

I don’t want to get into spoilers but the four weapons you see in the above screenshot are your trusty sword, your trusty spear, your trusty shield (think Captain America… that’s how you’re going to be using it to fight), and your trusty bow. There are two more trusty weapons that you get to find and then unlock as you go further and further up and out of Hades. And each one plays completely differently. The sword you get in close and you’re probably going to get hit but you do a *LOT* of damage. The bow does a lot of damage but it takes a second to charge up and shoot. The shield is great and fast long distance, but doesn’t do a whole lot of damage (up close it does a lot). And the spear? A nice jack-of-all-trades weapon. Good (but not great) at close range, good (but not great) at distance.

But, as you play, you get different boons and these boons change how the weapons work. Zeus, for example, can give your X or Y attack lightning damage. Artemis can give you the potential to do critical hit damage. Dionysus can have one of your attacks do poison damage. Poseidon can add pushback to your attacks. Ares can add a delayed second strike.

And then you start to notice the combos. There’s an upgrade to the shield that can have it hit +4 enemies as it flies around when you press Y. If you combine that with the Boon from Dionysus That adds poison to the Y attack? Suddenly you’re poisoning all of the monsters (or almost all of the monsters) on the board!

You can give the spear an upgrade that has you attack in a flurry of jabs. If you add Artemis’s boon to give bonus chances to get critical hits with your X attack, you’re effectively a critical hit sewing machine!

And you’ll die and die again and die again. I went back and looked at my numbers and my first two runs both lasted about 4-5 minutes each. I acquired a grand total of *ONE* boon for both runs. It wasn’t until run #3 that I *FINALLY* got a second boon. It wasn’t until my 5th playthrough that I finally got to the end boss of Tartarus. It wasn’t until my 7th that I finally passed her. Barely!

And, each time I played, I got a few more gems, another key or two, a little more darkness… and unlocked this and that and the other thing until, finally, on my EIGHTY FIRST life, I finally beat the game.

Along the way, I kept upgrading things, unlocking things, and the game threw a handful of “prophecies” at me that allowed me to unlock even more stuff. The prophecies are stuff like “will get every upgrade for the sword” or “will get every boon that Artemis has to offer”. And as I played, over and over again, I kept getting closer to achieving any of literally dozens of little goals for myself. Each death was rewarding… and each new runthrough of Hades promised maybe I’d unlock one more thing, get one more upgrade, achieve one more prophecy.

Maybe even get a rack of towels for the people leaving the Styx.

And, along the way, each of the gods you encounter has a distinct personality (and, yes, they squabble and are petty as heck). You’ll meet a lot of minor celebrities in the various levels of Hades and have fun conversations with them (maybe even engage in a contest with them from time to time) and play through again and again to see them again and again.

And, jeez. That first time you beat the game? It feels like, *FINALLY*, you figured out how to play and got lucky with your boons and upgrades and whew. Okay, one more run. I’ve just got to get Athena’s Legendary Boon and then I only need to get two more Legendary boons until I complete that prophecy.

Seriously, this game is *FUN*. It’s a game that has me pick up my controller at dinner and, next thing I know, it’s bedtime. If you like ARPGs at all, you should run, not walk, and pick this puppy up.

So… what are you playing?