“Come on, one last run before falling asleep, just to unlock some resources and to see how far I go, that I feel quite fit. Just one eh, only one and then you sleep, which is already too late .. . “. Thus begins, with a sort of mantra repeated obsessively in my head, a night that is a bit of a summary of the state of excitement, frenzy, involvement and all the effects of addiction that Hades, the new creature of those indie phenomena from Supergiant Games, is capable of provoking.
And it is right to speak – especially in hindsight – of addiction and especially of the night, because the epilogue sees the undersigned so limply lying in bed but also tense like a violin string, thrilled beyond belief after the clash with the final boss resolved for the very first time in my favor. At 6:07 in the morning, three runs after the proverbial last one mentioned above. Power of a bewitching spell, of an almost perfect formula that the very talented Bastion and Transistor developers have borrowed from that masterpiece that is Dead Cells (by the way, recover our Dead Cells review) doing it anyway their own, adapting it and deepening it in a video game clearly destined to become an absolute cult.
The new roguelike star
Mind you: that Hades could have all the cards in order to break through it was understood right away. After all, it was enough to start from Supergiant Games, a small but very vigorous Californian team that over time became synonymous with an unassailable quality and an extraordinary audiovisual refinement, to be strictly accompanied by a very special attention to the narrative component. In short, one of those studies to which we must pay attention almost regardless, because you know that they will certainly have something significant to say – even in the case of a result perhaps less bombastic than usual, as had happened in 2017 with Pyre. And what about the deadly style that Hades exudes from every single pixel?
Jen Zee, the company’s extremely talented Art Director, seems to have once again overcome herself, managing to go even beyond that typically pictorial approach that has always been her trademark: the look here is instead that of a kind of bewitching interactive cartoon, with a masterful use of color and chiaroscuro, a sensational character design and continuous glimpses of a beauty to take your breath away, because believe me that every single frame of the adventure could potentially be transformed into a wonderful painting.
What would have been much more difficult to predict is that Hades could enter the fierce landscape of roguelikes so straight, imposing himself to the point of even going so far as to worry (if not dethrone) a sacred monster like Dead Cells: a concept I I realize that it is difficult to accept the first ones, that one run after another will make its way with strength, winding through the hours spent deciding which could be the best weapon depending on the approach to combat and the resources invested to improve your relationship with the capricious gods of Olympus.
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Hades will see you dressed as Zagreus, the son of Hades and in effect the prince of the Underworld: a hero with a tormented soul, who feels he does not belong to the Kingdom of the Dead in which he grew up. And so, to rediscover himself and to rebel against the tyrannical personality of his father, the protagonist will embark on a daring escape from the afterlife, in a desperate attempt to leave the afterlife behind to enter the world of human beings.
A journey that will prove to be a real Odyssey, brilliantly represented through an Ancient Greece reinterpreted in pop sauce in a story that also justifies the roguelike approach from a narrative point of view. Because the beauty of Hades (or rather, one of the countless points in favor of the title …) lies, as per Supergiant Games tradition, in its commendable multi-level depth.
It does not matter, then, whether it is the grotesque “bureaucratic” representation of Hades, which becomes a sort of hybrid between a luxurious royal palace and a municipal office perennially congested by the incessant arrival of the souls of the dead, or in the fact that the numerous characters who you will meet on your path will actually remember you, making references to previous runs and joking about your status as an immortal with the luxury of being able to try and try again without ever giving up: the feeling is that of a sensational solidity in the round, of a class and of a maniacal cure pinned in the details ranging from large to small. And so it becomes almost automatic to get passionate about events, get lost in the abundant textual descriptions, try to establish preferential relationships with this or that divinity by deepening the dating component yes.
Beyond all, the heart of Hades’ magic lies in his own sensational gameplay: at first, part of the fascination lies in the impression of seeing oneself a little bewildered, of being thrown into the center of a system about which little or nothing is said. Just a few indications on the basic commands and go: best wishes and good luck, at the mercy of an undoubtedly challenging ascent yet immediately satisfying, promising and full of nuances of which the variety is not fully grasped.
Because, as you will gradually discover – coming to interpret what certain symbols placed above the doors of the procedural labyrinths mean or trying to understand how to best spend the numerous accumulated resources – the White Rabbit’s lair will prove to be much deeper than you might imagine , for a playful system of astounding richness. Although always starting rigorously from the beginning, to be precise from the choice of the weapon with which to try to escape from the Underworld, every run in Hades will in fact leave you with something, gratifying you and feeding in a not too implicit way the feeling of growth and of background progress.
Never give up!
Of course, you will necessarily have to deal with the (numerous) failures announced, with the deaths in sequence, with the idea of trying and trying again. To metabolize, so to speak, the very concept of game over, to be interpreted, however, not as a failure in a broad sense, but as a teaching, as an opportunity to have had experience and in the worst case, however, gleaned something from the perspective of Zagreus’s grand plan of progressive improvement. Why precisely no run in Hades will ever really be wasted, if only for the emotions given away even after several hours by a formidable combat system, from action of the finest workmanship.
An agile and snappy combat system, commendable in its immediacy and fantastic in the feeling of the shots, which goes hand in hand with the construction of a different protagonist every time. Because what will make all the difference in the world will be first and foremost the choice of the weapon – a fundamental constraint that cannot be changed until the KO, and which sees enormous differences from the point of view of battle dynamics if the bow is adopted rather than the shield or the sword – and then the definition in progress of a real build to be created step by step, accepting the gifts of the various divinities.
In full Hellenic style, the intercession from above, whether it is the favor of Zeus himself or encounters with minor mythological figures such as Sisyphus and Eurydice, will in fact go to powerfully affect your fate: accepting a gift will mean choosing between three random alternatives within a list of active and passive abilities dependent on the divinity itself. By doing so you can enjoy amazing bonuses, triggering combinations of perks capable of making you perfect war machines: a gimmick from theevident strategic value, which does nothing but contribute to making an already sublime videogame even more exciting, more multifaceted and more enjoyable.
All for the benefit of replayability, of freshness and long-term appeal, because even the fortieth game will certainly hide something to discover, new joints to experiment and much more to tell. Without considering, however, a diabolically satisfying end game, because in a certain sense it could be argued that the real Hades begins right after defeating the final boss, with a system of increasing the difficulty destined to push the total amount of hours towards peaks that I don’t even dare to imagine.
All that glitters gold? In this case the answer is really an unequivocal yes, because there are no obvious defects in one production with astounding solidity, which certainly benefited from the long phase of early access on PC to present itself at the release with a balance and a truly enviable amount of content.
Perhaps something more could have been done in the management of upgrades related to weapons (which cannot be recovered and which are a very precious material that we tend to spend at first without real knowledge of the facts …) and it is also necessary to report for duty to reports a terrible bug in the Switch version of the game: an odious and fortunately numerically very limited error that compromises the rescue, on which the American developers are already working. Yes, by the way from the edition dedicated to the Nintendo console: Hades performs great on the Big N’s hybrid console, proving a perfect match with Switch’s innate portability (and in the future the cross save of Hades between Switch and PC will also arrive). In short, yet another great arrow in the bow of what is increasingly the indie machine of dreams.
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