Hades has been on my radar for a long-ass time thanks to it being a Supergiant joint and the ongoing docuseries from noclip. It’s everything I hoped it would be. Outstanding art direction, immensely addictive, solid progression model for a roguelite (you’re always guaranteed to get some new story progression, permanent skill progression, and likely some kind of long-term weapon progression in every run), and a great variety of things to dig into and pour time into.

With all the skills, perks, upgrades, and combinations, it’s really amazing how well the game gels. Often when a game tries to go completely nuts with variety you end up with some things being clearly optimal over others, and some being objectively worse than others and some that are just like an automatic restart because it’s detrimental to take at all. There’s basically none of that. Sure, critical strikes aren’t great right now due to proc rates, but nearly everything else just works.

You can take effectively any skills and make a viable build that has some neat synergistic combo that results in a unique (or, at least distinct) playstyle, and it feels good no matter what it is. That really isn’t easy. Roguelites often fall into the trap of either how good your options are varies wildly, or everything has been filed down to the point that everything feels nerfed. Hades doesn’t. Supergiant seems totally fine leaning into everything being equally powerful and satisfying, and that’s refreshing for the genre.

I’m 31 hours in. I’ve maxed out all but one skill, got all the keepsakes, unlocked most weapons, and have beaten the game on low-heat with all 6 base weapons. I’m probably not done, but I’m approaching the point that I’d be ok with setting the game down until there’s a content patch. Probably won’t, though, until I get 10 clears, and maybe until I get a specific one of the summons. Maybe until I get all the aspects unlocked. Reasonably soon.

It’s yet another really really great game that’s gone on this list. Strongly recommended.

2020-10-19 - Addendum⌗

It’s so good I went back and got all the Steam Achievements. I never do that.

Now 80 hours in I’ve determined exactly three things that suck about the game, which is really one thing that sucks about the game:

Gating quest and story progression behind random chance sucks.
Gating certain boons behind random chance sucks, and I swear the Chaos Legendary Boon straight up does not exist.
Easily the worst fishing minigame in any game I’ve played in modern history.

…it all comes down to random chance. So much of the late game is dependent and gated upon randomness. Need to get a specific duo boon? Random. Need to get a specific Legendary? Random. Need to talk to a certain character to progress their story? Double Random (random to show, random to get a voice line that makes progress). Need to make progress on your lute? That’s not random, that’s just a soul-crushing grind.

There’s so much about this game that is completely up-front about what you need to do next, which is so refreshing. But then they turn around and undermine it by randomizing progress. Though, even with this one glaring fault, the game is outstanding.