With the impending release of Theros block in Magic: The Gathering, and having heard a lot about how the game has changed since I last played, I figured now was a good time to dive back into Supergiant Games’s latest work, still currently in Early Access: Hades.
Like Elspeth and so many, many characters in Greek myth, let us attempt to escape the underworld.
I have adored every release Supergiant Games has put out since Bastion, and Hades is no exception to that rule. Even though it’s still being developed, it felt feature complete even on release, and as time goes on it’s only gotten more refined.
Hades’s also makes excellent use of it’s source material, creating compelling characters and relationships between members of the Greek pantheon that most of us are familiar with. That moment on stream where Orpheus retells his story for Zagreus off screen genuinely made me laugh because it signaled that the developers knew exactly what they were doing. Similarly, I loved seeing Theseus and Asterius fighting side by side in a tag-team boss fight at the fields of Elysium.
I also can’t help but notice that the team retooled a couple of old ideas so that they would have more impact during a given run. When I last touched the game, Heat was a resource one could acquire, similar to Darkness. Except, when Darkness is used for character upgrades, Heat would add addition challenge modifiers to each run. Since then, it’s been folded into a new bounty system, where players can agree to tougher conditions in the hope of getting higher rewards. And seeing that on top of new systems like the renovations makes me all the more eager to dive in once more.
I don’t know how many future runs will be capture on stream, but know that I’ll be playing this way more than I used to.
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