Hades

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Hades solves a problem that nearly every roguelike quietly pretends does not exist: dying is supposed to function as a punishment, but a run that ends ninety seconds after it started still has to feel like it was worth attempting in the first place. Supergiant Games spent close to two years refining that balance in early access before the full release on 17 September 2020, and what they landed on treats death not as a wall the player slams into and bounces off of, but as the hinge the entire narrative structure swings on. Zagreus, son of Hades, wants out of the Underworld. He cannot manage it, at least not permanently, and the whole game is built around the gap between those two facts rather than pretending that gap does not exist. The premise fits in a single sentence: the House of Hades sits at the lowest point of the world, and Zagreus keeps sneaking out of it, fighting through Tartarus, Asphodel, and Elysium in sequence, trying to reach the surface and his mother. His father drags him back every single time, usually by having him killed along the way, which in most roguelikes would simply reset the clock. What elevates Hades from a clever gimmick to arguably the best structural idea the modern roguelike genre has produced is that nothing about that repetition is wasted. Every single attempt, however short or embarrassing, is registered and remembered by the household around Zagreus: Nyx, Achilles, Megaera and a widening cast of Olympians and Underworld figures who comment on his failures, track his progress, and develop actual relationships with him across dozens or hundreds of runs. The story does not pause between deaths. It accumulates through them. That narrative trick would mean little without combat and build variety strong enough to make repeated runs feel distinct rather than identical, and Supergiant delivers there as well. Boons offered by the Olympian gods themselves stack into builds that range from methodical and defensive to recklessly aggressive, and the specific combination of weapon, boons, and Mirror of Night upgrades available on any given run changes what a successful run actually looks like far more than most isometric action roguelikes manage. Few games in the genre make failure feel this productive. Every death in Hades moves something forward, whether that is a new line of dialogue, a deepening relationship, or simply the knowledge of which build choices led to the mistake that ended the run, and that single design decision is the reason Hades sits meaningfully above a dozen other well-made roguelikes rather than simply alongside them.

The thing you'll love. Or hate.

2026-09-26 · By Game Avant

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