Guest Post 001: Hades Broke Me Out of My Comfort Zone
Hades has been dominating much of my free time over the past few weeks, and for good reason. The roguelike dungeon crawler from Supergiant Games has a phenomenal gameplay loop and the developer’s talent at storytelling is on full display. You play as Zagreus, the prince of the Underworld, as he attempts to escape hell in search of answers surrounding his origin.
I’m a sucker for a quality roguelike, and Hades definitely qualifies. But I didn’t expect the game to sit me down and reflect on some weird habits I have while playing games.
Stuck in a Rut
A few months ago when I was finally getting around to Assassin’s Creed Origins, I was initially flexible in my weapon choices. For the first few hours of the game I tested swords, dual swords, a mace, and a spear before finding my first two handed axe. For some reason the slow but high damage weapon resonated with my version of Bayek, the first Assassin. I stuck with the two handed axe for the rest of the 40 hour game, enabled by the ability to upgrade a weapon and raise its level to match your own. Once I found a legendary axe with a cool power, I just got stuck in a rut and visited the blacksmith every couple of hours to bring it up in level.
After I recognized what I’ve been doing in video games lately, it was easy to spot the pattern in other games I’ve played this year. In Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night I found this awesome flying sword called the Flying Edge and I pretty much refused to swap away from it even as I outgrew its damage. Instead, I relied on its tendency to poke enemies from afar until I was able to finally upgrade it into the Oracle Blade, which let me throw two swords out at a time. Double the poking power! In Bloodborne, I poured all of my resources into the Saw Cleaver, and rarely tested out any other weapon in my playthrough. In Spider-Man I swore I was going to test out all of the suit powers as I unlocked them, but kept going back to the Battle Focus power since I needed so much healing on the hardest difficulty.
So it seems like I find a weapon or tactic of choice in games and get a little too comfortable with it. Luckily, Hades taught me to recognize some of these patterns and showed me the benefit of experimenting with every weapon and build.
Hades and the Art of Flexibility
As you attempt to climb up the various levels of hell in Hades, Olympian gods provide boons to augment your abilities and help point you in the direction of a playstyle. Each god has a theme centered around their personality, and with nine gods offering help, there are a ton of options to play around with. For example, Poseidon’s boons give your abilities knockback, Zeus’ boons set off a bolt of chain lightning, and Dionysus helps get the enemies drunk. That’s right, it’s always happy hour when Dionysus shows up.
Additionally, there are six Infernal Arms (weapons) to choose from in Hades, each with their own playstyle. Do you want to get up and personal and throw a flurry of punches? Then the Twin Fists of Malphon will do the trick. If you prefer to hang back and fight, the Heart-Seeking Bow or Adamant Rail Gun will suit you just fine. After a few escape attempts you’ll figure out which weapon or weapons are your favorite, but Supergiant Games doesn’t want you to just stick with only one.
After each escape attempt, one of the six weapons will have a purple glow around it giving you a 20% boost to darkness and gems on your next run if picked. We aren’t talking about a massive boost on the currency you’ll spend in between runs, but it’s a great incentive to hop around in your choice of weapon.
The six weapons in Hades each have a distinct feel, meaning you won’t grow bored from run to run. Credit: Supergiant Games
Incentives to test out different weapons and abilities are an integral part of the design in Hades, and an aspect of the game that I truly love. To track your experimentation you can use the Fated List of Minor Prophecies, a handy document you can access in between each of your runs. Fulfilling these prophecies will reward you with all kinds of helpful resources that upgrade your abilities or provide a fresh cosmetic look on the underworld. The list of prophecies is quite extensive, and the ones I’m working on right now give you bonus gems once you have taken every boon from each god’s list. This has been driving me to continually try new techniques and builds, even after 30 hours of gameplay.
For example, I didn’t think I’d enjoy Poseidon’s knockback, that’s just something that’s never been at the top of my list in games. I thought that if I was wailing on an enemy in melee range, the last thing I’d want to do is push them further away from me. However, once I started to explore Poseiden’s boons and saw the devastating power of pushing enemies into lava or slamming them against walls for bonus damage, I was sold.
The Prophecy List helps you keep track of boons to take, enemies to defeat and so, so much more. Credit: Supergiant Games
***Mild Hades Gameplay Spoilers Below***
You know what’s really wild? I haven’t even covered all of the ways Hades gives players options to change up their experience and up the replayability of the game. Using a persistent currency called Darkness, you can upgrade 12 different traits via the Mirror of Night in Zagreus’ bedroom. Each trait can individually be flipped to a different version as well (the red vs. green in the screenshot below) further tailoring how you escape hell.
Spending Darkness at the mirror in your bedroom unlocks tons of passive bonuses to Zagreus, and the two sides of the mirror help you define your playstyle. Credit: Supergiant Games
Once you do finally finish a run, the game unlocks a Heat system, challenging you to tune up the difficulty using 15 different conditions in exchange for additional high value rewards. These shiny rewards (treasure as SoraRabbit would say) are available for each level of heat you complete the game on all six weapons, upping the replayability of the game to ridiculous heights. There are so many incentives out there for being flexible on weapon choice and difficulty modifiers.
***End of Spoilers***
I can already see the impact of Hades breaking me out of my comfort zone. Inspired by the amazing experience of Hades, I picked up the first three titles from Supergiant Games. I’ve already devoured Bastion and found myself giving every weapon in the game an actual shot on multiple levels. I also started the lengthy Assassin’s Creed Odyssey last week and have vowed to continually swap weapon types over the likely 80-hour epic. Thankfully, it seems like upgrading weapon levels in Odyssey is much more expensive, so it’ll be harder to consistently do.
I’m grateful for the design of Hades to teach me the benefits of being flexible, and I hope it’s a lesson that sticks for a long time after the credits roll.
Aaron Blackman is a blogger and Twitch Streamer. You can read his reviews and thoughts on video gaming at his site: Aaron’s Video Game Blog. His Twitch username is Flagg05. Updates for both can be found on his Twitter: @acblackman.
