Game Debate #205: Hades

[Reed Rothchild | 9,637]

[Makar | 1,963]

Is it bad that I’ve never even heard of hades before?

[ZeldaFreak | 3,637]

11 minutes ago, Makar said:

Is it bad that I’ve never even heard of hades before?

It's pretty good from what I hear

[Makar | 1,963]

7 minutes ago, ZeldaFreak said:

It's pretty good from what I hear

Well dang that is quite the good feedback! I see it’s on steam which is why I haven’t heard about it. 

[fox | 1,694]

26 minutes ago, Makar said:

Is it bad that I’ve never even heard of hades before?

Greek mythology is dope.  Stay in school kids!

[Makar | 1,963]

1 minute ago, fox said:

Greek mythology is dope.  Stay in school kids!

Lol Cerberus would’ve been a cooler name. 

[spacepup | 2,421]

Gave it a 10.  I absolutely love this game!  It's an awesome modern roguelike, with tons of replayability, excellent writing and characters, and tons of style.  I'm actually playing it right now, just coincidentally hahha! 

If you haven't tried it, give it a shot! It's tough but super fun.

[Rhuno | 118]

I've played this fairly recently as part of the quest to play more of the games on IGN's latest "top 100" that I never played before. It's a good game, but doesn't sniff my top 100.

[NostalgicMachine | 260]

Never played it, but open to trying!

[Makar | 1,963]

24 minutes ago, Rhuno said:

I've played this fairly recently as part of the quest to play more of the games on IGN's latest "top 100" that I never played before. It's a good game, but doesn't sniff my top 100.

What’s on your top 10?

[spacepup | 2,421]

I may have hastily given it a 10 out of excitement, it's prob really like a 9 or 9.5 to me, but either way, it's a super fun game hahaha - I played it long time ago, and then since Hades II is in Early Access now, I wanted to get further into the Hades story by playing it more, so I picked it up again recently.  It is super well done.

[Gloves | 11,889]

EZ 9. Fantastic gameplay and a fun core loop with a super interesting story.

[G-type | 2,601]

what genre / system is it?

[LHCGreg | 116]

I could put this anywhere from 5 to 8 depending on my mood. Today my mood is that it's a 6. You don't have to look far to find praise for Hades so I'll focus on what I didn't like about it.

• Excessively metaprogression-based. You don't win (only) because you got good at the game. You win because you got good at the game AND you've dumped enough time into the game that the game decides it's ok for you to win now with that level of skill.
• Continuing the theme of artificially extending play time, you can only earn rewards for higher heat one heat level at a time. If you've cleared up to 4 heat and you can clear 16 heat with no trouble, you still have to clear 12 times to get all those rewards.

[fox | 1,694]

3 hours ago, G-type said:

what genre / system is it?

Action Roguelite.  Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, PC, Netflix.

[DarkTone | 989]

Haven't played it. 

[Strange | 1,705]

It’s one of those that even with the immense popularity I was still caught me off guard by how good it was. Great gameplay loop, fun story, the character designs and personalities are very good. Lots of different builds you can try in each run and they did a great job with the sense of progression you feel throughout. The rooms aren’t procedurally generated, they are just a bunch of well designed rooms that they randomize the order of in each run so it feels procedurally generated. The content flow is continuous, I’m surprised by how much more is still there even after you feel like you’ve seen everything or almost everything.

It‘s the first roguelike/lite/whatever that made me “get” the genre and why people like it so much.

Edited May 17 by Strange

[Rhuno | 118]

11 hours ago, Makar said:

What’s on your top 10?

Hmm, off the top of my head, and in no particular order, I'll go:
Chrono Trigger, A Link to the Past, Halo, Castlevania IV, Super Metroid, Doom 2016, Dead or Alive 3, Super C, SMB 3, SM 64

[a3quit4s | 4,140]

7/10 for me. It was really fun to play but I don’t go around talking about it. I made it to Hades but I don’t think I ever actually beat him. 

[Makar | 1,963]

1 hour ago, Rhuno said:

Hmm, off the top of my head, and in no particular order, I'll go:
Chrono Trigger, A Link to the Past, Halo, Castlevania IV, Super Metroid, Doom 2016, Dead or Alive 3, Super C, SMB 3, SM 64

Solid list. Link to the past and smb3 are in my top 3 as well. Chrono trigger is also up there but I still technically need to beat it lol. 

[TDIRunner | 2,791]

I haven't heard of it or played it.  

[Webhead123 | 690]

I've had my eye on this game for a while and think I'd probably like it. Just too many other things on my plate. I hope to get around to it eventually.

[wongojack | 232]

Steam says I've played it about 5 hours, but I'm not really sure if I'm ready to vote on it.  It was gifted to me by someone who loved it, so I pushed it up my backlog list, but the game didn't really grab me.  I found the gameplay repetitive to the point where I was ready to stop when I died rather than try to keep going, and the story didn't work for me. 

 

Here's a blurb I wrote about it in 2021

Hades - I heard so much about this game in the past 2 years or so.  10/10 GOTY type stuff.  I think it was actually at the top of many "Best of" lists for 2020.  Higher than darlings like TLOU II, Flight Simulator, Animal Crossing, and Half-Life: Alyx.  Anyway, someone bought me the PC version last month on Steam.  You may have noticed I was playing Bastion which is by the same company (Supergiant games).  I wanted to run through Bastion before trying Hades.

ANYWAY - Hades is fine.  If I had played it without any of the hype around it, I would have thought that it was a perfectly fine game for $20 - $25.  However, with all the coverage, I am not really impressed.  In fact, there's nothing really "impressive" at all about this game.  It fits right in where it should with other lower-scope titles (avoiding the term "indie" here because that doesn't really fit Supergiant) and does nothing to push any new boundaries that I can tell.  It comes complete with average voice acting and a very bland script that make me want to skip almost all the dialog.  The art style also does nothing for me and seems anachronistic with the Greek mythology theme in a way that I don't think really works at all.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,637]

9.5/10

I called it the second best game I played last year.

I was really underwhelmed by Bastion back in the day, and didn't even bother with Transistor based on that.  But the overwhelming adoration put Hades square on the front of my radar.

I absolutely loved my time with it.  Kinda reminds me of an overhead Dead Cells. And the runs are so short that's it's easy to squeeze one in whenever you have a free moment.  And whereas Dead Cells has certain builds that I naturally seemed to gravitate towards, here I feel you're rewarded for trying to master them all, which keeps the runs fresh.

And, as has been discussed ad nauseum across the internet, the blow from dying is greatly softened by the fact that it gives you a chance to continue your conversations with the cast of the underworld.  Not that you'll be dying much: this is one of the easier popular roguelikes imo.

[Strange | 1,705]

8 hours ago, Reed Rothchild said:

the blow from dying is greatly softened by the fact that it gives you a chance to continue your conversations with the cast of the underworld.

Working toward reuniting Achilles/Patroclus and Orpheus/Eurydice is really fun.

I actually haven’t beaten the final boss yet, I took a break for awhile and picked it back up because of Hades 2. He keeps beating my ass even with all of the death defiances and full health.