There’s someone I keep around in my life purely because I like watching them take everything they know and reduce it to Content. A hike in the woods becomes an instagram parable of what they found. New jobs become showcases of the personal brand: This is who I am and what I do reflects it.
All vulnerability is meant for the observer.

I don’t really know if I like the guy, but it livens up the Facebook feed. What else can you do right now, am I right?

Hades is the latest Supergiant Games Supergiant Game. Everything in Hades feels shareable. Everyone wants to be the cast’s whole boyfriend if they can – it is a spectacular kind of Not Horny Horny that’s making waves. Zagreus bares his chest – chiseled but not in the way you feel like he’s got opinions about weightlifting. You can make the bad boys kiss if you want, or pursue much more smoky voiced options.

Supergiant probably didn’t set out to make the game this way, but yes, actually, they totally did. The very act of writing about it makes me feel dirty. Like a lover called back after dark to have a night of carnal remembering. Manipulated? Gaslit? Is this how it feels to be someone’s forlorn lover?

Zagreus is the name of our personality, our protagonist. The driving force in the world. It’s Zagreus who sets out from his home through his home to find a world outside of it. It’s just – every step of the way is so frantic and so occupied.

How can I luxuriate in the art direction or voice acting if every moment proceeding is going to be one where I have to walk all the way back to square one? How could anyone – anyone enjoy this if they thought about it? We’re assaulted with dialogue. Crafty, fun dialogue that is always looping back in on itself. There’s only brief moments of respite that never change between chapters, and it’s off to Learn More and Do More.

Hades is a Roguelike – that’s it. There are some people out there right now saying it defies classification because it responds to what you do – Caves of Qud responds to what you do and nobody’s flying off the handle on twitter about it. Hades just has a bigger budget and better voice acting than anything else. Centering on drama rather than repetition, Hades wants to be a visual novel, but can’t commit to it.

It can’t commit to it to the degree that including God Mode, given to every player so they can include the story is simply commented on as a Net Positive and not…why the fuck play the game in the first place? If the story is So Good but can exist without the challenge of suffering for it or learning anything, why can’t I just read this as a comic instead?

Trapped under dodge mechanics and weapon loadouts, there’s conversations that chastise you for upgrades and then congratulate you when you don’t take them. Every trek through the underworld promises a new revelation, a new chuckle, a new screenshot posted directly to twitter. It is the ripe kind of enjoyable experience – push buttons, laugh.

Hades is a game about failure. A failure that is, after all, driven solely by our protagonist. Family must be brought together, even if the son cannot leave the house. The best classic Greek stories ended with tragedy, but a kind of affirming tragedy. People were allowed to be the sums of their failures, but here a disservice feels false.

Zagreus, our boy, will find what he seeks – but to no real end. We must give the player New Game +. They must be able to continue on, of course, think of the speedrunners and livestreamers. Would I stop playing or condemn him to a fate I find worse than the real permanent death?

Bathe in the gothic imagery, but don’t expect it to go anywhere. Each floor of the underworld puts you closer and closer to a real world, a world the protagonist cannot exist in. To his detriment, his sole goal becomes dragging the one person who did escape back. It’s not as imagines, a story of failure. It’s a story of stagnation.

Hades twist upon the first round of completion is that Zagreus should not be alive. And yet, cursed to toil over the souls of the damned eternally, Hades (not the game, the man) brought him back.
So the son carries the burden of the Father: Zagreus searches for his mother – the one person who truly escaped the Underworld.

Beneath the surface, beneath the charm, Hades is a deeply cynical game. Zagreus can never persist beyond the house and the people in it – so his job becomes to solve their problems. Holding hands by the end credits, what comes after to the cast? Do tensions fray and splinter the connections keeping them together? That feels like the more earnest and more interesting Greek Tragedy.

Garth Ennis, writer of The Boys (a comic I don’t even like!) has criticized the empire of Superhero Comics in a particular way. Garth doesn’t necessarily hate Superheroes – he hates that companies never allow the characters truly difficult situations. Real life, and the best analogues it has in fiction allow for intense fuck ups. Self sacrifice and death.

Hades makes the gods more relatable then they ever have, by wrapping them all up. The husky voiced woman and the soft and heartbroken boy stand only as love interests. The idea is that all of this could be fixed through a little tender love and nurturing. Zagreus may never leave the temple of his parents, so his only choices become eternal childhood or death.

I’m not sure where I so intensely soured on it. Well before the coronavirus, I watched friends lose jobs to bad economies and move to ruined households. I see the plot reiterating a millennial fear, a bad lesson. Between the gulf of childhood and adulthood, there’s only a pitch black void of the unknowable.

There’s a meme relative to rural towns about either becoming your parents or dying in the woods while you get paid to make conceptual art. Both of these are pitched as bitter escapes, but god. Going through all of the levels of hell, playing the role of cupid for two people who’s motivations are entirely explained. Sticking with all of it by the end just to have to stay forever.

Hades has shown me a fate worse than death. To sacrifice everything to keep mom and dad together, to keep an Elysian dream of childhood going. I would sooner drown in the river Styx itself.