Hades
I was already a fan of Supergiant Games thanks to Bastion and Transistor. So I’m not sure why it took me so long to finally download and play Hades, which is now on my list of all-time favorite video games.
It was on my 41st attempt that I finally escaped. There were some stutter steps after that before securing the 10 successes needed to unlock the “ending”. That credits scene — fantastic. The music in this game is top notch. The way it swells in combat and fades away. The singing of Orpheus and Eurydice is beautiful, and I love how you’re never forced to keep going when you encounter one of them. You can stand around and listen as long as you like.
I’m sure I’ve done just that quite a few times, helping bring my total play time to 137 hours. And coincidentally, I just completed escape attempt number 137 — whereupon I finally forged the final bond with Hypnos, who had been avoiding me for some time (I’d completed the prior conversations with him and Thanatos at least 6 or 8 runs before.)
It’s been a long, long time since a game kept me in its grip quite like this. And it’s fascinating to me that there is still content in the game I haven’t seen. How many people have? Has anyone seen it all? I suppose someone must have (beyond the devs), but I wonder how many hours it required (with no cheating!). Right now it feels like the last “challenge” I have is to complete a 32 heat run to earn Skelly’s third prize. The variety of combat options and the roguelike elements just have me hooked, so I imagine playing even beyond that…
One of my goals for this year is to make significant progress on a personal project, which is something I haven’t done in a long time. My initial intention is to mimic the gameplay loops of Hades, building out both the tactical and “strategy” loops. (It reminds me very much of the XCOM loops.) I’m not intending to make a copy of the game, but rather to explore gameplay system architecture and implementation with a very clear design spec. Having specific gameplay targets makes the engineering decisions a lot more straightforward, and will allow me to spend all of my time actually designing and implementing code, instead of spending it on designing a game.
I hope to share my progress on that project periodically here on Medium. I’ll be working in Unreal 5. I would like to share my techniques and learn from others on here as well.