Hades

Sometimes the new hotness is tough to resist. And there's been a lot of talk about Hades lately. The review scores are through the roof. And truth be told, I tend to like myself a solid roguelike. I've lost so many hours to games like Spelunky and Downwell and Dead Cells and so on. And given the sort of spooky nature of Hades, I figured October was an ideal time to give it a go.

The best way I can sum up Hades is if Diablo and Dead Cells had a baby. It's an isometric game with tiny little enemies and dungeons - much like Diablo. But it's very action oriented and has the same sort of procedural generation and weapon unlocks and perks that you'd find in Dead Cells. In summation, it's good stuff.

Now, it hasn't QUITE sucked me in the way that either of those games did. But it is definitely a solid game, and has that sort of "one more run" thing going for it. That's for sure. It's also a lot more story focused than the majority of roguelikes I've played are. Like there's legit dialogue and all, and the NPC's remember your decisions from run to run. And that's the brilliant part. See, you're trying to escape Hades, so each time you die, you go back to the beginning. The loop actually makes sense. Each death is actually part of the story. Kind of brilliant.

I've only played an hour or two so far, but I can see myself sticking with this for a while.

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The more I play Hades, the better it gets. I've unlocked more weapons and perks; I've gotten a feel for some of the weapon selection and which in-run perks to use to suit my playstyle; I've gotten more comfortable with certain enemy patterns. Perhaps most importantly, I'm always feeling a sense of progress. I've now made it to the second floor more than once, only to lose a battle (just barely!) against the Hydra.

It actually reminds me that I haven't played many 2020 games this year. It's kind of odd, because I generally keep up on a lot of new releases that interest me, but this year has been a weird year, of course. A combination of the pandemic and FOMO lead me to play Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which I enjoyed for about a week and haven't really thought of since. But I don't know. I've been delving into a lot of older and cheaper games, I guess. Plus having a young one in the house has made it harder to keep track of all the new cool stuff coming out. So I guess what I'm saying is that by default Hades is looking to be one of the best games I've played this year, for whatever that's worth.

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I'm definitely hooked. There's some good things this game does. For instance the dark weapon thing... when you choose which weapon you want to use for a run, one is glowing dark. This means that THIS weapon will give you extra drops for using it this run. So always pick this one. Right? The thing that's great about this is that instead of choosing one weapon to master and then getting stuck in a rut, I'm experimenting way more. I hated the shield on my first attempt with it, but now I love using it with the right power-ups.

I had an awesome run last night where not only did I make it to Elysium for the first time, I made it all the way to the Theseus boss battle! Woah. I'm making solid progress on this one and having a really good time.