Two Short Pieces on Hades and its Narrative and Mechanical Success
Rogue’s Odyssey
I have played a lot of roguelikes over the years, I think the rise of the genre after Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac both became storming successes has been incredibly interesting to watch as someone who has always been fascinated by the interplay between mechanics and narrative in games.
As triple AAA games have done their best to chase the narrative market attempting to make big, impactful and meaningful narratives, often in a clumsy manner that leads to them aping Hollywood and prestige TV, roguelikes said “nah” and binned all that pretence. They were about playing again and again, and the narrative was one of personal learning and skill based improvement.
If I wanted to make a broad, sweeping generalisation about most roguelikes (and I do) I would say that largely they were only concerned with two narrative beats for the longest time, which would be The Setup and and The Challenge. Games like FTL, Spelunky, Binding of Isaac, Rogue Legacy and Nuclear Throne offered a tight setup to make it easy to barrel into a new run: a fleet is chasing you, you need to escape your mother, you need to find the treasure at the bottom of a shifting maze.
The challenge is the main end game. You need to beat the challenge for… reasons. In FTL it’s an enemy flagship at the core of the blockade, in Spelunky and Isaac it’s a little more mutable depending on what ending you go for, but you defeat a big bad and then start again. It’s the starting again that is problematic in a lot of roguelikes. It’s an artificial thing, usually with no explanation — that’s not a fault, but it is interesting.
Death and repetition in games can be a useful narrative tool, as seen in Dark Souls and NieR Automata, games which built the whole artifice of restarting into their stories that commented on cycles of death and rebirth, and the potential futility in ever expecting to break a cycle. Less talked about are R-Type: Final and ZeroRanger, two shmups that take the core experience of the shmup genre: the desire to replay for better scores and 0 credit clears, and contextualise that with stories that rely on looping back to the beginning: becoming the genesis of the events you play through in R-Type, and exploring karmic cycles in ZeroRanger.
It seems strange then that it took so long for a roguelike to properly embrace the power that it had within its artifice of death and repetition. Then Hades came along, and had a go at it, and succeeded with aplomb. I’m not going to go into length here about it, as the people reading this will maybe be the same people who wrote these great reviews, and also this excellent piece on how Supergiant wanted to experiment with Early Access as a storytelling format.
Suffice to say, the game contextualises its loop of death and rebirth — you’re a god after all — but also by giving you plenty of things to do between each loop. The Chthonic gods are well aware of the pains of immortality, and the futility to try and change things that are set in stone by the fates. It all plays into the typical roguelike mechanic of playing things over and over again.
— Ending Spoilers Here! —
What hasn’t been talked about a lot yet is how they have managed to translate that feeling of narrative exploration through early access into the finished product. I’d been scratching my head about how they’d manage to work out a way of keeping the loop in place. In the early access version you’d be sent back with a pithy joke, because why not. In the release version, they’ve managed to imbue the ending with a real sense of pathos. Finally meeting Persephone after several achingly difficult attempts only to die to some phantasmal malaise was imbued with more hope and sorrow than I thought would be possible with such a frantic action game, and is a testament to Supergiant’s deft narrative hand.
Now with at least 10 or so clears under my belt, visiting Persephone has been a real treat — the setting, the music, the conversations that link back to Zagreus’ arguments and interrogations with Hades and Nyx making running the loop fully worthwhile. I am now at a point where I have been asked by Persephone to not return any more, but Zagreus is an impetuous youth (a little like his Mum it seems) and is determined to get out and see her again.
— Ending Spoilers Over! —
The way the game elegantly ties the two strands of player and character desire together is magnificent, and I hope future roguelikes take this formula forward and run with it. If I’ve learned anything from playing games for years, it’s that developers will continue to find new ways to explore narrative and mechanics, and the interesting ways they bounce off each other and create no opportunities for stories. In many ways, game development is like a roguelike, but each run is longer and tougher than any game could portray, but improvements and advancements are made, and the narrative games build between each other, the connective tissue that sees a genre like the roguelike evolve from its roots as a genre that exemplified emergent narratives, into something that has been able to facilitate an extremely curated and beautiful narrative arc is in itself, a wondrous result of that iterative loop.
Burning Down the House
Quite a while back now, me and my pal Jon wrote a really good piece (IMO) on the evolution of Roguelikes, and how they have advanced mechanically over the years. I think it’s a good piece, largely resting on the weight of Jon’s scholarly shoulders. It should be available here, if the wayback machine can do its job.
The gist of the thesis was that roguelikes are brilliant at creating emergent narratives because they rely on a confluence of luck, overlapping buffs and passive effects from various abilities and objects, and ability for the player to minimise the randomness through their own knowledge of the game’s mechanics and their own skill.
Certain games utterly exemplify this, such as The Binding of Isaac and Slay the Spire, which both essentially reset to zero on run completion. You might add a few new trinkets to the pool of abilities and items over time, but largely your experience is fresh for each run. It’s what makes them so compelling, the vast open possibility space that they offer.
The other side of the coin is represented by games like Rogue Legacy and Dead Cells, where overtime you slowly buff your character through the accumulation of various currencies that can help you unlock new abilities, buffs, and create a higher chance of beneficial item drops. What starts as an interesting difficulty eventually leads to the weight of time and number steamrolling the difficulty. Throw enough shit at the wall, and eventually one attempt will stick as the time investment rewards you with a golden run.
Fishing for those runs is undoubtedly fun, but the ability to simply win through sheer accretion of fancy upgrades sort of takes the wind out of the core appeal of roguelikes. It makes tackling the things that make Isaac and Slay the Spire so appealing in their twilight hours, namely their extensive list of achievements, challenges, and escalating, often incredibly punishing difficulty levels less appealing, as there is always room to add a few percent onto your drop rates if you simply invest hundreds of hours into farming resources.
Here then is another place that Hades excels. Whilst it sometimes lacks the inventive, emergent play of other roguelikes the Boon system is sufficiently advanced enough that there feel like there are near limitless options to chain together. The ability to force the boons with trinkets with the downside of having no other noticeable passive is an interesting concession to those who love chasing builds (not gonna lie, I am always chasing the Dionysus Cast’ with the Hera Aspect Bow).
To keep you interested, and to help you surmount the vicious horrors of Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium and Styx, the game also has a ramping power curve. You invest keys and darkness, earned through your run, into the mirror in your room, slowly unlocking powerful new abilities that you can chop and change between, as well as… what’s this, an incremental percentage chance for better drops?
If it sounds like the typical tedious power curve described a paragraph or two ago, it’s because it is. Whilst skill is paramount in Hades due to the difficulty of the bosses and general battles, you will eventually get strong enough, and widen your access to stronger potential builds by virtue of time and investment. It runs the risk of succumbing to the Rogue Legacy and Dead Cells approach of investment trumping skill, which runs counter to the core mechanical prowess of its combat system.
However, Hades plays a trump card with its brilliantly executed metagame, the Pacts of Punishment.
Whilst there is the potential for Hades to become a bit overstuffed with different currencies; darkness, keys, gems, nectar, ambrosia, diamonds, and titans blood (oh my!) they all elegantly fulfil specific niches and have interesting gameplay consequences, which mean you’ll want as many as you can get. The game presents you with two options then: trade surplus of one resource for another in the lounge, or go through the pacts of punishment.
Each weapon rewards you one random high level (Titans Blood, Diamonds, Ambrosia) resource per level of the underworld you clear, so to get enough of them to make meaningful long term impacts to weapon aspects, or underworld renovations. The only way to get more of these resources beyond trading thus becomes to slowly and incrementally increase the Heat gauge for that weapon, which involves turning on the various conditions of the Pact. These range from simply adding more health to enemies, to turning off the buffs of your mirror, making you abandon boons, or adding new mechanics to each boss that you fight. They range from minor difficulty tweaks, to tweaks that look simple but feel incredibly punishing — you haven’t known pain until you’ve had to abandon an early legendary buff simply to get out of Tartarus.
The genius in its implementation however is what it means for the overall game. Rather than provide you with a simple difficulty curve and a scaling power curve that intersect over time and both become less interesting (as in Dead Cells and Rogue Legacy) it offers a back and forth trade off between advancement and power. Unlike the opt-in of Isaac’s hard mode and Slay the Spire’s ascensions, without grinding for run after run to earn resources slowly, the only way to increase your strength in Hades is to take punishments and get better at the game.
The reciprocal relationship that forms between upgrading Weapon Aspects and the Mirror to improve your damage output and survivability is tempered by the game’s urge to turn on more and more punishing conditions. Your skill tempers the difference between the positives and the negatives of these two competing systems in a way that is incredibly elegant, your power slowly rising as you understand how to operate weapons and boons in better synergies, and your reward is the ability to pump the numbers on your weapon aspects even higher, and then drop your Heat Gauge back to nothing in order to tear through a run and feel just as godlike as you’ve wanted to feel.
Whilst as an experience it may not be as rewarding as Slay the Spire’s ascension system, where you can shunt hundreds of hours into learning the unfathomable depths of its deck building and relic interactions (for more on this check out the interview I did with now 6000+ hour deep Slay the Spire streamer Jorbs) it’s certainly one of the most compelling long form metagame loops that a roguelike has ever offered, and is an exemplary addition to the genre.
