As you say, there are a limited number of elements. Me, I play a VERY limited subset of video games--Spiderweb and Aldorlea are my personal Big Two developers. Both excel at world building in a series game, and I want to wander around and discover new things and monsters and places and peoples, and oh, yeah, fight and learn the spells. Give me a world like Avernum or the Laxius force world and an 'Easy' or 'Story' level to play at first time through, and I'm happy as a hog in clover. I'll learn enough about the combat and leveling and gear systems so that I don't have to use cheats, or only rarely, and I'll happily explore until I see the world in my dreams, following up every side quest I can find. Then, on the second run through, I'll pay attention to battles. And ignore the game for a year or 18 months, and discover its world all over again.
I had to stop and think about "It's a 2020-vintage roguelike" -- both because the timeline surprised me and because Hades feels like one of the roots of that vintage, rather than a fruit of it.
The Early Access window is part of what confuses me -- I was playing Hades by 2018, in those unimaginably distant pre-Covid years. So very long ago.
But regardless of whether measured by the date of EA launch or full release, Hades was only a year behind Slay the Spire. And while it definitely wasn't the first roguelike to have most of the mechanics on display (nothing is new under the sun -- my most personally-beloved Edward Gorey-styled roguelike Our Darker Purpose had players picking one of three random perks on level-up back in 2014, and it wasn't the first either), I honestly don't think those systems were particularly tired or played out at the time? To where I'm not sure how fair it is to call Hades "a mix-and-match of a bunch of prior successful games", because that's getting into some awfully sweeping generalizations.
None of the big roguelikes released in 2018 or 2019 *felt* like Hades much in structure or gameplay -- I'm thinking of Dicey Dungeons, Risk of Rain 2, Noita, Void Bastards. The 2020 roguelike explosion had a couple games that did feel quite similar (Dreamscaper, Curse of the Dead Gods), but they felt like pale shadows of Hades's light. Other roguelikes in that 2020 boom felt like very different animals -- Spelunky 2, Rogue Legacy 2, Star Renegades, BPM, One Step from Eden, Monster Train, and Ring of Pain don't seem like the same structure as Hades to me, though that's a matter of degree and perspective.
There are certainly plenty of imitators *now*, of course -- I feel like there are even more Hades clones washing up on the shores of Steam than there are deckbuilders in Slay the Spire's vein. There's a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Hades-like at this point.
You make good points, and I have added an edit to the post.
I was trying to make points about the increasing exhaustion of the design space for the most popular games we play. And I do think indie games are getting painfully derivative. But that's not Supergiant's fault. They've always tried to do cool new stuff.
It seems like Hades 2 is doing well, but it has its work cut out for it. After all, it has to compete with Hades. And the 50 Hades-inspired works.
The most Hades-like game I recently tried was Children of Morta - also from 2019. To me, it felt like Hades, only worse (people tell me the story is better, but I really disliked gameplay, to the point where I decided to drop it for now, with Hades II on horizon, as I, too, only have so much patience with rogue-lites).
I never finished it but the idea of a roguelike where after you've done several runs fighting the same first boss over and over again, now you can hang out with said boss at a bar between runs and commiserate with them, is one of coolest things I've seen in a video game in the past several years.
This worked really well and I tried to credit it with what I said about the story.
However, after the first few conversations, the chats with Magaera got really samey for me. There's only so much you can do with snippets. But it took time to get to that point, which means they gave me plenty of value for my $$$.
I had a very similar reaction to playing Hades as you. Initially, I was taken in my the great art style, snappy gameplay, interesting characters, good music and large variety of meta-progression. By the time I had played the game for abouy ten or fifteen hours, I felt like I had seen it all many times over. It's not as if Hades introduced any ground-breaking stuff, it just does everything you'd expect in a roguelike in a competent manner. What led me to eventually dropping the game was ironically a lack of variety and reason to keep playing. I had already finished five or six runs, used most of the weapons and their variations, fiddled around with the difficulty modifiers, tried as many of the upgrades and buffs and builds I could think of, talked a lot to the characters I found most worthy of my offerings, and meta-progressed very far. But the constant drip-feed of engagement was starting to leave me hungry for more, and more never came. The game expected me to beat it another six times, and I simply wasn't excited at the prospect. There was no hook left for me. The interactions with the different characters were interesting at first, but fizzled out into quite mundane or boring discussions, so I wasn't engaged with the characters. As for the main story, I also wasn't terribly interested in going through the same stages and bosses many more times just so I could see two characters exchange three sentences before doing the very same once again. Maybe I missed out on a kickass resolution or true final boss or something, but I felt like I had seen and experienced all there was to see and experience many times over. So I ended up dropping the game rather than play it to the point of annoyance. Games are about having fun, and I wasn't having fun anymore. I wish Supergiant returned to making more straight-forward experiences like they did with their fantastic first two games, Bastion and Transistor. I also wasn't a fan of repeating the same loop ad nauseam in Pyre, so I had dropped that prior to playing Hades too. Great games all in their own right, but I feel like Supergiant shines best with more linear games.
I get your eventual reaction to Hades. I have a similar 'cut off' mechanism for games, where my brain just decides I've seen and got enough out of this one now, so please stop playing.
Roguelikes are particularly prone to it when I've played enough to see the underlying systems and I become aware I'm just turning the handle.
Hades managed a solid couple of weeks, which is impressive.
I wonder how you would like Vampire Survivors, it’s the same formula but pretty much zero story (in the base game) and in old school pixel art. If you asked me years ago if I liked games like Hades or VS, I’d say “nope, not my kind of game”. But after spending hundreds of hours in them, I’m forced to rethink that.
I've gotten back into Avernum. I love that game and I'm looking forward to finishing it, but I keep restarting it every six months or so. It's my permanent curse with CRPGs. I'm incapable of spending time figuring out where I left off. And who doesn't love rolling new parties?
I've been digging into Avowed. Pillars of Eternity 2 is my favorite CRPG ever - god, I love that game - and I'm excited to be digging back into the same world. But first-person RPGs don't always do it for me, though this seems like a pretty good one. Have you given it a shot yet? Any thoughts?
I’ve got to give that another whirl. I bought it when it came out and had all kinds of problems. I never revisited it post patches, but I heard it got good
As you say, there are a limited number of elements. Me, I play a VERY limited subset of video games--Spiderweb and Aldorlea are my personal Big Two developers. Both excel at world building in a series game, and I want to wander around and discover new things and monsters and places and peoples, and oh, yeah, fight and learn the spells. Give me a world like Avernum or the Laxius force world and an 'Easy' or 'Story' level to play at first time through, and I'm happy as a hog in clover. I'll learn enough about the combat and leveling and gear systems so that I don't have to use cheats, or only rarely, and I'll happily explore until I see the world in my dreams, following up every side quest I can find. Then, on the second run through, I'll pay attention to battles. And ignore the game for a year or 18 months, and discover its world all over again.
I had to stop and think about "It's a 2020-vintage roguelike" -- both because the timeline surprised me and because Hades feels like one of the roots of that vintage, rather than a fruit of it.
The Early Access window is part of what confuses me -- I was playing Hades by 2018, in those unimaginably distant pre-Covid years. So very long ago.
But regardless of whether measured by the date of EA launch or full release, Hades was only a year behind Slay the Spire. And while it definitely wasn't the first roguelike to have most of the mechanics on display (nothing is new under the sun -- my most personally-beloved Edward Gorey-styled roguelike Our Darker Purpose had players picking one of three random perks on level-up back in 2014, and it wasn't the first either), I honestly don't think those systems were particularly tired or played out at the time? To where I'm not sure how fair it is to call Hades "a mix-and-match of a bunch of prior successful games", because that's getting into some awfully sweeping generalizations.
None of the big roguelikes released in 2018 or 2019 *felt* like Hades much in structure or gameplay -- I'm thinking of Dicey Dungeons, Risk of Rain 2, Noita, Void Bastards. The 2020 roguelike explosion had a couple games that did feel quite similar (Dreamscaper, Curse of the Dead Gods), but they felt like pale shadows of Hades's light. Other roguelikes in that 2020 boom felt like very different animals -- Spelunky 2, Rogue Legacy 2, Star Renegades, BPM, One Step from Eden, Monster Train, and Ring of Pain don't seem like the same structure as Hades to me, though that's a matter of degree and perspective.
There are certainly plenty of imitators *now*, of course -- I feel like there are even more Hades clones washing up on the shores of Steam than there are deckbuilders in Slay the Spire's vein. There's a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Hades-like at this point.
You make good points, and I have added an edit to the post.
I was trying to make points about the increasing exhaustion of the design space for the most popular games we play. And I do think indie games are getting painfully derivative. But that's not Supergiant's fault. They've always tried to do cool new stuff.
It seems like Hades 2 is doing well, but it has its work cut out for it. After all, it has to compete with Hades. And the 50 Hades-inspired works.
The most Hades-like game I recently tried was Children of Morta - also from 2019. To me, it felt like Hades, only worse (people tell me the story is better, but I really disliked gameplay, to the point where I decided to drop it for now, with Hades II on horizon, as I, too, only have so much patience with rogue-lites).
I never finished it but the idea of a roguelike where after you've done several runs fighting the same first boss over and over again, now you can hang out with said boss at a bar between runs and commiserate with them, is one of coolest things I've seen in a video game in the past several years.
This worked really well and I tried to credit it with what I said about the story.
However, after the first few conversations, the chats with Magaera got really samey for me. There's only so much you can do with snippets. But it took time to get to that point, which means they gave me plenty of value for my $$$.
I had a very similar reaction to playing Hades as you. Initially, I was taken in my the great art style, snappy gameplay, interesting characters, good music and large variety of meta-progression. By the time I had played the game for abouy ten or fifteen hours, I felt like I had seen it all many times over. It's not as if Hades introduced any ground-breaking stuff, it just does everything you'd expect in a roguelike in a competent manner. What led me to eventually dropping the game was ironically a lack of variety and reason to keep playing. I had already finished five or six runs, used most of the weapons and their variations, fiddled around with the difficulty modifiers, tried as many of the upgrades and buffs and builds I could think of, talked a lot to the characters I found most worthy of my offerings, and meta-progressed very far. But the constant drip-feed of engagement was starting to leave me hungry for more, and more never came. The game expected me to beat it another six times, and I simply wasn't excited at the prospect. There was no hook left for me. The interactions with the different characters were interesting at first, but fizzled out into quite mundane or boring discussions, so I wasn't engaged with the characters. As for the main story, I also wasn't terribly interested in going through the same stages and bosses many more times just so I could see two characters exchange three sentences before doing the very same once again. Maybe I missed out on a kickass resolution or true final boss or something, but I felt like I had seen and experienced all there was to see and experience many times over. So I ended up dropping the game rather than play it to the point of annoyance. Games are about having fun, and I wasn't having fun anymore. I wish Supergiant returned to making more straight-forward experiences like they did with their fantastic first two games, Bastion and Transistor. I also wasn't a fan of repeating the same loop ad nauseam in Pyre, so I had dropped that prior to playing Hades too. Great games all in their own right, but I feel like Supergiant shines best with more linear games.
I get your eventual reaction to Hades. I have a similar 'cut off' mechanism for games, where my brain just decides I've seen and got enough out of this one now, so please stop playing.
Roguelikes are particularly prone to it when I've played enough to see the underlying systems and I become aware I'm just turning the handle.
Hades managed a solid couple of weeks, which is impressive.
Quick typo report: "4. However, there is so much you can do with snippets of stories. " - Should it be "...there is *only* so much you can do..."?
Otherwise, love reading your blog posts. I've been following since your very first one where you reported on how much Geneforge 4 made.
Thanks, fixed! I hate it when I typo makes me say the opposite of what I mean.
I wonder how you would like Vampire Survivors, it’s the same formula but pretty much zero story (in the base game) and in old school pixel art. If you asked me years ago if I liked games like Hades or VS, I’d say “nope, not my kind of game”. But after spending hundreds of hours in them, I’m forced to rethink that.
I think Jeff wrote about Vampire Survivors earlier--go check it out!
Great article - thanks!
I've gotten back into Avernum. I love that game and I'm looking forward to finishing it, but I keep restarting it every six months or so. It's my permanent curse with CRPGs. I'm incapable of spending time figuring out where I left off. And who doesn't love rolling new parties?
I've been digging into Avowed. Pillars of Eternity 2 is my favorite CRPG ever - god, I love that game - and I'm excited to be digging back into the same world. But first-person RPGs don't always do it for me, though this seems like a pretty good one. Have you given it a shot yet? Any thoughts?
An RPG REALLY has to be exciting for me to stand playing it.
Though I am having some fun with Cyberpunk 2077 right now.
I’ve got to give that another whirl. I bought it when it came out and had all kinds of problems. I never revisited it post patches, but I heard it got good