Don't Hate the Game; Keep Playing

Super Giant Games does an incredible job with getting me to just want to play the game as soon as I see one piece of artwork, then I go looking for the game-play and then I've probably already bought the game. This is what happened when they announced their new game Hades at the 2019 Game Awards. As soon as they demonstrated what they had, I turned around to the computer behind me, logged on to Epic and bought the game.

Hades is a rogue-like dungeon crawler that uses the theme of ancient greek gods; hence the name Hades. You play as Zagreus, son of the God of the Underworld himself; Hades. The entire purpose of the game is to escape the underworld and the grasps of your father as you fight through random waves of enemy encounters. The game lets you customize your playthrough differently every time, making every run unique compared to the previous, which really opens up levels of depth to the design of the game.

So I downloaded the game and immediately knew I was unprepared for what was about to happen, and so I died, started a new run, died again. And again. And again. But the best part I found about this game is although that is the entire purpose of it's genre, I was never pulled away from the game due to lack of motivation to keep going. The developers really made it fun to die. The reason behind this comes from their ever random and changing encounters. Throughout each encounter you have a chance to collect Boons, which are gifts given to you by other Gods trying to help you escape, and each boon is relevant to their specific lore and buffs different abilities based on what you chose. For example, Zeus is the god of sky and thunder, therefore all of his buffs are lightning based such as chain-lightning on attack. Each run has random chances to drop specific god boons, meaning that your attack patterns will differ every time.

Now there is an exception to these random rules, which is what maintains the game's level of play so it is not true complete random, and that is accomplished by item trinkets that are awarded to you if you gift specific people. You equip one of these trinkets at the beginning of a run, and it's modifier can consist of a few things, the most common being a higher chance of finding said gods boon (that didn't make a whole lot of sense). To clarify, if I had Zeus' trinket equipped, I would have a higher chance of finding Zeus' boons, and this applies to all gods that gift you their trinket.

Super Giant Games just understands level design and the depth that can be applied to such simple concepts. Each game never fails to impress me in all categories, not to mention absolutely stunning voice acting. I suck at games, but this one is definitely worth it.