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Hades

Role-playing (RPG)Hack and slash/Beat 'em upAdventureIndie

Time to beat: about 24.1 hours
Plays offline: Yes

Overview

Hades is a 2020 roguelike action role-playing game developed and published by Supergiant Games. It was released for macOS, Nintendo Switch, and Windows on September 17, 2020, following an early access release in December 2018. It was later released for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S in August 2021, and was released for iOS in March 2024 through Netflix Games.

Players control Zagreus, the son of Hades, in his many attempts to escape from the Underworld and find his mother, Persephone. Aided by boons the Olympians bestow on him, he battles through a random series of rooms populated with enemies and bosses at the end of each section. The game features a hack and slash combat system; the player uses a combination of a main weapon attack, a special attack, a dash ability, and a magic ability to defeat enemies while avoiding damage to progress as far as possible. While Zagreus will often die, he can use the treasure gained during these failed runs to improve certain attributes or unlock new weapons and abilities to increase the chance of escaping on subsequent runs.

Hades was developed following Supergiant's Pyre, in which they wanted to explore procedural narrative storytelling. However, due to the nature of the gameplay, they found that players did not play through it multiple times to explore this. The roguelike structure of Hades allowed them to tell these branching stories to the player over the course of multiple playthroughs.