Hades

And it's, it doesn't always feel great.

And for me as well, like one of the reasons I don't talk about Hades a lot when I talk about roguelikes is that Hades used its meta progression to further its narrative.

Yeah, like dying, sometimes you wanted to die because you wanted to learn more about the characters.

Yeah, you get narrative beats, you get story moments, you get character development.

And that's like the city is coming back to life and you're doing that.

sure whatever but ultimately like i said it's just in the service of getting the biggest number because like i finished the game i say i finished it i hit like credits on it i did the i got to the last level and i beat it with enough characters to do the big cut scene thing then i rolled credits and then unlocked new game plus and i've played a little bit of new game plus which so far is just the exact same levels but the enemies have more hit points now um And it doesn't like it's I feel weird talking about motivation in this game because on the one hand, I'm very motivated by narrative.

I find like that's what I liked about Hades is the meta progression advances the story.

But in this game, there's no story to advance.

Oh, references and brevity.

Hades from Supergiant Games, huge reference for us.

We openly would look at, in the games Hades and Hades 2, the amount of time it took you to get from a spawn in to going into a new run.

as a reference point for us, for Hawks coming in on a new cycle and making it to the Holy Table.

And just the speech patterns that Greg Kasavin would use for the Hades conversations, a lot of like ABA or ABBA or ABB with the main character and that was we talked about that pretty openly around like you only have so many lines before the player is going to get twitchy and want to move on and you know what what can we do inside this really tight time frame and just as a writer carter i think that's a good looking at those patterns of like exactly how many lines are people saying to each other how many uh how many clauses are they saying to each other like one of the stupid things i'd i'd waggle over colon caroline is every clause has a pause so like that's awesome you're like hitting the brakes on on the player moving forward so you gotta like think about how quickly you're allowing the player to process what's happening and get on with their day

that's awesome yeah i i

Not to go too deep down into the writer thing, but

I don't know.

Do we just call it a Hades style?

Yeah.

The developers

have been pretty forthright in saying that it was designed by Hades to be a shopkeeping roguelike.

So that's fair.

Yeah,

anyway, I think it's...

So it gives you sort of challenge levels to max out each individual tarot card so you can get the maximum amount of power out of each tarot card.

It's kind of like Hades.

Oh, is it kind of like Hades?

Yeah.

Sounds like I should try Hades then.

You might like it.

I'm sure I would.

like that.

Well, speaking of each weapon bringing its own pizzazz, we cannot pass up the Hades games.

Yeah, so...

What's your preferred weapon in Hades, Phil?

I've always been a gauntlets guy.

I love that rapid swing, swing, swing away.

that's so true.

You're going to see what that first power-up is.

I'm getting a little tired of the grind.

It's not as deep as other roguelites like Hades or Absalom.

And so, you know, I thought there was going to be a lot more there there.

So I was like,

Um, A roguelike at worst is super repetitive and it kind of forces you to just play the same thing over and over again.

Or at best, it forces you to kind of reimagine the game or reimagine your runs as just a new opportunity and it stays fresh and it stays exciting, right? And I'm thinking of the Hades games when I'm thinking of that.

This unfortunately for me kind of felt like it was the former.

It just kind of felt repetitive.