rambling about supergiant games writing over the years
since i've had hadesgame in my mind for a while and it was bleeding into tangentially related things, i decided to replay all of supergiant games's... games, in order. I've gone back to Pyre and Transistor multiple times, but I think the last time I beat Bastion was when it fucking came out.
Just finished it again today; still a very good, very short game. It's funny how every single one of their games is the same thing; isometric lavishly illustrated good-sounding story-focused games with a narrating presence of some kind, and things you can activate to have a harder time and increase your rewards.
But one thing I've noticed, and I'm guessing this might be due to writer Greg Kasavin getting older and growing more experienced and more comfortable talking about the things he actually wants to talk about, is the fact that the games before Hades used to not have clean endings.
Like, okay, Pyre is somewhat of an exception to that because you really work for your ending in that game: it's highly dependent on your actions, and I am a staunch supporter that there is a golden ending in that game and it rules (the one I got, which I'm not spoiling). But Bastion and Transistor end bittersweet at best, and they know it, and it's a big part of their impact. In Bastion, you're literally given two impossible choices, and Transistor has very much a "despite it all, we're still alive" type vibe to what happens to those characters.
There was an understanding back when you played a SGG game that your beautiful journey would come to an end that wouldn't necessarily make everything better. That you could see beauty in what you had left, and you could work with what you got, but that you were going to have to give up something you loved in order to receive something that feels maybe less than what you had before. I think it's a huge reason why Bastion and Transistor specifically resonated so much with people. You really take that gray note into the credits of both games, and it sticks with you.
Pyre was the first one that asked a lot from you. People sleep on it, but it's so peak-- NBA Jam drawn by Jen Zee, you are a fucking idiot if you don't immediately want to go play that with that description, come on. But jokes about your bad taste and my superior one aside, it takes relatively longer and some poignant effort for you to get to the end of Pyre. It's an evolving sports tournament with what amounts to Social Links with your team, and you really gotta take it seriously, even if it's really not that hard.
Not to mention that if you aren't perfect like I am, you'll have to replay it to get the golden ending, which just isn't the case with Bastion or Transistor. Yeah, you can replay Bastion to watch the second ending with context, but it's really nothing that expects you to not just look it up on Youtube. Pyre has a fucking credits song that updates depending on what you did to whom, it's crazy. Play Pyre. Oh my god, play Pyre. Join the golden gods that have, and bathe in the light of moral superiority.
Anyway, Hades and then Hades 2 take that to the next extreme-- those are games that will last you hundreds of hours. They're borderline modular because of the way they were made, and you can essentially choose the game you want to play for as long as you want, and still get new dialogue, new rewards, new most of everything. It's honestly a ceiling no other roguelike has ever reached in terms of bespoke, handmade-content, because most all other roguelikes are about the gameplay-- and the ceiling on sheer quantity of variations of gameplay is likely still Binding of Isaac, despite all the nay-saying.
But, again, the narrative, right? This is about the narrative. Hades 1 and 2 have perfect endings. Not as in, the endings are done or executed perfectly (OOooOOOooh boy no), but everything goes well in those endings. Everyone gets exactly what they want, the immediate bad situation ends definitely, the world is an objectively better place after you do what you do, all the drama resolves.
And that's not bad at all-- fuck I just pretty much did that in my own thing, it's obviously something most people want after following characters for dozens if not hundreds of hours, getting through all that dialogue, seeing what they think and getting them to kiss and fuck and all that.
.... but you don't really think about the ending to Hades all that much, do you? I mean, not really. It just kinda happens as a result of you playing enough, but it doesn't really... stick. Like I can barely quote Persephone in that, it's very much just the next thing that happens, and then you're in post-game.
It's a nice ending where everyone gets back together and a nice song plays. Very similarly, Hades 2's ending is one where everyone gets back together and a really nice song plays, even if it took a patch for people to really get behind that ending.
But, man, like, I've thought about the ending of Transistor since the day I first saw it. I literally didn't even understand what was happening until credits, on the grounds of being a very stupid child at the time. And the friction introduced by the themes in that ending has made or broken that game for a lot of people I know; people in my life either love that game or hate that ending, with no in-between after you talk about it for long enough.
Similarly, I've thought about the ending to Bastion more than I've thought about Bastion. When everything about the narration gimmicks, and combat, and music fall out of long-term memory, I still remember what you had to choose during that ending, and I always wondered if I would have chosen different since I'm such a different person now than I was when I first played it. Hell, that's why I played it again. And I chose different! A new achievement came up! I popped off!
And I've already done this bit with Pyre, fucking... I will one day get a Pyre tattoo, that thing lives in me. It ruined me when I first played it and got to the end, I couldn't believe it.
I guess I'm saying that I kinda miss that capacity SGG had to make a beautiful, pristine, short experience with a punctuation mark at the end so visceral that it never leaves you. I was getting choked up at the end of Bastion, of all fucking things, and that's easily the least developed story with the least developed characters they've made. But they really used to get you with those endings regardless.
The Hades 2 ending wasn't bittersweet or complicated, it was incomplete, that's different. You can't program and test hours of story content and then add it into your game within a month. That patch was coming no matter what, the game definitely got pushed out because of the Switch 2 release. And because of that we kinda got some friction with the ending of Hades 2, but it was... very, very clearly not actual friction. It was just a draft to be supplanted by the real ending a month later. The feelings you had about that ending were going to get overwritten in 30 days regardless of the response being positive or negative.
At the same time, I would have thrown my controller at the wall if anything bad happened to the Hades cast. They're all obviously meant to stay where they are from beginning to end, and any drastic changes to their status quo would be kinda traumatic for the narrative. If like, I don't know, Orpheus lost his voice, or Achilles and Patroclus broke up for real, or if Nyx actually fired Dusa and she was never around again. If Odysseus left forever to be with his family, if Hecate went and fucking killed Chronos-- anything. Anything at all that means you don't get to talk to them again sucks, it would be awful, that's just not the kind of game they made.
.... but i gotta say, the feeling of letting a team player in Pyre go and just not having them for the rest of the game, or looking at the destroyed Bastion near the end and knowing something is wrong between the last few people alive, or even just watching Cloudbank get progressively more fucked over the course of the game until there's nothing left...
Like, I would not be considering a tattoo of those games if they didn't hurt a little, is what I'm saying. These stories used to have a lot more freedom because the story came first, and the gameplay came second. And the gameplay was still excellent, in all of them-- PLAY, FUCKING, PYRE, OH MY GOD-- but at the same time, Hades 1 and 2 are the gameplay, if that makes sense? It truly feels like the story necessarily needs to take a step back, under the assumption you'll be done with it much faster than you'll be done with the gameplay challenges.
You could play those others forever too, they're built with pretty substantial New Game+ content, but not at all in the same way. They kinda sacrificed their sense of closure to bring us these two excellent 10/10s that I love. Which is sorta why I really do not want a Hades 3 or another Early Access-style game; I want to wake up, see some beautiful Jen Zee art moving to the sound of some excellent Darren Korb music in a trailer, to be told some really cool shit by Logan Cunningham setting the tone for the project, and then in a few months buy a complete product for a fair and reasonable price and play ~10-20 hours of a curated experience.
this doesn't really have an end, i'm just thinking about how these games changed my life, and how Hades is obviously really important to me, but, fuck. I had a single emotion throughout all of Hades 1 and 2: amusement. It's amusing. It's pretty nice to go through them at all times, even when it's annoying.
I have a plethora of emotions about Bastion, Transistor and Pyre. Those took me for a wild ride every time. I miss going on a wild ride instead of a cruise. Cruises are cool but damn, no big waves unless it's falling apart.
