rocketbeagle i really needa play that game
i'm gonna use this as an excuse to ramble about Hades because I have so many thoughts
mostly that i was sorry worried this game wouldn't work for me, and it really does and i'm relieved. I love the first two Supergiant Games titles but the third one was a huge flop for me because the pacing was so bad (it's like all the combat of Hades, separated by like an hour of slow visual novel-style cutscenes, and that's just the ten-hour-long intro that i didn't bother to play past)
but in every one of their games Supergiant does an amazing job at mix-and-matching modifying elements? like mostly which weapon to use, and which improvements to add to which part of that weapon? and there's dozens of different combinations (Hades has at least hundreds) which makes each approach to combat feel fresh
in the first two, i could build up combinations that I liked best that were radically different from combinations another player would choose, but in Hades it's all randomized since they've made it a rogue-like, so i find myself making a run without any of my favorite add-ons... and often still doing OK, with the alternative add-ons I picked up only out of necessity??
the repetition honestly feels a lot like the repetition in Outer Wilds, because as much as i gain during a run, i need the run to start over to use most of it. so I'm not frustrated by the repeats so much as able to use them to move forward still? even though i WOULD like to be able to skip past the sections of the 'dungeon' i've completed multiple times now *sideeyes Meg*
(also there IS an easy mode i could turn on but i haven't needed to yet? I don't think I turned it on in any of the previous Supergiant games, i hate dying over and over but Hades makes dying over and over literally a part of your advancement which is fun)
ALSO to get back to the FEAT of coding that this company accomplishes?? the voice actors must have had to record HOURS and HOURS of dialogue and I'll never hear half of it because they're lines that only occur if X and Y just happened while A is true but B is false or so on - like, its super complicated keeping track of all of the variables and even AAA companies ignore it sometimes, but none of the NPC lines feel poorly placed (yknow the way video games sometimes do, where someone's coded to say 'hope you kill that enemy!' even though you already have, because there's no variable to change the line)
the other thing Supergiant does well is having something going on in the world that the player can see peripherally but can't do anything about - for Hades, it's the fact that something's wrong in the underworld, possibly even the regular world too, and I don't know what. also it doesn't change the fact that I'm just trying to get Zag out of the underworld. like I'm seeing these hints and there's more clues in the dialogue and i'm so freaking anxious to get to the surface and see how it's not what i expected, but it doesn't change what i'm doing. it just adds tension and it's delicious
also, important, Zagreus sometimes makes snarky comments and half the time I have made that same comment seconds before he does so we're basically twins
