I love what Hades is made of. It’s made of mythology, of course – Zeus and Nyx and all that other spontaneous, terrifying, pitiable lot who have been lurking in their own form of Early Access for millenia. And it’s made of everything the developer Supergiant has learned from making dashing, finely poised action games like Bastion and Transistor – and storied, wilful, luminous oddities like Pyre.
Hades reviewDeveloper: Supergiant GamesPublisher: Supergiant GamesPlatform: Reviewed on PCAvailability: Out now on PC, Switch release is today
But it’s also made of stone so smoothly polished it reads like glass or water. It’s made of lap pools of blood, of palm columns shot through with arteries of twinkling jewels. Even when you’re pushing a raft across lava there’s a sense that the rocks around you are just so, that they melt and ooze because artists have thought about their insides, and are in love, above all else, with texture. After every run of Zagreus’ attempts to escape the underworld, he returns to a house that is positively lurid with texture and sharp edges and glimmer. The famed gods live in a sort of McMansion, or a Las Vegas hotel’s Presidential Suite, bad taste spared absolutely no expense. Of course they live somewhere like this. Maybe life and death is just one big casino. Maybe these gods play dice and then hit the slots.
Most of this textured stuff is designed to shatter. Hades is a Roguelite brawler, so each run is a run into hell and, hopefully, out the other side, and in between failures you spend earnings on new abilities and unlocks. But brawler is too padded and fleshy and imprecise a word, the clumsy heel of a palm, the stub of a haphazard elbow. During the run, during the failures, you are a wrecking ball with the focus of a laser, taking down pillars, slamming things into walls, blasting stone and crystal into shrapnel clouds of thick, gritty air. Supergiant chose Zagreus as a protagonist because he is a bit of a pencil shadow in the mythological texts – hazy shape and no real substance, a whisper of graphite. The writing team styles him as the kind of irresistibly arch Ivy League hardnut that Donna Tartt writes about so well, bruised cheekbones and dewy forehead, lip a dissolute twist just waiting to attain its precarious hold on a Gauloise. He is charismatic and chancy, refined without being remotely delicate. But then the game’s action comes along and turns him into the part of every episode of The Property Brothers where teardown kicks in – mallet meets plasterboard and the sky is busy with splintered timber. The kitchen becomes a crater in seconds. The violence is backed by the unflinching heft of metal. What a complicated fellow.
None of the rest of the game would matter if it wasn’t fun to hit things. And on this topic, I’ve sometimes worried that Supergiant, a developer blessed and cursed with rare taste, is going to end up a victim of that taste, turning out theoretically exquisite mechanisms that chime a little hollow. I’ve worried that the team’s output will even gloss away into mere brute luxury – Lambos or Swarovski swans. I’m wrong so far! What’s surprising about Hades, to me at least, is how gutsy it is, how vitally in love with connection it is. It lives to clobber. Room after room of hell. You turn up and wait for horrors. The horrors arrive and, jeepers, you them. You pulverise them. I have never felt so sorry for the stuff of nightmares.