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rynlingI sat down with Hades for about an hour and a half yesterday. I was in a good headspace, properly caffeinated, and extremely hyped to play the game…
…and it is tedious as fuck.
I’ve read a few reviews that talk about how Supergiant Games was really interested in getting player feedback through an early release version in order to make Hades more accessible and appealing to a wider audience, and I understand the impulse, especially after the generally lukewarm reception of Pyre. That being said, I tend to think that the sort of feedback from the specific community of gamers who are invested in providing detailed commentary on an early release version isn’t going to make any given game more “accessible” or “appealing to a wider audience.”
I don’t know what to say, except that Hades is a very Rougelike Rougelike. If you’re interested in storytelling, clever writing, character development, worldbuilding, specificity of setting, unique visual design, and music used to enhance the gameplay, Hades probably isn’t for you. If you’re interested in sitting in front of a screen by yourself for hours and killing randomly generated waves of repetitive enemies to get rare drops with a minimum of narrative context, I guess Hades is as good a vehicle for that as anything.
(I definitely want to say, though – if you’re into mowing down waves of enemies to get rare drops, I am not judging. Personally I enjoy different categories of repetitive tasks in video games, but still, there are so many demands on my time right now that a game needs to have something else going on for it to be worth my attention.)
I think I understand how the mechanics of the game are supposed to work, at least in theory, but the gameplay isn’t accessible to anyone who’s not already fairly invested in various esoteric conversations surrounding the Rougelike genre. Like, I already sit in front of a screen and do meaningless tasks for hours on end without making any sort of tangible progress, and I don’t want to do even more of that to get Hades’s story (and gameplay) to be less one-dimensional.
And this is really sad, because I get the feeling that I might have enjoyed Hades if it made an attempt to actually be more accessible and appealing to people who aren’t already hardcore Rougelike fans. This brings me back, in a somewhat roundabout way, to the trickiness surrounding the concept of “representation” in gaming. Like, if you have an interesting and diverse cast of characters, but they’re created by a homogenous dev staff within the context of a genre shaped and dominated by the sort of “git gud” gamers who actively despise diversity, then what’s the point of this representation, and who is it benefitting?
Idk, Hades isn’t bad, necessarily; it’s just somewhat boring to me as someone who’s not a fan of the Rougelike genre. Then again, I didn’t really understand what Breath of the Wild (or Pyre) was trying to do for the first few hours either, so it might be worth having a few more sessions with Hades before I give up on it entirely. If nothing else, you die so frequently that you can pick up the game and put it down again after ten to fifteen minutes, so it might become a nice alternative to Animal Crossing if I can manage to get used to it.
…and it is tedious as fuck.
I’ve read a few reviews that talk about how Supergiant Games was really interested in getting player feedback through an early release version in order to make Hades more accessible and appealing to a wider audience, and I understand the impulse, especially after the generally lukewarm reception of Pyre. That being said, I tend to think that the sort of feedback from the specific community of gamers who are invested in providing detailed commentary on an early release version isn’t going to make any given game more “accessible” or “appealing to a wider audience.”
I don’t know what to say, except that Hades is a very Rougelike Rougelike. If you’re interested in storytelling, clever writing, character development, worldbuilding, specificity of setting, unique visual design, and music used to enhance the gameplay, Hades probably isn’t for you. If you’re interested in sitting in front of a screen by yourself for hours and killing randomly generated waves of repetitive enemies to get rare drops with a minimum of narrative context, I guess Hades is as good a vehicle for that as anything.
(I definitely want to say, though – if you’re into mowing down waves of enemies to get rare drops, I am not judging. Personally I enjoy different categories of repetitive tasks in video games, but still, there are so many demands on my time right now that a game needs to have something else going on for it to be worth my attention.)
I think I understand how the mechanics of the game are supposed to work, at least in theory, but the gameplay isn’t accessible to anyone who’s not already fairly invested in various esoteric conversations surrounding the Rougelike genre. Like, I already sit in front of a screen and do meaningless tasks for hours on end without making any sort of tangible progress, and I don’t want to do even more of that to get Hades’s story (and gameplay) to be less one-dimensional.
And this is really sad, because I get the feeling that I might have enjoyed Hades if it made an attempt to actually be more accessible and appealing to people who aren’t already hardcore Rougelike fans. This brings me back, in a somewhat roundabout way, to the trickiness surrounding the concept of “representation” in gaming. Like, if you have an interesting and diverse cast of characters, but they’re created by a homogenous dev staff within the context of a genre shaped and dominated by the sort of “git gud” gamers who actively despise diversity, then what’s the point of this representation, and who is it benefitting?
Idk, Hades isn’t bad, necessarily; it’s just somewhat boring to me as someone who’s not a fan of the Rougelike genre. Then again, I didn’t really understand what Breath of the Wild (or Pyre) was trying to do for the first few hours either, so it might be worth having a few more sessions with Hades before I give up on it entirely. If nothing else, you die so frequently that you can pick up the game and put it down again after ten to fifteen minutes, so it might become a nice alternative to Animal Crossing if I can manage to get used to it.
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Date: 2020-10-02 07:43 pm (UTC)That said, I did buy it. I've yet to even open it, though. I swear every night I'm like, "Maybe tonight's the night I try it", only to find myself already exhausted by the idea of whatever the fresh fuck the gameplay is going to be and then play something else.
Also, again, I typically enjoy roguelikes, but WOW can we just ban all games that fall under that for a year or two?? I'm so sick of every other indie thing being some roguelike-like-like variance.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-07 01:00 pm (UTC)Yeah... yeah.
I think it was Eiji Aonuma himself who said that, once you've made enough games, it becomes difficult not to focus on mechanics as opposed to storytelling. The developer conversations surrounding the theory and implementation of Rougelike games are fascinating, but that doesn't make the games themselves any more interesting to play. At least, not to me.
I've kept playing Hades, and this may just be because I'm a shitty casual gamer, but I keep getting hardcore wiped out by the first boss. Every time you die, you get to go back to the main game hub and hear new versions of everyone's dialog, which is something of a reward, but like... I'm getting kind of bored fighting the same groups of enemies on the same battlefields with no story progression.
The randomness of everything is also frustrating. You can only go out into the field with one weapon, so you better hope the bonuses you get at the beginning of each run complement your weapon choice. I sometimes feel like the game is going out of its way to frustrate me, and I wish there were some way to get it to, you know, not do that.
People on Twitter keep saying that it's a fun game, and sure, it's fun for what it is. I just wish it were something different, though.