There are a handful of game companies where I buy all their products, they are simply that consistent. Supergiant Games is one and Hades is no exception to the trend.

Incrementals/Roguelikes are all the rage. That does make sense, since developers make smaller packages and re-use it for dozens of hours of content. Assassin’s Creed recycles a ton of content, but it still adds small tweaks to the layout. Clearing that last fort on the map isn’t much different from the first one, it just happens to be on a hill rather than a bay.

A pure roguelike doesn’t allow for increments between plays, it expects the player to learn how to get better over time. Pure incrementals allow for the player to choose when to reset, and then provides some boost to the next attempt. You can find hundreds of these in mobile apps.

The merger between both is a challenge in terms of balance. You want there to be a cap to the increment in player power, but not so much that the game over screen never is a possibility after a few attempts. Conversely, you want the increments to be valuable so that people can “beat” the game. Tricky math, and as a general rule, players are much smarter than developers in that regard. Slay the Spire and Dead Cells are two recent examples of games that hit that just right.

Hades has more in common with Dead Cells, but focuses less on exploration and more on intense combat. The best Dead Cell runs simply blow through looking for specific drops. Hades forces you to clear everything in a room before giving you options as to the rewards in the next room. It’s hectic action with a period of respite afterwards.

Mechanically, the game has multiple levers to increment both the power of the player as well as the difficulty. It took me 17 tries to beat the final boss, and that first win had much less to do with the power increments than it did with my knowledge of the game.

The real beauty in Hades is the setting. Every character you talk to exposes more of the story, but only 1 conversation at a time, and often only after you die. And they are solidly written and drawn. Each one has their own motivations, slowing lifting the fog of the game as you progress. The friendly competitions with Thanatos, or great cooking of Eurydice are high points in the mess of tons of enemies. Even the bosses have dialogue that they expand upon after previous victories/defeats.

It’s easy to lose a couple hours to runs, a whole bunch of “one more turn” of old. Dying never feels like punishment, cause you’re always getting something from a run. And you never really feel cheated along the way, because you have more control over the room rewards than the high randomness of something like Slay the Spire. And once you beat the final boss, a whole new aspect of difficulty opens up, with a level of granularity that isn’t common in games.

And with any game of this nature, speedrunners are going at it. See video below, which took about as long for the whole game as it did for me to clear the last boss on my first attempt.

An amazing game. Well worth the pick up. I’ll have a future post on some strategies I’ve found over many failures.

Free to Play is a lie. It really means “pay what you want”. It’s a more effective business model because 1 whale can compensate for hundreds of freeloaders, and in 99% of cases, the games are predicated on sheep for the wolves.

As a guy, there’s this interesting thing about being buff or having a suped up car. When you’re younger, you think these things will impress potential mates. As you grow older, you realize that the only other people who care are other males. The intended audience is in fact not the true audience.

F2P games are not made for me, they are made for whales. The largest incentive for whales is showing off how much of a whale they are, yet they need an audience for it. For PvE games, you would think this is cosmetics (it can be sometimes), but it fact it’s ladders. A smart developer will include the ability to view a character from the ladder… then you see cosmetics take a whole other meaning. PvP games are somewhat similar, but now we’re really talking sheep vs. wolves. I am not dismissing the talent that top level players have, but they need targets to practice. And those targets needs targets, and so on.

In both cases, there’s a feedback loop where the bottom of the pole sees the top and has some incentive to say “hey, they did this with X, I should buy X too!”. The monetization model is simple on the surface, but can get extremely complex as more and more systems are developed. The kicker here is that eastern developers have figured this out a while ago, and they have practically perfected it. Puzzles and Dragons is probably one of the most popular ones, and it’s 8 years old.

Which leads me to Genshin Impact. The bait of the game is amazing, I only hear positives. There’s a lot of good content until AR30. The money aspect up until then is mostly around wishes – loot boxes for characters and gear. It appears optional since progress is so quick. The switch that occurs past that point is that the fun things people were doing are now time gated (bypassed by money or waiting a day for resin to recharge). There are hundreds if not thousands of other games that use this exact same business model of energy / loot boxes (who hasn’t seen Raid ads on mobile?). Genshin Impact is different in that it looks amazing, is multi-platform and does an ok job on multiplayer. It’s lipstick on a pig. Nothing wrong if you like pork, but there’s no sane argument that it’s not pork.

All of this and I didn’t even get into the moral aspects of supporting a Chinese company. I’ll leave that to smarter folk.

I will end on saying I’m happy folks are enjoying it for the time being. Dollars to donuts it crashes before end of calendar in the west. As much because it’s a gacha game, compounded by our infinitely small attention spans.