Hope you’re having a great weekend. I know I am. I’m tearing through the copy edits for Silicon Override, and working on something else special I hope to announce here in the near future.
Aside from that, when I’m shirking my actual work – I’m currently engrossed in a few games. The one that’s got most of my attention now is Hades – a Roguelike(lite) from Supergiant games.
I love this game. Like a lot.
I bought it several months back when it was still in early access after watching some streamers on Twitch playing it. It was pretty amazing even then – though, Supergiant recently released the official version of the game, adding a few new elements (including the real ending, some new powers/abilities, etc…) and just generally filling things out.
They did not (wisely) mess with the already-great game play that had in place in the early access. That’s still as fun as always.
The long and short of it is, you play Zagreus – son of Hades – and you’re looking to escape the Underworld. There’s actually a lot more to the story (which I’ll get to in a moment) but I don’t want to spoil it.
Anyway, being a rogue-like game, the core loop of the game is that you get as far as you can, collecting resources (like “Darkness”) to use to make you more powerful when you do the next run. Hopefully, getting a little farther, until eventually you make it to the end.
The movement, combat, abilities, all of it is super tight and super fun.
While I don’t want to spoil any of the story for potential players out there – As a writer (and a game developer) I do want to talk about the storytelling. Supergiant took a brilliant approach here. They used the format of the game (run out, die, come back, try again) as a mechanism of the story. Each time you die and come back, you can talk to characters in the underworld to advance the overall plot and get to now (and impact) those characters themselves. It’s a truly inspired direction, and I applaud their decision here – and on top of all that, the story itself, the characters, and the voice acting are all top-notch as well, so you actually enjoy and look forward to advancing the story.
If you’re on the look out for something fun, that’s easy to pick up and put down (the game lets you save in the middle of a run) then Hades might be worth looking into.
Oh, and I don’t think I could sleep at night if I didn’t let everyone know that Cerberus the dog IS in the game…
But most importantly – to answer the question inevitably in your mind right now…
Yes, you can pet the dog.