Hades (video game)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Hades is a 2020 action game from Supergiant Games in which the hero dies again and again, and that failure is the point. Its hero, Zagreus, is the son of the ruler of the Underworld, and he badly wants to leave home. Every attempt turns into a fight, and many end in defeat. Yet the story only moves forward because he keeps trying. Why would a studio build a story around a character who so often falls short? How did a game that began with a labyrinth and a different hero become a tale about one family's grudges? And what is the real reason a prince of the dead is so desperate to reach the surface?

  183137

• 2. From Minos to Zagreus

  ›

  Pyre, the game Supergiant released just before Hades, was meant to tell a branching, open-ended story. Once it shipped, the team saw that most players finished it only once. The other branches went unseen. A roguelike offered a fix, since that genre asks players to start over again and again. Repetition would now show off a branching story instead of hiding it.

  The studio had other reasons to choose that style. It wanted something easy to pick up, playable in very short sessions, and open to expansion after release. Roguelikes also suited its habit of handing players new tricks that make them rethink how they have been playing.

  The setting came from creative director Greg Kasavin, who had been interested in Greek mythology since his youth. The studio had considered revisiting the worlds of its earlier games but wanted something wholly new. The first plan was a game called Minos. Its hero was Theseus, searching for a way out of the ever-shifting mazes of Minos. The mazes fit the roguelike format well. But the team struggled to fit a branching story into them, and it judged Theseus too generic a character.

  During a break in development, Kasavin read further into Greek myth. He found that Hades himself was underrepresented in the old stories, because the Olympians feared him. That pointed toward a son trying to escape his father. Kasavin described the gods as "a big dysfunctional family that we can see ourselves in." Repeated failed escapes, he felt, would bring out the slapstick comedy of that family. They would also match the roguelike mood, in which a player feels invincible one moment and is sent back to the start the next.

  The change of hero cost little of the work already done. Theseus stayed in the game, but as a boastful villain who fights alongside a tag-team partner, Asterius the Minotaur.

  15678

• 3. Anatomy of a Run

  ›

  Four dungeons stand between Zagreus and the surface: Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, and the Temple of Styx. Each one represents a region of the Underworld, and each is unlocked by clearing the one before it. The player sees the action from an isometric angle, looking down at Zagreus as he fights through a chain of rooms.

  Every room in a run is drawn from a pool of pre-built layouts. The order of the rooms and the enemies inside them are randomized, so no two attempts match. Combat is hack and slash. Zagreus has a main attack and a special attack, both tied to the weapon the player chose beforehand. He can also cast a magic attack from a distance and call on the power of one of the gods through a summon.

  The dash deserves its own mention. It gives Zagreus a moment of intangibility, which lets him slip through thin walls and gaps. Paired with an attack or a boon, it can also deal damage.

  Boons are the gifts that the Olympians hand out during a run. Each offer presents three choices of lasting boosts, and they last until that run ends. They carry the personality of the god who gives them. Zeus offers lightning damage, while Poseidon's boons create waves that push enemies back.

  Clearing a room earns a reward, which either makes Zagreus stronger or restores lost health. Death does not come immediately when his health reaches zero. He carries "death defiance" tokens, and only when none remain is he defeated and carried by the river Styx back to the House of Hades.

  After enough rooms in a region, a boss blocks the way forward. Tartarus offers at least one of three Furies. Asphodel holds the Lernaean Hydra. The last of them all is Hades himself, waiting at the gates of the Underworld.

  2463639

• 4. The House Between Runs

  ›

  The House of Hades works as the game's overworld between attempts, and it is where failure turns into progress. Obols and certain upgrades vanish on death and must be collected again. Other kinds of currency are different. They buy permanent upgrades that carry into every future attempt.

  At the House, the player can unlock and upgrade Zagreus's abilities, obtain or improve weapons, and order the construction of new Underworld features that may show up in later runs. Zagreus can also talk with the residents, including notorious figures such as Sisyphus, Eurydice, and Patroclus. Raising his standing with them brings narrative scenes and sometimes quests with extra rewards. As the plot unfolds, the player can romance certain characters, among them Megaera and Thanatos.

  Writing for this structure was a new problem for Supergiant. Its earlier games, Bastion and Transistor, were more linear, so the writers knew roughly what a player had seen at any moment. In Hades, Kasavin and his writers drafted about ten hours of dialog between Zagreus and the other characters, built from many possible chains of events.

  One example shows how the chains work. A player might meet Eurydice in the middle of a run, then return to the House after failing and meet her husband Orpheus. Because of the earlier meeting, Orpheus asks the player to carry a message to Eurydice next time. Seeing a chain through to its end can also lead to improvements in the House itself.

  The game also lets players tune how hard it is. After beating Hades at least once, a player can sign the Pact of Punishment and add extra challenges. The Pact can raise enemy attack power, health, or numbers. It can also change boss fights, giving Theseus a chariot with a mounted machine gun or adding an extra phase to the fight with Hades. Higher difficulty brings rare rewards, special decorations for the House, and progress on some characters' subplots.

  For players who struggle, there is a setting called God Mode. It makes Zagreus stronger after every failed run, so even those players can reach the full story.

  181240

• 5. A Family Secret

  ›

  Nyx, the goddess who raised Zagreus as her adoptive mother, is the first to take his side. Zagreus, voiced by Darren Korb, is the firstborn son of Hades. He has been told all his life that Nyx is his mother. Hades insists escape is impossible and sends the Underworld's monsters to stop him.

  The real reason for the escape emerges slowly. Zagreus wants to find his biological mother, Persephone, whom he never knew. Hades forbids anyone to speak her name in his House, and those who disobey are said to face punishment. Nyx decides to help anyway, putting Zagreus in touch with his relatives on Mount Olympus.

  When Zagreus finally defeats his father and reaches the surface, he finds Persephone at a cottage in Greece. The reunion has a cruel catch. Like Hades, Zagreus is bound to the Underworld, so he will quickly die once he reaches the surface. He promises to keep escaping anyway, to spend time with her and learn why she left.

  The truth comes out over those visits. Zeus had "given" Persephone to Hades as a reward for ruling the Underworld alongside the other Olympians, who believed she had simply vanished. The couple had a loving marriage until Zagreus was stillborn. The Fates had decreed that Hades would never have an heir. Persephone fled in grief and refused to go back to Olympus, which she disliked because of the constant bickering among its gods. Nyx later resurrected Zagreus after making a deal with the Fates.

  Persephone still refuses to return to the Underworld, because she fears the Olympians will punish Hades if they learn what happened. Zagreus persuades her by reminding her of the bonds of family. Charon ferries them to the House. Hades, now with fresh respect for his son, asks him to keep up his escape attempts so that he can expose weaknesses in the realm's security.

  An epilogue brings the Olympians to a feast in the House, an idea Persephone proposed as a way to reconcile with them. The gods are told that Hades and Persephone eloped and had Zagreus. She can only leave the Underworld for a few months each year, they hear, because she ate its pomegranate seeds. The Olympians accept this, though it is implied that they know the truth and want to move on.

  67103738

• 6. Mythology on Screen

  ›

  Jen Zee, the studio's in-house artist, drew every Olympian as an attractive figure, which Kasavin described as a tasteful homage to the "heroic nudity" of ancient Greek art. Her portraits of the characters became a frequent point of praise in reviews. The studio wanted its version of the myths to stay faithful in spirit to the old stories.

  That included the diverse sexuality found in the Greek myths. In Hades, Zagreus is bisexual and, along certain routes, polyamorous. One side narrative follows the gay relationship between Achilles and Patroclus.

  Myth also shapes the game's systems. The different powers of the gods are the benefits a player collects as they progress. Trials of the Gods, a gameplay element, emphasize how fickle the gods were with one another. Supergiant felt that dialog advancing with each run made every escape attempt matter more than in a traditional roguelike, and it hoped that would draw more players in.

  The voice cast stretches across several roles. Logan Cunningham speaks for Hades, Poseidon, and the ferryman Charon. Laila Berzins plays both Persephone and Demeter, and Jamie Landrum plays both Nyx and Artemis. Cyrus Nemati takes Ares and Dionysus. Cunningham's work later drew nominations and awards of its own.

  69103738

• 7. Building in Public

  ›

  At the 2018 D.I.C.E. Summit in February, Amir Rao and Greg Kasavin of Supergiant approached Geoff Keighley, the host and organizer of The Game Awards, with a plan. They wanted to release Hades as an early access title on the same night as the show. Hades was announced at The Game Awards 2018 on the 6th of December 2018, and it was confirmed as one of the first third-party titles on the newly announced Epic Games Store.

  After Pyre, Supergiant wanted to open up its process and use player feedback to improve both gameplay and story. That meant early access, once the game's foundation was in place. With only about 20 employees, the team knew it could support early access on just one platform, with ports to follow near the end. Epic's plans for its store appealed to the studio, in part because of Epic's focus on creators. Supergiant had designed Hades to be friendly to streamers. The studio expected the project to take about three years, similar to its earlier games.

  A technical rebuild ran alongside the design work. Every Supergiant game since Bastion had run on a custom engine written in C# on the Microsoft XNA framework. Because of limits in performance and the difficulty of porting to other hardware, the studio rewrote it in C++ on a framework called The Forge, gaining the speed of native code.

  The game was a timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store before arriving on Steam on the 10th of December 2019. Supergiant officially left early access on the 17th of September 2020, the same day the game launched on Nintendo Switch. Cross-save between Windows and Switch had been planned for then but had to wait for a patch in December 2020, with saves tied to an Epic Games Store account.

  A physical Switch edition followed on the 19th of March 2021. PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S versions arrived on the 13th of August 2021. An iOS port launched through Netflix Games on the 19th of March 2024, and it was removed from that platform on the 14th of July 2025.

  511141516

• 8. Acclaim and Afterlife

  ›

  Three days after the official launch, Hades had sold another 300,000 copies, lifting its total past one million. During its nearly two years in early access it had sold 700,000. Metacritic recorded "universal acclaim", and OpenCritic reported that 99% of critics recommended it.

  Critics singled out different strengths. IGN wrote that the characters each "felt like an authentic reinterpretation of a classic Greek myth." The Guardian called the portraits "wonderfully drawn". Jordan Devore of Destructoid enjoyed how the dialogue used its non-linear structure "without coming across as artificial". Matt Miller of Game Informer found the combat fast-paced and challenging but felt it could lean on button mashing at times. Suriel Vazquez of GameSpot praised a robust postgame.

  The awards were many. Hades won Game of the Year at the 17th British Academy Games Awards, the 24th D.I.C.E. Awards, the 21st Game Developers Choice Awards, and the 10th Annual New York Game Awards, among others. It was also the first game to win a Hugo Award, through a special video game category added for 2021. Reviewing that win in Black Gate, John ONeill wrote that video games had become "a solid reservoir for powerful storytelling", sixteen years after Roger Ebert's infamous claim that they could never be art.

  The game's replayability drew a large speedrunning community. In August 2023, a runner beat the game on its maximum difficulty, something long thought impossible, and the feat caught the attention of the media and the developers.

  A sequel, Hades II, was announced at The Game Awards 2022. It reached early access on Windows in May 2024 and on MacOS in October 2024. The full game launched on the 25th of September 2025, with versions for Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. Its hero is Melinoë, the Princess of the Underworld and sister of Zagreus. She is out to defeat Chronos, the Titan of Time, with help from Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft. Melinoë casts spells that drain mana and gathers ingredients to craft boons and gear in special rooms.

  4324287380