But first, a story
It’s probably unfair to say that video games struggle with knowing how to tell a story, but I do feel pretty confident in saying that the majority of games have difficulty telling a story as a game.
What I mean is that, when games seek to tell a story, they often do so by aping the narrative methods of movies or books, things that are linear and will tell a single story regardless of what the viewer or reader does. (Yelling “DON’T GO IN THERE” at the screen isn’t going to stop a character in a horror movie from entering the killer’s house.)
Unlike movies or books, video games require continued interaction between the player and the game, effectively creating a third space, a space neither wholly the player nor wholly the game but which is, instead, defined by each’s response to the other. So, when I say that “the majority of video games have difficulty telling as story as a game,” I mean that this third space is often either underdeveloped or fully ignored. What this leaves us with, then, are games that feel segmented, where gameplay is kept mostly of wholly separate from the narrative drive of the game.
This makes sense from a development point of view: players are unpredictable, and if you seek to tell a story, you have to reduce player control in some regard in order to ensure the narrative points you wish to hit are actually reached. But this means that games that seek to tell a narrative story often do so at the expense of gameplay. I mean, I still remember the level of true dejection I felt after playing The Wolf Among Us, a game that advertised that my in-game decisions held moral weight and would affect the ultimate outcome. When I later learned that, no matter my decisions, the ending cut-scene would always be exactly the same in every playthrough, I felt cheated. I thought I was playing a game, but I had actually been watching a movie with occasional prompts to push a button.
This isn’t to say that a story-focused game can’t have interesting gameplay, or vice versa. Rather, even in games that do both well, these realms are kept largely separate (see: The Last of Us Part II, which has engaging gameplay but relegates the majority of its storytelling heft to cinematic and expository cutscenes). What we’re left with are a vast majority of games dancing a ring around the third space in different, yet consistent, ways.
So imagine my surprise when I started playing Hades, a game I expected absolutely nothing from besides some hours of mindless gameplay, but which manages to not only address the third space, but create an experience directly within it.
Daddy Issues
Hades is the newest game out from Supergiant, makers of such one-word-game-titles like Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre. Supergiant’s earlier games lean more heavily into the RPG/linear/narrative structure, so Hades is somewhat of a departure. Hades is a roguelike, a genre of video game built on a looping structure. In roguelikes, the player is tasked with achieving an in-game goal and, upon failure (usually: when the player’s character dies), they are sent right back to the beginning to try all over again.
In Hades, the player controls Zagreus, the impetuous son of the lord of the Underworld from the Greek pantheon of gods. Hades’s Underworld is really more of an administrative building with a death motif, with Hades himself sitting behind a giant desk, filling out the intake paperwork of the many souls and shades who come through his realm.
Zagreus hates the Underworld, resents his father, and is gaining a growing suspicion that the loving goddess who has acted as his mother (Nyx, night incarnate) might not actually be his biological parent. And so Zagreus attempts to escape to the surface world to reunite with his distant relatives on Mount Olympus who all seem a lot more fun than the paperwork drudgery he’s seen so far in his father’s dour house.
The player is thus tasked with dashing and slashing through the Underworld: from Tartarus, to Asphodel, to Elysium, and finally to the mouth of the river Styx. Along the way, the Olympian gods offer help in the way of acquirable “boons,” which provide offensive or defensive power-ups to Zagreus’s arsenal. All are nicely themed around the god providing the assist (Artemis boosts critical hit ratios; Dionysus poisons enemies; Zeus hits ‘em with lightning; Aphrodite makes them weaker). However, even with the help, the Underworld is full of danger. Soon enough in the player’s first escape attempt, Zagreus is felled by some Underworld denizen.
And where else do the dead go but to the house of Hades? So, after dying, Zagreus finds himself re-emerging from the bloody river Styx in the main chamber of his father’s house, with Hades himself scoffing at him from behind his giant desk; doesn’t his ungrateful son know there is no escape?
But the thing is, Zagreus isn’t about to stop trying. So, we enter the quintessential roguelike death loop, with Zagreus continuing to make escape attempt after escape attempt, only to be killed in the process and find himself staring down his father once again (a father who may have literally dealt the death blow in the last escape attempt, since Hades is, as one might expect, the final boss Zagreus has to face before leaving the Underworld and stepping into the sun).
It’s a clever conceit; repeated death is the hallmark of rougelikes, so having a game set literally in the realm of the dead fits in to the mythology (as it were) nicely. Thus the player begins Hades with the implicit task of roguelikes made explicit: escape death, and anything less than that is failure.
Git Gud
A successful roguelike makes the player feel that reaching their stated end goal (e.g. in Hades, getting Zagreus out of the Underworld) is achievable, albeit very difficult. The disappointment of failing a run needs to be tempered by the possibility of success in the next attempt. The emotional balance between these two poles is also what entices the player to continue; if you feel that you almost made it, then you’re much more willing to give it another go.
For roguelike games that seek to tell a story, this emotional undercurrent becomes the driving narrative force of the game. Beating the final boss is the natural end point in a linear story, so the emotional weight is tethered to that goal. This is why the player grinds through multiple attempts, learning the rhythms and cadence of the game, building up an arsenal of skills, getting some light carpal tunnel from learning to time their button-pressing just right. This is the root of the joking recommendation that the only way to beat a hard game is to “git gud” (read: “get good”).
Here’s the problem: what happens when you actually beat the final boss and finally — finally — succeed? What then, when you’ve reached the “end” of a game built on eternal looping?
Well, after a “winning” run, the roguelike — narratively speaking — has nowhere to go. So, it has one of two options: 1) be really, fully over and done or 2) find a reason to put the player back at the beginning, and give them a reason to try again. With option #2, these reasons to try again are often in the form of more difficult challenges: doing runs with beefier enemies, reduced health pools, or other impediments.
This option is still pretty pleasing from a gameplay perspective; once you get good enough to beat the game comfortably, increasing the difficulty simply keeps you on the “git gud” path, to “git gudder.” But, narratively, it’s pretty empty… because there is no more narrative to speak of, it having “ended” with the conclusion of the emotional arc. In short, we’re seeing the failings of trying to force a linear story on a non-linear experience.
For instance, in my favorite roguelike to date, Dead Cells, the player controls an undead warrior, compelled to try to escape from an infected and neglected kingdom. However, when the player finally beats the final boss for the first time, the game turns the player’s character into a little blob and send them back to the beginning without much explanation as to why. This was especially jarring for me as a player because the game had set itself up like there would be a story: there was ample flavor text and non-player character interactions that seemed to hint to a deeper in-game lore. But that was laid low by virtue of how the game played: it couldn’t have a storybook ending because there was no ending, just more loops, forever and ever and ever.
A cycle, broken
Hades would have been an absolutely stellar game to play, even if it had gone the route of other roguelikes and sat content with an endless loop cycle, uncommented upon and continued forever. It certainly has a host of merits: its art style is beautiful, with watercolor-painted backgrounds and fine details; the Gods and Underworld personalities have defined personalities, and Supergiant very purposefully made them from a variety of racial backgrounds (and they’re all BEAUTIFUL); the gameplay is smooth and, when you’re in a good flow, makes you feel like a champion of button-pushing.
But, where Hades shines is that it cracked the nut of the rougelike narrative by subtly and surprisingly re-setting the emotional goalposts of the game before you even escape the Underworld for the first time.
When the player begins Hades, the point of the game seems abundantly clear: escape the Underworld. With this in mind, Supergiant must have known that the player would take every possible opportunity to better their chances of getting Zagreus to the surface.
And so, Supergiant gives the player plenty of chances to gain power-ups for Zagreus. However, Supergiant does a sort of gameplay sleight of hand: the only way to gain many of these power-ups is by talking to different characters randomly encountered in the Underworld. Thus, before any power-up can be granted, Zagreus is going to have a quick chat with Achilles, or Megara the Fury, or Sisyphus, or Eurydice, or Orpheus, or Patroclus, or whomever.
Casual in-game dialogue is not an unusual precursor to getting an item (think: an in-game shopkeeper who greets the player’s character with a hearty “Hail and well met!” in any fantasy RPG) , so these interactions fly under the radar. But Supergiant also knows that the player is working on a loop. So, as the player continues to try to make escape attempt after escape attempt and keeps seeking out these Underworld characters to get their power-ups, the conversation between the characters and Zagreus deepens.
They start to grow close to each other. Eurydice not only gives upgrades to Zagreus’s Olympian-bestowed boons, she also shares the story of how she and her husband Orpheus were tragically separated. Hypnos doesn’t just greet Zagreus when he emerges from the River Styx, but also desperately wants an autograph from the Bull of Minos (who just happens to be one of the bosses). Nyx doesn’t just gift Zagreus permanent power-ups in the House of Hades under the lord of the house’s nose, she also shares the story of Zagreus’s true mother and how he might connect with her… while also wondering about she can rebuild her relationship with her own parent, the Cthonic god Chaos, whom Zagreus has coincidentally come to know during his many escape attempts.
The more the player tries to escape, the more Zagreus interacts with those around him, and the more lovingly entangled he becomes in all their hopes and dreams. The game quietly and deliberately pivots from a linear story of escape, to a many-branching tree of equally important stories, all being told concurrently and circularly.
So, by the time Zagreus does escape for the first time (for me: on escape #26 after a long and white-knuckled battle with Hades), I didn’t feel like the game was “over.” To me it was clear that, like the structure of the game itself, Zagreus’s story is one of loops and patterns and messy tangled knots, and the only way to keep untangling it all was to keep playing. And, anyway, I wouldn’t want to leave even if I could; there were people back in the House of Hades that I wanted to say hi to. I had finally gotten the Bull of Minos’s autograph and I just knew Hypnos would be psyched.