Launching Hades (2020, Supergiant Games) is like stepping through the wardrobe into the world of an 80s power metal album. The characters reflect the chiseled musculature of Ancient Greek statues. The action flows like an anime fever dream. The characters, lore, story, design, and even the sidequests are carefully based on Greek mythology, to incredible effect. The soundtrack is just banger after banger; a metal score for a metal onslaught. And over a year and a half since I completed the story, the random elements and eternal, slow escalations in difficulty are just enough to keep me guessing and learning without feeling punished. If I lose, it’s always clear how I could do just a little better.

I got back into Hades in the middle of a bind. About to take a few weeks away from my streaming setup, it was too late to commit to an entire new game (e.g. Metroid Prime 4, Hollow Knight or Hades II), but too early to play nothing. Hades filled the gap — putting the braincells through their paces in increments one or two runs at a time, the gamer-skills equivalent of a two-kilometre run or of “drop and give me twenty”. It feels like a short workout, in the best possible sense of the term.

Now I’m back to playing two or three runs a day, usually after dinner. I’m slowly incrementing the Pact of Punishment’s heat guage from 16, to 17, to 18. I’ve attached a few clips featuring a couple of my recent builds (SPOILERS for major bosses in their Extreme Measures forms).

For a build I thought wouldn’t work out, this one turned out shockingly well. For a Malphon (gloves) run, I usually try to get a Damage Per Hit boon for the basic attack, and this time around I got saddled not merely with a percentage boost, but with a non-damaging status effect — Heartbreak Strike’s secondary effects don’t benefit even a little from a second hit, except to reset the timer on the Weak status (where any of the other % damage boons get at least a few edge-case benefits). Even worse, I got stuck with Zeus’s cast boon — not useless, but when the same chain lighning and its associated status effects can be applied to a rapid-fire attack instead, it feels wasted in this slot.

But then it all fell together. The Aphrodite/Ares duo boon causes ‘weak’-afflicted targets to take repeat damage from Doom effects, and having those two on attack and special, respectively, ended up being absolute dynamite as the secondary boons stacked up. Putting chain lightning on cast still isn’t my usual style, but in one shot it does about as much damage as four or five chains on the standard attack version. Add a bunch of revenge boons and the Zeus/Ares Duo Boon (Vengeful Mood) that sets them all off at regular intervals, and finally, the full benefits of an Epic-tier Rush Delivery, which converts all % speed boosts into % damage boosts as well.

This build wasn’t a winner, but still showcases a few of my favourite things: we’ve got Dionysus’s Trippy Shot converted by a Duo Boon (into Ice Wine, which does plenty of Chill damage), we’ve got two separate stackable status effects at full tilt (Hangover and Chill), as well as the Duo Boon combos that cause Aphrodite’s Weakness to enhance the other status effects (ie. more stacks of Hangover). The hardest part was keeping Hangover stacks applied — the primary attack with the Shield doesn’t quite have the speed or range for it, and it mostly excels as a hit-and-run weapon rather than a sit-and-hit. Honorable mention to Ares’s Doom effects on the shield throw — the best possible place for them; tag once and let it do its thing.

In this build I made some mistakes. I was lucky enough to get the triple-shot upgrade for the bow, plus Sea Storm (Poseidon/Zeus duo boon) on the attack, special, and cast. For the 2nd Aspect bow, whose special fires 8 shots that all home in on a target marked by your attack, Poseidon’s Tempest Flourish isn’t the ideal boon for the special initially because it increases the damage by a percentage instead of a raw amount. But Sea Storm makes each of these individual hits do an added 40 lightning damage, and that’s without accounting for status effects, so this is pretty much the best possible outcome (for comparison, Thunder Flourish’s damage-per-hit varies, but it’s usually less than 40). This was all brought down pretty significantly by Hunter Dash (one of the harder dash boons to benefit from, especially with the bow) and the lack of other utility in the kit.

This one snuck up on me. I usually try to pair Artemis with Ares’s or Demeter’s casts, specifically for the homing properties Artemis’s Duo Boons grant them (which compounds quickly with other upgrades and with Fully Loaded, which gives you extra cast charges). I was still thinking of the Hangover/Doom combo as the centrepiece of the build, the Glacial Glare as a support. Partway through Phase 1 of the final boss, I was neck deep in armoured Flycatchers and Doom Crystals when I started to notice just how rapidly those lasers were stacking (and popping) Chill damage. My perspective inverted. For the rest of the fight, I was able to dodge around laying turrets and occasionally use the rest of the kit just to bash through to the other side.

I don’t really have an end goal in mind. It’s pretty likely I’ll stop playing when I start on Hades II, and use that as a replacement, which you can expect to happen live on Twitch in a few weeks — but it’s just as likely I’ll play through something else first. We’ll see!