Hades Review: Supergiant Games Turns Death Into the Best Reason to Keep Playing

Supergiant Games’ Hades proves that a roguelike about failing over and over can be one of the warmest, funniest, and most generous games of the last decade.

A Prince With a Grudge and a Very Angry Father

Hades opens with a premise that sounds almost mundane for a game about the Underworld: Zagreus, son of Hades, wants to leave home. Not conquer it, not destroy it, just walk out the front door and find his mother, who he has never met. His father, predictably, disagrees, and the entire structure of the game becomes an argument played out across four increasingly hostile biomes of Greek myth: Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, and the Temple of Styx. Every time Zagreus dies, which is often, he wakes back up in the House of Hades, and the story keeps moving forward regardless.

This is the single smartest decision Supergiant made with Hades, and it is the decision that separates it from almost every roguelike that came before it. Death is not a punishment here. It is a plot device. Every failed run feeds new dialogue, new relationships, and new context into a cast of characters who remember what you did to them three attempts ago. Megaera, one of the Furies guarding the gates, goes from cold professional rival to something far more complicated over the course of dozens of runs, and that arc only works because the writers treated repetition as an opportunity rather than a limitation.

Combat That Rewards Improvisation

Mechanically, Hades is an isometric action game built around six weapons, each of which fundamentally changes how a run feels. The Stygian Blade is a fast, simple sword for players who want to learn the game’s rhythm. The Eternal Spear thrusts and can be thrown for ranged pokes. The Shield of Chaos lets you body-check enemies and deflect projectiles. Later unlocks like the twin fists and the exotic Adamant Rail push the combat further into territory that feels closer to a bullet-hell shooter than a hack-and-slash.

Layered on top of weapon choice is the Boon system, where Olympian gods offer buffs mid-run. Zeus might chain your attacks with lightning, Poseidon might knock enemies back with every hit, Aphrodite might reduce enemy damage output through “weak” status effects. The real depth comes from combining boons across different gods into what the community affectionately calls “builds” — a Zeus-Ares combo that chains lightning through poison marks, or a Demeter-Poseidon combo that freezes and shatters entire rooms. No two runs feel identical, and figuring out a broken combination fifteen hours in still feels like discovering something the developers half-hoped you’d find.

Difficulty is handled through the Pact of Punishment, a set of optional modifiers you can toggle on individually once you clear the game once. This is one of the most elegant difficulty systems in modern game design: instead of a blunt Easy/Normal/Hard toggle, you choose exactly which knives you want thrown at you, whether that’s tougher enemies, fewer healing fountains, or bosses that hit twice as hard. It means the game can scale from a comfortable narrative experience to a genuinely brutal challenge run without ever needing separate difficulty tiers.

Art, Music, and the Voice Acting That Sells It All

Visually, Hades leans into painterly, high-contrast character art that makes every god and monster look like they walked out of a beautifully illustrated mythology book rather than a generic fantasy asset pack. The environments shift from the ash-grey drudgery of Tartarus to the sickly green of Asphodel to the marble opulence of Elysium, and each biome has its own visual identity strong enough that you could recognize a screenshot blind.

Darren Korb’s soundtrack deserves special mention. It shifts between moody, guitar-driven combat themes and quieter, more intimate pieces for the House of Hades hub, and it never becomes repetitive even across a hundred-plus runs, partly because combat music dynamically layers based on what’s happening on screen. But the real production triumph is the voice acting. Every single line of dialogue in the game, thousands of them, is fully voiced, and the cast, including Logan Cunningham as both Hades and the narrator, gives Hades one of the most theatrically confident vocal performances in the medium.

The House of Hades: A Hub Worth Coming Back To

Most roguelikes treat their hub area as a glorified menu screen, a place to spend currency and immediately dive back in. Hades treats the House of Hades as a genuine location with its own cast, its own running jokes, and its own slowly evolving relationships. Nyx, the primordial goddess of night, offers cryptic maternal wisdom between runs. Achilles, Zagreus’s old sword tutor, dispenses advice tinged with guilt over a past the game only reveals gradually. Even minor characters like the gorgon Dusa or the bureaucratic Cerberus have enough personality that returning to the hub after a rough run feels less like a chore and more like checking in with people you’ve grown to care about.

This extends to the game’s Codex, the Mirror of Night, and the Keepsake system, all of which add optional layers without ever feeling mandatory. The Mirror of Night lets you spend a separate currency, Darkness, on permanent passive upgrades, extra health, better dash timing, or increased damage against full-health enemies, that soften the game’s difficulty curve gradually over dozens of runs without ever making a single run feel automatically won. Keepsakes, small trinkets gifted by companions, modify the odds of specific boon types appearing, giving you a further layer of control over how deliberately you can chase a specific build strategy.

Who Should Actually Play Hades

Hades is unusually well suited to two very different kinds of players at once, which is part of why it crossed over so successfully outside the traditional roguelike audience. Players who love theorycrafting and optimization will find enormous depth in min-maxing boon synergies, chasing higher Pact of Punishment configurations, and pushing for the fastest possible clear times. Meanwhile, players who are primarily there for story and character writing can turn the difficulty down through the Pact of Punishment’s God Mode option, which gradually increases survivability the more times you die, and effectively experience the entire narrative without needing mechanical mastery at all.

That flexibility is rare. Most games that try to serve both a hardcore and a narrative-focused audience end up serving neither particularly well, but Hades’ modular difficulty options mean a completionist chasing every weapon aspect and a player who just wants to see how Zagreus and Persephone’s story ends can both walk away satisfied, often from the exact same fifteen-hour campaign.

Where It Falls Short

Hades is not a flawless game. The core loop, however well dressed, is still “fight through the same four zones repeatedly,” and if the roguelike structure itself doesn’t click with you, no amount of narrative polish will fully paper over that repetition. The final stretch of the story, once you’ve technically “won” the game the first time, asks for a significant number of additional clears to see everything, and that commitment isn’t for everyone. A small number of boon combinations can also make certain runs feel trivially easy compared to others, which occasionally undercuts the tension the game otherwise builds so carefully.

Tips for a Smoother First Escape Attempt

New players tend to struggle most in Tartarus and Asphodel simply because they haven’t yet learned to prioritize boons that synergize rather than boons that simply look strong in isolation. A single Zeus boon that adds a chance to chain lightning is fine on its own, but paired with a second Zeus boon that increases cast frequency, it becomes dramatically more effective, and learning to read these Duo Boon prompts, which appear once you’ve taken enough boons from two specific gods, is one of the fastest ways to make early runs feel less punishing.

It’s also worth resisting the urge to rush toward beating the game as quickly as possible. Talking to every available character in the House of Hades between runs, even when it feels like it’s slowing down your next attempt, is where the bulk of the writing lives, and skipping those conversations to sprint back into combat means missing the exact content that makes repeated failure feel worthwhile in the first place.

Final Verdict

Hades succeeds because it never treats its roguelike skeleton as an excuse to skip storytelling. Every death matters, every character grows, and every build feels like it was earned through your own experimentation rather than a menu of pre-set classes. It’s rare for a game this mechanically demanding to also be this emotionally rewarding, and rarer still for both halves to reinforce each other as well as they do here. If you have any interest in action games, Greek mythology, or games that treat failure as fuel instead of punishment, Hades remains one of the essential indie releases of its generation.

Reviewed on PC by the Foremy Team.