 So I'm still working on my best game for 2018 video because I'm kind of struggling to put together a long enough list to make it worthwhile. But in the meantime, there's a game I wanted to cover that is both really great and also in need of some significant tweaks to allow it to reach its full potential. Luckily, it's in early access and comes from one of the best indie developers out there. Supergiant Games' newest title Hades is a rogue, light, isometric dungeon crawler that features the studio's insanely high quality and distinctive art style. It's always excellent writing and voice acting and very, very good but still a little bit rough around the edges gameplay to craft something that has a real chance to be one of the best games of 2019. Supergiant's previous game Pyre was one of my best games of 2017 and Transistor and Bastion were both really good though niche titles. Hades has a chance to be Supergiant's first huge commercial hit because the core gameplay is both snappy and skill based enough to offer even more casual players something fun. In addition to the amazing and I mean amazing, absolutely amazing art and again snappy gameplay you've got really fun story and dialogue. I'd go so far as to say it has the makings of the best story ever to appear in a rogue, light game. Now it's got some real issues that are currently holding it back but that's what Early Access is for right? Let's dig down a bit and find out if the game is for you in the state it is now after the logo. Supergiant Supergiant Games is an interesting developer. They are a favorite studio amongst people who love indie games and for good reason. Supergiant hasn't produced a bad game and they haven't produced a game that's easy to explain. All of them are relatively small but conceptually ambitious. Seriously I was talking to my wife about this game and she asked me what other games Supergiant had made and I was like well there's that one game that's like a religious ritual but also like basketball and then there's the one that's like a weird tactical real time turn based one where you play as a pop star and use your guitar as a weapon and then there was the first one that was an RPG where you play as a little kid and was like a story where a narrator describes every single thing you do. Supergiant's games have all been challenging artistically as well as mechanically. And one of the coolest things about Supergiant is how they maintain a singular style and aesthetic while also having each game remain distinct. This is the fourth title and every single one is a drastic departure from each of the previous games but at the same time each of those games is immediately identifiable as a Supergiant game. Music is uniformly fantastic. The art is amazing and distinctive. And this unique art style has lent all of the games a sort of aesthetic continuity that's rare in games actually. Mechanically the games have evolved in interesting ways. Bastion was a fairly familiar gameplay experience that managed to be unique because its art style was stunning and because its narrative quirks were unique and memorable even if the gameplay was a little bit rough. Transistor was nearly avant-garde in its gameplay systems and high art in its presentation and design. It was complex and different and not the kind of game anyone could pick up in the middle and understand. Pyre was just fantastic, easy to learn and difficult to master with a memorable story wrapped up inside a super tight and utterly unique sports game. PS I think that online multiplayer might have made that game a tremendous success if they'd done it but you know by guns. But while all of the first three games were excellent games, they were also not the kind of games that had a huge market necessarily. None of them were the kind of game that's easy to sell in a paragraph. It's not just the size of the studio or the lack of big time marketing that made Supergiant's games relatively small. It's that the games themselves have again been avant-garde challenging games that by their very design only appealed to a certain niche market of players. And I really liked that about the games. I'm a guy who likes experimental art, film and music. I saw Eraserhead in the theaters when I released. I love bands that only appeal to niche tastes. I'm a musician who likes bands that make music for other musicians but I also have pop tastes deep down. I love bands like Collexico and Transam and Godspeed You Black Emperor. But I love Simon and Garfunkel and Sam Cook and The Shins even more. Hades is shaping up to be Supergiant's first highly accessible and commercially viable game for a number of reasons and that has me excited. Hades relies on a very familiar hack and slash combat system mixed with accessible and relatively simple roguelike progression mechanics. Now, while roguelike games have become much more common in recent years, this style of game remains tricky to get right because balancing fun and difficulty is the most important part of the design. The game genre is built upon failure. If a player picks up your roguelike game and beats it in 10 hours, you've totally failed. But you've also got to make sure that the game feels like it's respecting a player's time. Balancing a feeling of consistent progression without making a game so frustrating that players quit or making it so easy that large sections of the content become irrelevant is what makes or breaks a roguelike. What this ends up meaning in practice is that many of the best roguelikes have several simultaneous progression systems. A game like Diablo in many ways closely mirrors what we've come to expect in roguelites, especially in the greater rifts. You run randomly populated and generated levels over and over getting further each time. The difference between Diablo and a true roguelike is that Diablo relies only on vertical progression. Vertical progression is a system where a player progresses through content mainly by leveling up numbers. Those numbers can be health and damage values or they can be getting badass armor or weapons but the progression is mainly a matter of those numbers going up. Back to Diablo, you run those rifts to get better gear so that you can run the next rift. Then you keep running that one until you get better gear so you can run the next rift and on and on. Now certainly there's some skill involved in the game but it relies far less on that than it does on simply getting better and better gear on your character. This is most often seen in RPGs or MMOs that rely almost completely on vertical progression to the point that it's literally impossible to defeat content without the progression system. Go to a high level area in Warcraft or enter a Destiny raid severely underleveled and you will eventually run into enemies that simply cannot be damaged by the player at all. On the other side there are roguelites like Spelunky where almost all of the progression is simply player progression. You will advance in Spelunky only as you get better at the game. You can't play the first level over and over until you have twice as much health. This makes Spelunky an unbelievably punishing game at first. You progress in Spelunky because you died like an idiot in every conceivable way over and over until you start realizing why you died like an idiot. This is great for driving a feeling of accomplishment in players but also great at frustrating players to the point of quitting. The most successful roguelites combine these systems. Binding of Isaac makes heavy use of player progression. As you play it you will eventually become so familiar with its enemies, bosses, and tile sets that you'll be capable of beating the game without picking up an item. And as you're improving as a player you're also unlocking more and more powerful items that have a chance to drop. The beauty of Isaac and in my opinion the ultimate secret to its explosive success is the subtle generosity of its progression system. While the game is difficult for new players and a game demands a healthy dose of player skill progression, its upgrades mean that occasionally, as you are learning, you will run into a super powerful combination that lets you break the game. This means that every so often as the frustration of the game is about to get to a new player, they'll get brimstone and Tammy's head and suddenly tear through the game to give them a release valve. It is tuned perfectly between hardest nails and player power. And then at the end of that curve, once you unlock more and more and more items, half of them are bad. So the more items you unlock the harder the game gets because it gets less and less likely that you'll get one of the few truly broken combinations. Dead Cells combines item unlocks, player skill progression, and a vertical progression system for a more conventional and smooth progression. You get better and more familiar with the game. You unlock better and better items and over time you actually upgrade those items so more and more powerful versions of them drop with more and more interesting synergies. This means that unlike Isaac, the game is getting consistently easier on a mechanical level. But unlike Isaac, the base moment to moment gameplay is extremely tight and fun so it doesn't really matter. And this is balanced somewhat by the later levels featuring much more difficult enemies. You can still run into combinations that make the game easier but you rarely run into things like the guppy transformation that make the game trivial. And then you've got games like Nuclear Throne and Enter the Gungeon that rely almost completely on player skill progression and item drop RNG. Difficulty is mainly managed by how good the player gets with all of the weapons and a good run and a bad run will be decided by how you play, the RNG of enemy placement, and the RNG of whether or not you get great weapons to drop. In its current state, Hades has very, very limited vertical progression and falls much more closely into the Nuclear Throne or Enter the Gungeon style of roguelite. Which means almost all of your progress is based upon your skill, whether good upgrades drop during runs, and whether you choose wisely amongst those upgrades. And this is fine in theory, but the current difficulty and gameplay balance can be so chaotic that it feels less like it relies on skill and more like it relies on attrition and blind luck at times. The limited vertical progression in Hades is centered around slowly upgrading a very small group of stats inherent to your character, not the gear or upgrades themselves. And the stats that you upgrade don't feel all that good because you're upgrading things that end up feeling like they're out of the player's control. Now, that might sound strange, but I'll explain. It's clear that Supergiant wants the progression in their game to be much more focused on player skill progression than on item or power-up progression. And that can be fine if the game is carefully tuned with that in mind. And the possibility of doing just that is clearly here, so I'm confident the game will get it right. And for now, let me give you a couple examples. There are three places where you can upgrade the damage your character does. You can slowly upgrade the damage you do when hitting an enemy in the back, when attacking immediately after dashing, and you can upgrade how much health you recover when counterattacking immediately after being damaged, a la Bloodborne or Dead Cells. Now, all of those sound like great places to have vertical progression. It's a way to upgrade your character without ever making any of the content too easy because in theory, none of these upgrades are simply passive damage boosts. All of them require a specific player action to take advantage of. But there's also a problem here because these upgrades don't mesh very well with the combat that's currently on offer. Hades, to its credit, is an insanely twitchy, fast-paced game. There's not all that much in tactical encounters here. In the first level, you can sometimes control whether you backstab an enemy or make a concerted effort to only attack after dashing, but the difficulty ramps up very, very quickly in the current build. Let's take a look at some first-level encounters here, okay? You'll notice that in order to stay alive, you've got to be dashing and dodging pretty regularly. But once you hit the first boss, you'll notice that the chaos on the screen has ramped up to a point where it's basically impossible to expect any player to keep track of everything happening. To the point, I'm curious if any of the developers feel like they are making actual decisions about when and where to attack enemies. There's only so much a player can take note of. There are so many things to be dodging that the idea of deliberately aiming for an enemy's back or timing dodges so that you can attack within one second, or especially the idea of counter-attacking after taking damage is kind of crazy to expect. By the second level, you will never be dealing with one enemy, or even with five enemies. You'll be dealing with ten or more enemies constantly attacking. It's not that you start button-mashing necessarily. It's that the game becomes a kind of rhythm game of dodge, dodge, attack, dodge, dodge, attack. Now the progression damage increases still will come into effect, but it won't actually be under your control. If this is the gameplay style, it seems to me Supergiant would simply be better off offering passive damage upgrades tied to the weapons or the upgrades themselves. The current system almost seems like a vestige of the gameplay style of their previous games, which were far more tactical. This game isn't tactical. It's akin to a bullet hell twitchy response type game you'd expect from 1988 or from games like Gungeon or Nuclear Throne. Hades is, again, much closer to enter the Gungeon than it is to Binding of Isaac. Now, the most important thing in a game's combat is how it feels, and the reason Hades has a chance to be a huge hit is because the combat feels really, really fucking good. But even there, there were slight tweaks that could make it feel better. There's a recovery time after dashing that feels, again, like the vestige of a time where gameplay might have been less insanely fast and more tactical. If there were less enemies, I could justify having the dash recovery time, but as it stands now, you're already punished for dodge spamming because by the second level, the arenas are littered with high damage environmental hazards. There was a build that relied on small amounts of high health enemies restricting the dodge would make more sense, but that's not the game Supergiant has here right now. And I know I'm sounding negative here, so I want to be clear. I love this game. I love the art. I love the story. The music is unbelievably good, and the gameplay is really, really excellent. And it isn't very early access with Supergiant saying the final release might be as late as 2020. But the point of a good early access release is to make sure the game can be everything it can be and there are some important balance and aggression issues that need to be worked out. The weapons on offer are all really cool and do change how you play, although the bow's slow charge time might need to be reduced just a tad. I also think Supergiant should consider not letting players choose which weapon they will use. No matter what a developer does, one of the weapons will always be better than the others, and players will naturally always choose the weapon they're most comfortable with. I feel like starting each run by assigning the player weapon would probably be a better system. The actual rogue light elements on offer are through boons and power-ups, and they are very cool. The power-ups are all satisfying and powerful and do drastically alter your play style. And choosing which way to go and which power-ups to choose gives the game a really nice feeling of progression within each discrete run. And there will be more weapons and powers added as development continues, apparently. So my main issues with the game right now boil down to four things. I think the recovery after dashing doesn't fit with the current game's ridiculously chaotic and twitchy style, the way the elite enemies are implemented, the total lack of vertical aggression, and boss health. I'm hoping that the difficulty spiking is a result of there being only two levels, and Supergiant wanted to provide hours of playtime and value to those who choose to buy in early access. But even so, when you get to the second level, Asphodel, the difficulty ramps up to insane, ridiculous levels. The game handles elite monsters by making them have two health bars. The first one is yellow and is called armor by the game. And if that was the entirety of the difference, I think it would be perfectly balanced, but it's actually not. Not only do the yellow enemies have two health bars, enemies who have a yellow health bar cannot be interrupted, meaning the only, only thing the player can do is either dash constantly or kite the enemies around over and over. In the first level, this plays fine and actually pretty fun because there are manageable amount of enemies and you do a reasonable amount of damage to them. But in the second level, when enemies who had previously been a mini-boss or regular enemies, there are traps all over the floor and certain enemies actually make others totally invulnerable, it gets to just impossible, ridiculous levels of chaos. There ends up being so much going on that it's just kind of a total button mashing mess. Watch, watch. Also, both bosses just take too damn long to kill. Now, I like hard games. I love Nuclear Throne and Gungeon and Isaac. I love the Souls games, so I don't want these encounters made easier. I want them made shorter. The first boss, Megara, features a bunch of immunity phases and constantly spawning adds. On top of that, the boss herself has only very brief periods where she can be safely attacked and she absorbs an outrageous amount of punishment. Fighting the boss quite literally takes almost as long as the entire floor leading up to her. The obvious solution here is to tone down the amount of enemies a bit, increase the damage the boss does, and cut her health by as much as half. The second boss is very cool mechanically and super cool visually, but again, has just too much health and during its final phase, it is such a chaotic mess of visual feedback that it is simply impossible for me to actually process what's happening. Between adds, boss heads, lava, explosions, boss ranged attacks, and the particle effects from your dashing and attacking, it is simply not feasible to expect a player to comprehend what's happening on their screen. Now, the boss health issue can be solved either through a vertical progression system that allows players to do more damage as they progress or simply cutting health. And honestly, I would probably prefer it to be accomplished through a vertical progression system. A very slow vertical progression system that gives players a passive bonus to all of their damage also helps players who aren't as skilled be able to eventually beat the game. Now, those are all big issues, but also issues I expect to be addressed as the game goes through development. As it stands right now, in its current condition, it is easily able to provide 20 plus hours of gameplay before you've upgraded everything and beat the two levels and bosses. It is a hell of a start, but some of these issues I have highlighted need to be addressed to make this game truly great. It's definitely in early access and the game is still rough mechanically in certain spots, but it's got so much potential and the care and crafts that have gone into the art, music, and gameplay make it clear that Hades has a real chance to be Supergiant's best game yet. And if the game is carefully balanced around the style of gameplay that's here, rather than a style of gameplay Supergiant might have originally intended, it has a chance to be a huge breakout hit. It is an excellent example in its current state of how small things like enemy health, attack startup frames, iframes, dodge recovery times, how things like that can be critical to how a game plays. Still, if this looks and sounds like something you'd like to play, I wholeheartedly recommend getting it in early access. I'm excited to play the game as it updates and watch it take its final form. If it was more clearly in its final form, I'd probably be less excited, but I hope to watch this game really hone in on the core experience and further refine everything that makes it play so well. If that sounds fun to you, give it a buy. It is 20 bucks, and as it is now, I feel it is well worth the price and I really can't wait to see where it goes. Alright, see you next time. Bye.