I don’t envy any designer tasked with expanding upon Hades, a game so airtight that it could only have crystallized through a process of rigorous elimination. Whenever I go back for another run–which isn’t too often these days, though I did spend at least three solid months of my 2020 malaise deep in a Hades foxhole–I’m always impressed by the game’s ability to wring near-infinite permutations of itself out of a relatively restrained framework.
I say “restrained” with an asterisk here because, as any Hades vets well know, the game is packed full with enough ideas to keep things surprising and challenging for many tens of hours. But key to its replayability is its immediately graspable possibility space: there are six weapons, four zones with (basically) one boss each, and a grab bag of themed powerups that all offer unique variations on playstyle. One successful run usually clocks in at around 30 minutes. Hades onboards you painlessly, and it’s not long before you’ve internalized the game’s core mechanics and progression systems, free thereafter to relinquish yourself to their combinations. (Contrast with a roguelike like The Binding of Isaac, which uses the genre’s randomized, cyclical structure as a vector for dizzying mechanical maximalism, tipping the scale more toward chaos and unpredictability (to great effect) than careful strategizing.)
Developer Supergiant Games could have made Hades bigger, surely, but they didn’t. Bigger would have been unnecessary, and Hades wasn’t built to sustain the unnecessary. It was built to be played, quickly and repeatedly. It cut right to the bone. Why add more?
After about 30 hours with Hades II, I’m still not quite sure.
Hades II is Supergiant’s first sequel. This tracks for a couple reasons: one, Hades sold a gazillion copies, and two, it was the studio’s first genuinely excellent video game. I’m warm on Transistor and Pyre, but Hades felt like a blistering synthesis of all the action game chops they’d been honing for nearly a decade, and it made a deservedly enormous splash. It’s only natural that they’d return to this well, having hit upon a template that represents a perfect alignment of all their skills.
If we coldly define “well designed” as “the numbers in this game make sense,” Hades II is very, very well designed. All of its weapons are sensibly balanced, all of its progression systems are finely tuned, and it doles out new mechanics and information at just the right pace to keep you grinding out fresh runs. It’s a game made by smart, talented people who know exactly what they’re doing.
And if we coldly define a “video game review” as “I tell you whether or not a game is fun,” then yes, Hades II is fun. In some ways it’s more fun than the first. Their structures are nearly identical: you control a figure from the Greek pantheon, fighting your way through the underworld in an attempt to reach and eliminate a boss at the end. Here, your player character is chthonic goddess Melinoë, tasked with defeating the titan Chronos. You’re aided remotely by other members of the pantheon via upgrades to your moveset, and the game’s story unfolds gradually across dozens of runs.
Hades II’s greatest feat of narrative design, shared with its predecessor, is its reactivity. It responds to your decisions (and mistakes) in granular, entertaining ways: Melinoë may express frustration that she (you) didn’t get as far in a run as she’s used to, or gods may remark upon the fact that you’ve already received boons from other gods, offering complementary boons in turn. Certain characters become more directly involved with your journey as you progress–a standout here is the goddess Nemesis, who, after a certain point, begins making clandestine runs of her own, and will challenge you to petty contests or snipe items from shops should you cross her path. The game successfully sells the illusion that you’re not just going through the same motions ad nauseum; every run, regardless of outcome, is a narrative or numerical step forward.
Complicating this reactivity considerably is another, entirely separate route through the surface, beginning in the mythic city of Ephyra and culminating in a battle atop Mount Olympus. The surface route is, effectively, an entire Hades game unto itself, with its own bespoke zones, enemies, items, characters, and encounter design. There’s an astonishing amount of detail and mechanical inventiveness on display here, though just as impressive is the interplay between the two routes. Surface runs will periodically change or realign certain aspects of underworld runs and vice-versa, gradually engendering a natural inclination to alternate between both without pushing players too forcefully toward either. This is, by a wide margin, the most robust addition Hades 2 makes to the formula, a confident and meaningful doubling down on the first game’s most distinctive virtues. On its own, it’s nearly enough to convince me that the existence of a sequel was not only desirable, but necessary. Then they added a bunch of other stuff.
“Stuff” is an ever-shifting variable in game design. One game’s stuff is another game’s foundation. I wouldn’t dream of complaining about weird, fiddly currencies in a game like Crusader Kings III, because Crusader Kings III is, I say affectionately, designed for people who derive genuine pleasure from poring over minute differences between health insurance plans. I would, however, complain about weird, fiddly currencies in a game like Hades, which is about pressing a shitload of buttons as fast as you can until an evil skeleton dies.
Hades II has a lot of weird, fiddly currencies. Fundamentally, I get why they’re there: the game is exponentially larger than Hades, and Supergiant is trying to fill in the margins to avoid any potential long-term redundancy. Hades’ primary currencies were “darkness,” used mostly for unlocking permanent perks and stat upgrades, and “gemstones,” which unlocked helpful modifications to routes. The game was concise enough to coast by with little else. Hades II’s darkness equivalent is “ashes,” but there’s also “psyche,” which can expand Melinoë’s available attunement slots; “moon dust,” which improves Melinoë’s abilities (represented here by an “arcana card” system); “bones,” which are a sort of catch-all currency with which all aforementioned currencies can be bought; and a slew of collectible resources, including various types of ore and flora, which, when combined, modify routes in much the same way gemstones did.
In theory, all of these interlocking systems should seamlessly coalesce into something that feels holistic and self-sustaining. In practice, they place more obstacles between you and having fun. Just cleared a room? Time to run around hitting rocks with your pickaxe and digging up flowers with your shovel (assuming you crafted the pickaxe and shovel to begin with). Want to harvest psyche from a wandering spirit? Grind your momentum to a halt to play the most braindead take on Simon Says in gaming history. Want to add something to a route that the first game was way less stingy about? Plant a seed in your garden, wait a couple runs for it to grow, pick it, realize you don’t have the other required resources yet and have no clue where to get them, give up and just start another run so you can play a video game again.
I spent the first few hours of Hades II being genuinely curious about these systems, the following few hours trying to tune them out, and the remainder of my time actively wishing they would go away. They never impeded my progress to the point that I was compelled to drop the game entirely, though runs eventually began feeling more like obligatory farming missions than intrinsically satisfying arcade action gauntlets. That action is there, but it’s obfuscated by a veil of fussy numbers and half-baked cozy sim mechanics, just intrusive enough that they’re impossible to ignore. The math checks out; the experience doesn’t.
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Back-of-the-box quote:
“Less is Moros.”
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Developer:
Supergiant Games
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Type of game:
Top-down roguelike action RPG.
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Liked:
Constantly evolving and reactive design, creative progression, infinitely pliable combat system.
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Disliked:
Overemphasis on fussy resources, uneven weapon movesets, tedious writing.
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Platforms:
PC (played), Switch, Switch 2.
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Release date:
September 25, 2025
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Played:
30 hours.
It’s especially disappointing, then, that the core gameplay can’t quite compensate. Certainly not for lack of trying–Hades II’s weapons are all admirably cerebral, placing a greater emphasis on positioning and multitasking than anything in the original (with the possible exception of the railgun Exagryph, which also happens to be the only one I hardly ever touched). The dual wands, for instance, are designed around constant, careful projectile management, while the axe hits slowly enough that a single improperly-spaced attack, especially in the more unforgiving later zones, can put you at an enormous disadvantage.
I understand and appreciate the effort to mechanically differentiate Melinoë from Hades protagonist Zagreus, to make her feel less like an in-your-face rushdown beast and more like a prudent tactician. But–and I know how vague and unquantifiable this sounds–the game isn’t as satisfying to play. Supergiant’s combat design has always been fairly straightforward, and that’s fine, because whatever it lacks in raw complexity it more than makes up for with intuitive, thrilling buttons; those buttons are just a bit more limp here, the game’s ambition again chafing against its uncertainty over what to do with it.
Carried over more directly from the first game is an emphasis–even greater, this time around–on character dynamics and interactions. Melinoë, like Zagreus, is booted back to a central hub after failing a run, wherein she can chat up a number of friends, family members, and frenemies before making her next move. Relationships with these characters, and with the Olympians, deepen naturally over time, and can be deepened further by offering them “nectar,” a resource available in either route. Give someone one nectar and they’ll hand you a personalized, equippable item with unique attributes; give them more, and you’ll begin growing closer with them. Very occasionally, that closeness may blossom into intimacy.
The stories and characters in these games do basically nothing for me. I was probably willing to be a bit kinder toward Hades because it was a new, shiny thing with novel ideas about how to structure a video game narrative, but outside of some exciting beats and the occasional funny joke, Hades II had my eyes glazing over. This is uninspired fanfiction by nature and in execution, a sanded-down and self-serious reinterpretation of Greek mythology that warps its figures into cuddly, quippy dating sim archetypes. I’m by no means fundamentally opposed to any work of fiction that wants to riff on those myths (though I’m getting a kick out of imagining how much the Hades games would piss off my high school Latin teacher). I only take issue with Hades II’s irritatingly focus-tested writing, which comes off as little more than red meat for fan engagement; directly downstream from this is the game’s dorky faux-eroticism, presupposing the sexual appeal of its characters and then refusing to actually let them do anything sexy. It’s hard to care about cleavage when everyone talks like a gifset.
Let’s all be adults about this: I have not “finished” Hades II. I’ve completed a few runs and played several dozens more, though one of the game’s biggest draws is that a successful run is merely another plot point; the story and gameplay both continue evolving long after. I’m willing to accept that there could be an eventual moment, which I have yet to reach, where a new upgrade makes the weapons as engaging as those in the original’s arsenal, or where the writing takes an unexpected turn for the better, or where the resource management evens out into something more relaxed and coherent. I’m also willing to accept the game’s foibles even if they remain uncorrected, because I’ve had, more or less, a great time with it. Supergiant’s core design philosophy is still kinetic enough to cut through the noise, and unpredictable enough that I want to see where it goes. This is still Hades we’re talking about, II or otherwise.
