“It’s a paradox, right? How do you end something that can keep going forever?” says Kasavin. There’s an endless number of things to do: the minutiae of everyday life. You can continue to play the game long after you trigger the credits sequence as well as an epilogue. Hades has multiple endings but, also, none at all. In a kind of interactive slash fiction, I became heavily invested in reuniting Achilles with long-lost lover Patroclus as well as courting Thanatos, thirst trap of death, with bottles of ambrosia. You meet other characters along your journeys through the planes of death and can choose to help them. The game has the aesthetic and charm of a sardonic graphic novel. Endings, rather elegantly, simply become new beginnings.Įventually, Hades starts to feel more like a family drama in which the goal is to patch up relationships: Zeus and the rest of the Olympian clan are petty and capricious with their boons your father is an overbearing bureaucrat drowning in paperwork. The brief encounter is just another opportunity to do the whole thing all over again in order to talk to your mother. You reunite only to discover that you can’t survive for long in the surface world. When Zagreus reaches the mortal coil, he meets his birth mother Persephone, who believed him to be stillborn. The first time I got out of hell (the final boss is, quite fittingly, your father Hades), I felt relief, joy, fulfillment. The structure of the game remains the same and yet your motivations for playing begin to change. Of course, what an endless loop of death begins to resemble is life itself. You are no longer the same person when you try again. So it becomes a fun thought exercise: How do we align the narrative experience with the actual experience the player is having?” There’s a metaphysical point here that’s inherent to even the most rudimentary games, whether it’s a Rubik’s Cube or Red Dead Redemption: You die, you learn. “We wondered if we could build that into the premise - have it be about a character who also carries forward his knowledge and encounters other characters who also remember everything that happened. “You carry forward your knowledge,” says Kasavin. I learned not to stand in lava, for instance. Still, as Zagreus gets stronger, so do you. I refused to put on “God Mode” to make the game easier on myself, because purism is another form of masochism. “You didn’t screw up, you didn’t do something bad.” “This is how you get through this game,” adds Greg Kasavin, the creative director. “Failing is an important part of the pleasure of the game,” says Amir Rao, the studio director of Supergiant, the independent game developer behind Hades. Like Tom Cruise waking up the day before battle in Edge of Tomorrow, you emerge from the River Styx, shake the blood out of your hair, ready for another round. Other characters acknowledge that you suck at staying alive you accumulate experience (as well as something called “darkness”). Yes, you return to the starting line, but a narrative arc also forms. Gaming scholars will point out that technically Hades is a “rogue-lite” in that while it shares many of these qualities - you move through ever-shifting chambers of hell - when you die, you don’t start from scratch. Hades is a “roguelike,” a video-game subgenre whose main features include a randomized dungeon crawl, high difficulty level, and permadeath, meaning that when your character dies, you have to start all over again. It was affirmation, not wish fulfillment: We were in hell, and there was no escape. Hades offered a different form of solace. I learned to take pleasure in the repetition. I texted my friends beseeching them for their help: Help! They lobbed benign platitudes like “Keep trying!” and “It gets better!” I died and died and died in both new and familiar ways in a Groundhog Day reprise. It’s fast and difficult, and I was terrible at it. The structure is straightforward: There’s a beginning and an alleged end when you reach the surface. As the pandemic dragged on, I turned to Hades, a video game in which you play as Zagreus, the son of Hades, attempting to escape the Underworld. Initially it was Breath of the Wild, the giant open-world Zelda game, which offered a fantastic opportunity to do things I could not do in real life, like travel, buy a house, or save the world from a primordial manifestation of evil. For the first time since my teens, I was playing Nintendo. Photo-Illustration: by Vulture Photo by Supergiant GamesĪs I lost my grip on reality over the past year, I found comfort in virtual ones.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |