Hades (2018) is a great game. I realize I might be a little behind the curve here. As is typical with Supergiant games, it gets everything right – the writing is lovely, the art and music are beautiful, the gameplay is well designed. It embraces ludonarrative, something even mainstream reviewers picked up:

Something that’s truly special and unusual about Hades is that Supergiant Games uses these persistent relationships to travel the difficult path of marrying story to gameplay, and in doing so elevates the simple loop of Zag’s escape into something more than the sum of its parts. Within the world of most rogue-lites, a failed run is not typically seen as part of the story (with apologies to Rogue Legacy). But in Hades, a death leads to Zag returning home to mockery (usually from Papa Hades). This transforms something as fundamental as death from a video game-y failure state into in-game world building. Characters remember your triumphs and failures with a staggering amount of incidental dialogue that made me feel like I was constantly chipping away at new content within Zagreus’ story even when I failed. After a while I no longer feared death, I embraced it as an opportunity to learn and revisit friends back in the House of Hades to see if they have something new to say.

(that’s from IGN)

I got into Hades having already played a couple other roguelike games (a genre where your character has to start over from scratch after dying or otherwise losing, instead of loading from a save). There are individual roguelike games that I enjoyed, like FTL and Into the Breach, but as a whole it’s not my favorite genre. I always felt like the games were too hard and placed too much of an emphasis on punishing the player, assuming you’d come around to enjoying the experience out of some, I guess, inclination to masochism. But Hades is emphatically not that kind of game. And not only that, it manages to be difficult, complex, and really fun to play at the same time. I’d like to get into the specific thing that makes that possible in this post.

Hades does not have a tutorial. When you start the game, you’re simply dropped into the first level to collect your first “boon”, a powerup that your character receives from the Olympian gods, and then you have to fight your first enemy. Subsequent levels introduce progressively more complicated and difficult enemies, in larger numbers and different combinations. Eventually your character dies in a flash of red, and then emerges from the river Styx into the house of Hades, your home base for the remainder of the game. This segment introduces most of the game’s major characters and sets up the narrative for the rest of the game, and then eventually you return back to the underworld to try fighting your way out again. And again. And again.

What the game is doing in this early segment is a pretty well established concept called conveyance, which just describes the elements games use to directly teach players how to play the game. There’s no single element of conveyance in Hades that’s particularly novel, but it’s attention to detail is exhaustive. One thing I particularly appreciated: the pattern from the early game of introducing enemies one at a time continues throughout later levels, even after the player has been exposed to every possible type of opponent. The game designers recognize that you don’t just need to see different enemy types once, you also need consistent practice fighting them and to be able to experiment with different styles of attacks and different weapons or powers.

The ways that Hades rewards learning and experimentation are closely related to another concept: “play conditioning”, a term coined by YouTuber Hbomberguy in a video about Bloodborne. It’s long, so here’s a quick summary of his argument: in Demon’s Souls and the Dark Souls games, players are encouraged early on to use shields in combination with weapons like spears that encourage slow, cautious play. A lot of players take this path-of-least-resistance approach and end up not enjoying the game because they were never encouraged to learn a more agile style of play that’s ultimately easier and more fun. Bloodborne solves this problem by removing the shield and forcing players to learn to play the “hard” way. That’s play conditioning – the way that games encourage or discourage different styles of play.

Hades embraces this “no path of least resistance” approach. Your character starts without much health and a relatively low-damage weapon, so you need to master the dodge mechanic early on and figure out the timings of enemy attacks to make progress at all. The first boss fight you encounter is really difficult – I’d guess it took me around ten tries to beat it the first time. But once you’ve finished it, you’ve had to learn a lot about how to play Hades and you’re well prepared for the later levels.

Where play conditioning shines in Hades though is encouraging learning and experimentation. Short game “runs” (for me, it takes less than 40 minutes to beat every boss and escape the underworld) combined with random rewards for completing chambers mean that you never get too attached to any one character “build” or style of play. All eight weapon options are visible from the very beginning, and you pay clearly defined resource costs to unlock them, which means you don’t have to invest heavily in learning one weapon at the start of the game. You’re encouraged to continuously try different options by a rotating boost that you can get by picking a different weapon at the start of every run. Compare this to FTL, another very good roguelike RPG, where you unlock new ships very rarely and unpredictably; as a result, you tend to get very invested in learning how to use the starter ship are more hesitant to try alternatives.

The mechanic of introducing enemies slowly at the start of chambers plays into this as well; players aren’t expected to have immediately mastered a new weapon or combination of boons, and even if you do struggle initially you’ll find a lot of opportunities to heal your character and make up for a poor start as the run progresses.

The result is magical: a roguelike game that’s actually fun to play. The insight that Hades has, that isn’t completely unique but that is relatively new to the roguelike genre, is that you can make a game that’s challenging without completely ignoring the player experience. And it does this not by letting people opt out of the challenging aspects of the game, but by ensuring it’s easy to learn to master them.

There’s an admittedly stupid debate among gamers about the existence of easy modes in games. The argument I tend to agree with is that people should be allowed to play games however they want, including if they don’t enjoy difficult game mechanics, as opposed to the elitist and sometimes ableist view that more difficult games are just inherently better. But I also love how Hades charts a third path through this debate: instead of letting people opt out the main difficulty level, the game focuses obsessively on making that difficulty level accessible to even casual players. It does later introduce some mechanics to let people optionally add more difficult elements to their underworld runs, but even that is done in a way that gives you very granular control over how the difficulty changes and lets you ramp up slowly over time. The answer to this classic dilemma is, as it turns, to make better games.