Hades was officially released in late 2020, during the heights of the coronavirus pandemic. An endlessly replayable spin on Greek mythology, it came out to mass death, to fear, to a society trapped inside, avoiding neighbors and loved ones alike.
Like Zagreus, the rebellious son of Hades trying to escape from his father’s realm, we were also fighting to stay alive, struggling to break free and catch one breath of cool, crisp air before being dragged back inside and down under. Hades was escapism that told a story about escaping, an entertaining time-waster when time was all we had. We could dream alongside Zagreus of a freedom from the crushing forces of the world we had inherited.
Four years later, its successor has arrived, a different game for an entirely different time.
We can touch and talk and see one another. We can cram into a movie theater or a club, can even chug the sweat-filled air of a packed gym. But it’s not the same world as the one we left behind in 2020. Everything’s different. Work, for many, exists in a confused middle ground between remote and in-person shifts. Social skills and conversational ease have stiffened and atrophied. Everywhere, once familiar and trusted systems seize up and crumble.
Hades II takes place a number of years beyond the events of the first game. You play as Melinoë, the youngest child of Hades, born sometime during these intervening years and spirited away as an infant just before the titan Chronos invaded the underworld and imprisoned the rest of her family. Chronos comes across as dismissive and haughty, an apt characterization for the father of time.
At first glance, the sequel doesn’t seem to depart at all from its predecessor. Your character fights through a series of worlds, with minor bosses at the end of each and one big boss blocking the way. If you die you must go all the way back to the beginning and start again. Both iterations are about learning and improving through repetition.
But Hades II exists in direct conversation with Hades, reflecting back many of its ideas rather than simply extending them. Many sequels opt to balloon out their worlds and give us the same stuff — just more of it. Hades II dredges up the same stuff while twisting it into something else, a beacon of what once was but can never be again.
In Hades, Zagreus is intent on breaking out of the underworld. Hades II reverses things. Though part of Melinoë’s time may be spent exploring the surface, her main task is to break into the underworld. She is on a mission of revenge against Chronos, intent on dethroning him and saving her family (along with many beloved side characters).
Areas and enemies familiar to those who’ve played the first game look different here, through Melinoë’s eyes. Tartarus, once the starting level, now comes at the end, and it’s astonishing how much the shuffling of its place in the dramatic arc changes how it is perceived. What was home and comfort to Zagreus — and, by extension, the player — now feels alien and unfriendly.
Once again, Supergiant Games, the team behind Hades, has released a title that seems purpose-built for a particular time and place.
Melinoë, like us, is an orphan of the past. She has been severed from her family, from a life that could have been one of safety and comfort. She begins the game out in the wilds, far from the place she knows to be home. She barely even remembers it, having left at such a young age. Melinoë is trying to make her way back, trying to return to a past she cannot even picture or recall. Her struggle is to exhume that memory; to fall over and over again in the battle to reclaim her home.
Because Hades II is in early access, which allows players to play an unfinished game before it is officially released, there are plenty of bugs, placeholder art and not-quite-balanced combat encounters. But the intent is for developers to make improvements based on feedback from eager playtesters, an approach that Supergiant successfully navigated with the original Hades.
Both games have a lot to say about death, although Melinoë’s expirations look different from the bloody throes of Zagreus. She appears to cast a spell that teleports her back to safety just before the ultimate blow lands. But her deaths are just as final, signaling a violent end to the pursuit of progress. The cycle begins again. When enough blood is spilled, our depleted hero returns back to zero once more.
Death is an inevitability in these games. It’s life that’s the anomaly, a rare thing to be glimpsed only in passing. While Hades II finally allows your character to visit the surface above the mythical underworld, it’s only to enter into a war among the gods.
In his essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Sigmund Freud lays out his theory of the death drive as the “compulsion to repeat.” We tend to repeat and replay our past traumas and memories in an effort to master and defeat them. Both Hades and its sequel are stories about exorcising trauma by breaking through its wearying cycles to find some meaning and connection on the other side.
For Melinoë, just as it was for Zagreus, the other side is represented by family. It’s a connection with a past legacy that has long been denied her. With Hades II in early access, Melinoë must struggle for a while longer. Beating the final boss won’t yet bring resolution — there are still new areas to come and further battles to be fought. As the goddess Eris, strife incarnate, informs Melinoë, there’s “no going back to the way things were before.”
In our own lives, we must struggle too, making our way through the dark and confusing muddle of our reality to find a way forward, knowing there’s no way back. Our paths are just as unclear, our futures just as murky. We press on, repeating the same cycles of work, of friendships, unclear what awaits on the other side, if there even is another side to reach.
Hades II, at the very least, will eventually be given some finality. Melinoë will break through and hopefully find what she’s been searching for. In the meantime, there’s pleasure to be found in the increasingly familiar cycle.
I’ll continue playing with god-granted boons and cool new weapons. Slicing through waves of enemies with the giant Moonstone Axe is as satisfying as any of the weapons from the first game. Throwing an explosive skull around hasn’t gotten old, either. I’ll keep digging into the cleverly written narratives of side characters plucked from myth like Odysseus and Hecate, or Narcissus and Echo. I’ll engage in the repetition, biding my time.
