Post Script
How Hades has set a new gold standard for Early Access games
When we first previewed Hades in E329, we suggested that Early Access seemed an unusual choice for Supergiant, a developer that simply doesn’t do rough edges. But while it clearly wasn’t anywhere near the finished article back then, the studio had evidently started building upon rock solid foundations. Tartarus looks better now than it did, but it scrubbed up well from the start, while the fundaments of the combat were already firmly in place. Many more weapons, aspects, godly powers (and combinations thereof) and features were still to come. But the core of Hades was there from its first showing. It looked, sounded and felt like a Supergiant game – it was just a smaller one than usual.
In the 20 or so months since, updates have come regularly and punctually. The studio set out a clear roadmap for Hades’ journey, keeping fans fully informed throughout the Early Access period. Every new version, even minor patches between the named updates, has come with extensive notes – detailing feature changes, interface tweaks, weapon rebalancing, adjustments to visual and sound effects, and more. Key additions have been clearly laid out, letting players know what to look out for. Some bullet points have been accompanied by an icon, thoughtfully denoting which changes have been made as a direct result of community feedback.
Exemplary stuff, in other words, but what’s been most fascinating about following Hades’ journey from the beginning is the way the game’s story is intertwined with the process of making it. As you begin the game, the palace of Hades is fairly bare, and the underworld itself doesn’t boast nearly so many features as it does once you’re 100 runs in. While you’ll invest some of your haul from each run in upgrading Zagreus himself, you’re also steadily renovating the place. It’s such a gradual process that we only realise what a difference we’ve made when we start a new save file in v1.0 and see what’s missing. It’s hard not to imagine Supergiant doing the same with the first Early Access build.
The experience of revisiting the game across different versions, meanwhile, has been something akin to playing a Roguelike. The genre seems simpatico with Early Access in the sense that each return visit has produced exactly the kind of surprises and discoveries you’d hope for while playing. It feeds, too, into the notion of myth-making itself – the idea of a tale relayed and passed down, the details changing slightly with each retelling.
But perhaps most fascinatingly of all, the ending of the game – don’t worry, we won’t detail it here – is almost certain to resonate more with those who’ve been with Hades
from the beginning. In previous versions, Zagreus’s escape has been thwarted by a variety of amusing misfortunes, relayed with wry delight by the game’s narrator. Those who’ve never played Hades before will never know the delight of poor Zag slipping on a banana skin, or stepping on a rake with such force that it kills him instantly and he falls back into Hell once more. (Indeed, this ties into what Greg Kasavin told us back in E329
where he likened Roguelikes to slapstick comedy. “You inevitably make some boneheaded move, and you can’t believe you did that. And so you try again.”)
The moment of our first ‘true’ escape, then, is all the more thrilling for all those accidents, the cumulative emotional weight all the greater for the many joke endings borne of Hades’ previous incompleteness. It’s a feeling that’s heightened by the months of anticipation leading up to it, the journey that we and the game have been on together. For new players, it should be a powerful moment regardless, but it’s hard to escape the fact that they won’t have quite the same experience. Hades may be a triumph for Early Access, in other words, but its unique achievement in this regard may well be unrepeatable.