3.5/5 ★ – Nestunt's review of Hades.

Supergiant Games is my front-runner for best indie studio in the industry. Notwithstanding, Hades was the first of their games that I was not hyped for. I just had a suspicion that the rogue-like format was not going to maximize their talents. Yup, my skepticism came into fruition. Hades is the second best rogue-like I have ever played, behind Rogue Legacy, but it is not as great as the other Supergiant’s titles. There are three main reasons why I love their games: 1) they control really well, with fun and intuitive combat; 2) they look and sound above their budget, with fantastic visual art, memorable voice acting and blazing music; and 3) the choices you make from system-level to even mechanics-wise inform the worldbuilding and storytelling, which are exceptional on their own. What makes Hades such a good rogue-like are precisely those three characteristics. It’s never repetitious to go for one more run, because the combat is engaging, the procedurally generated dungeons are artistically beautiful, the music is “hit-on-repeat”, and experimenting with different loadouts makes you witness different narrative threads. On the other hand, the repetitive nature of the rogue-like subgenre does dilute the highlights of this studio. In their previous linearly curated games everything was more memorable, because they presented one environment instead of another, one song instead of another, or one line of dialogue instead of another as it made more sense at that point in time in the gameplay. Here, there is somewhat of a disconnect between your progression and everything else (they were actually really good at this in their other games). Environments, music, characters and story become filler, which is a shame, since isolated they retain all the qualities of this studio. And the link between loadout and narrative rapidly becomes a sterile process of stats’ optimization, instead of an artistic engulfing of gameplay. This is still a really good game, with Supergiant qualities all over the place, but Bastion remains their most charming title, Transistor their most innovative, and Pyre their best expression.