Hades 2 review: Mechanical prowess that doesn’t quite stick the narrative landing

The tales told by Supergiant Games don’t have a traditional ending.

New Game+ modes in Bastion and Transistor immediately make it apparent that there’s something different in their retelling, presenting what-if scenarios as fuzzy memories for their protagonists. Pyre explores this further with its Rites, competitions that occur ad aeternum, as a playful cast of characters gambles a ticket out of purgatory.

Greg Kasavin, creative director at Supergiant, once referred to these Sisyphean stories as cyclical narratives. When Hades was announced, the decision made total sense. A roguelite was the natural evolution for the studio, a canvas for the team to play and experiment.

It was a novel push for the genre, and became Supergiant’s most renowned work, even though it was the result of breaking rules: Hades was in early access, and it was based on Greek myth rather than an original setting.

Last year, Supergiant broke a third rule when it announced Hades 2, the team’s first sequel. It takes place in the Greek underworld once more, but things are amiss.

Most of the antedecessor’s characters have been frozen in time by Chronos, and now Melinoë, sister of former protagonist Zagreus, is operating from the shadows as part of a group of witchcraft-obsessed misfits. It’s a fairly simple scenario that’s nonetheless significant.

The cyclical narrative was now intertwined with the studio itself, presenting an opportunity to try and replicate success while also attempting to surpass expectations of a newfound mainstream audience. Throughout Early Access, there were plenty of signs that hinted that Supergiant could pull the same magic trick once more. Now, after having played the 1.0 version ahead of release, all I can think about is its missed potential.

The core loop of Hades 2 remains similar — you start each night at a hub with characters to speak to and preparations to decide before venturing out in the wild. The action adventure of Hades is now more methodical thanks to Melinoë’s magic expertise, but the structure is immediately familiar.

When you inevitably die, you return to the hub with not just experience and lessons learned, but also more narrative to continue unraveling. Your crusades under the moonlight, regardless of outcome, always move the story forward.

The main difference is that, well, there’s more of everything. Melinoë goes to the underworld and also the surface. She’s being pulled in the direction of the Greek Olympian deities on one side and her newfound family on the other, all while attempting to stop Chronos.

Naturally, these sprawling paths come with a barrage of new mechanics — incantations at a cauldron, arcana cards to boost your mechanical capabilities, familiars that tag alongside you, trials, and more, all on top of almost everything that was already present in Hades.

It’s an ambitious premise, but one that feels less as smart iteration and more as padding what came before. Pretty much everything you do is tied to resource-gathering, whether that is collecting seeds to plant in your garden, mining ores, or spellcasting lost souls during your ventures.

The result is a superfluous incentive to get back into runs, unless you’re pursuing story-related goals. These are the promising connections — despite being different paths, the underworld and the surface eventually feed into one another as well, for example, which makes the busy work thematically relevant.

Yet, these connections begin to falter when drawn in direct comparison. Underworld runs, despite taking you mostly through new areas and boss encounters, feel familiar to Hades. The surface is completely different, and it was intriguing to see it evolve throughout Early Access, with Supergiant gradually opening the door to new areas up until the final confrontation.

But these runs are also unnecessarily long. It wasn’t until I had exhausted everything available in Early Access and had accrued the knowledge and materials to prepare Melinoë properly to halve run times to sub-20 minutes that they became more amicable. But this was after dozens upon dozens of hours of playtime.

It’s perhaps a testament of Supergiant’s mechanical prowess that, throughout 70 hours in Early Access and 35 additional hours with the 1.0 version, I didn’t feel bored. Did runs get repetitive? Absolutely. But Hades 2 nails what makes the long-time commitment to roguelites so tantalizing, in which you can witness your progress over time and put it to the test. The satisfaction of being stuck in certain bosses for hours and, over time, not even having to think about them during fights never waned.

One section of the fight with Prometheus requires players to memorize attack patterns before they happen. For a while, I’d stop the game and write them down in the nearest Discord chat, afraid of what a mistake could cost me. But I eventually got to a point where this was no longer necessary.

In Hades 2, the action ebbs and flows. It follows the rhythm you make for yourself with the weapons you choose and the builds you pursue. It grabs your hand when you’re confident enough to be in a flow state and not have to think about what buttons you’re pressing, when you know exactly when to dodge an attack.

But the action, at least for me, was always a vehicle to experience a new story from Supergiant, not the main appeal. As someone who jumped into Early Access since launch, there were signs that the studio was being playful about the structure of the sequel, subverting previous expectations.

The characters accompanying Melinoë felt as familiar archetypes of Zagreus’ group, but their motivations and in-the-shadows nature of their existence paved a ground to tell stories from a different perspective, away from the macabre grandiose of the House of Hades, god of the underworld.

As time passed, this promise started to feel sidelined. During the Early Access of the first Hades, I experienced a genuine excitement to be able to get access to not just new areas to plunge through, but also getting to meet new characters or find out more about the familiar faces that would greet me after a run.

Supergiant seemed adamant in making something as granular as Early Access feel uniquely its own thing, coming up with funny outcomes when you fought the final boss without the actual ending of the game being in the game yet. Or a distinct element I always obsessed over, which was seeing sketches of character portraits as placeholders, and eventually getting to the update that added the final illustration. It was as if the mental images of new people in Zagreus’ life became clearer over time, rather than fuzzy memories.

But Hades 2 doesn’t have the same thematic weight. Without spoilers, the culmination of almost every major story beat feels oddly unceremonious, while the lead up to them lacks substantial purpose when comparing Melinoë’s to Zagreus’ story.

“But Hades 2 doesn’t have the same thematic weight. Without spoilers, the culmination of almost every major story beat feels oddly unceremonious, while the lead up to them lacks substantial purpose when comparing Melinoë’s to Zagreus’ story.”

Even if certain aspects of Hades’ ending were also missing a punch, the process of getting to the credits has stuck with me since. Despite only being a few days since I did the same for the sequel, I can say for certain it won’t be the same case here.

I’ve been going back and forth on what the cause for this is, and it might be the difference in display of family disputes. In Hades, it didn’t take long to notice that the Greek gods only wanted to take advantage of the one person stubborn enough to launch himself into an impossible mission.

Melinoë is given her own mission, and she wants to see it through, no matter what. She’s willing to be a helping hand, even when her own family sees her as a mere pawn yet again, years of conflict and disdain to each other not being enough to tear them apart. She happily obliges, but neither our efforts nor hers are properly rewarded for the efforts involved.

In being forced to pick between witchcraft bonds and dogmatic roots, Melinoë’s conviction doesn’t have the proper resolution. In the case of Hades 2, knowing that you can always start a new night doesn’t feel like a blessing.