Five Great Reasons to Fight Your Dad
By: Gentle Zacharias
Tags: Gaming, Review, Games, Features, Videogames

There’s a term for games that are ridiculously demanding and yet satisfying to play — it’s becoming a little dated now, but we used to call that “Nintendo hard.” These days, Nintendo focuses on expanding gaming’s fanbase beyond its existing demographics, and there’s nothing wrong with that; anybody shit-talking a game for being accessible or “casual” is a little boy trying to keep the other kids out of his clubhouse, and destroying his own hobby so he can feel superior. There was a time, though, when Nintendo was known more for making games that wanted you fucking dead. There’s an appeal to that, if the game is well-designed, as the wild success of games like Dark Souls can attest. But the game must be well-designed — it can’t be hard because it’s obtuse, badly balanced, responds sluggishly or unpredictably, communicates poorly or lies to the player. That’s the kind of hard that makes a gamer quit, not the kind that makes her grit her teeth and reload from the last checkpoint.

We get that he’s pissed about being assigned the underworld, but that’s millennia ago now. At some point, you have to move on, fix up the house, find a hobby.

Hades is Nintendo hard, in the most beautiful way. So much of this is gamefeel — the experience of maneuvering around the world, the responsiveness of the character, the speed and elegance of the animation. Rewarding progress with power is one thing, but starting a player off limping feels punitive in a roguelike game where you’re always restarting — and Zagreus never feels weak. He fights like a god from the first step he takes, and grows more powerful from there, and the challenge scales accordingly. This scaling isn’t just bigger numbers, either. Too often, “New Game Plus” just means another zero tacked on the end of all your stats, and the only difference between “Normal” and “Hard” is that enemies have twice as much health in hard mode. And you can do that, in Hades, if you want — make the numbers bigger if it embiggens your…enjoyment.

But you can also cause the Hydra that spat fire at you from the sidelines to hop right out of the lava and chase you on its dangling neck-stump, if that sounds more fun. Face Theseus and the Bull in Elysium’s arena enough times, and you’ll realize that raising the difficulty here actually makes Theseus easier to hit — he jumps into a chariot to charge you, but doesn’t carry a shield and block all damage from the front anymore. This is active, thoughtful game design, and it requires active, thoughtful play in response. You often find yourself wrecking shop through Tartarus and Asphodel, only to discover that your build is atrocious when facing a single, huge enemy, or you have no good strategy for dealing with armor. You have to adapt to what you find and when you fail. You fail more often than not.

And yet failing never feels like a waste of your time. Only got as far as Asphodel before you stood in the fire while picking your nose and contemplating your build? (I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.) It’s fine, you got a fistful of gems that you can use to change the draperies in the hallway for the fourth time this week. I change ’em every time the option comes up; hearing Dad bitch about it is worth ten gems a day to me. Even if you only made it to Meg before she spanked you (which you love, and you know it), so long as you ran into Sisyphus, you’re doing meaningful work out there in hell.