As this is the first of these posts, I’m going to get things started, before I let Danny Harbeson take the floor and introduce the first of the podcasts to appear on Rogueliker, and also tell you a bit about the RoguePod LiteCast and what it’s all about.
I had already listened to a couple of episodes when Danny reached out, and I’m a fan of the pod’s approach to longform, thoughtful reviews and how they cover all aspects of a game. Where I love to dig into lots of different games as I search for treasure, the RoguePod team dives deep into one game at a time. As such I was more than happy to help spread the word, and share my platform with them once a fortnight, so they can tell you what has been added to their ever-expanding tierlist.
Anyway, that’s enough of me. Here’s Danny and his first feature for Rogueliker – and hopefully the first of many…
RoguePod LiteCast covers Hades
I put about 20 hours into Hades when it first released, died on the final boss a handful of times, and one day never fired up the game again. Before revisiting it for the podcast, my general vibe was that it’s a pretty “neat game”, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near my top all time roguelites.
Regardless of what I think, Hades is probably the most successful roguelite of all time. What even comes close? Balatro? Binding of Isaac? No other roguelite has swept the Game of the Year awards like Hades did in 2020. So where is the disconnect here? That’s the question we set out to answer in this episode.
The runs in Hades start to drag pretty fast. Each individual room spawns in a host of enemies that you defeat one at a time using a series of pre-fab combos, dodging and mixing in the occasional special or cast.
There is little differentiating one room from the next within the same zone and you’re always encountering the same tanky bosses over the course of a run. Sure you can get some run-to-run variance by selecting a different weapon, but I never felt like my play-style was fundamentally different between the first room in the first zone and the final fight.
Give me zany builds, please
What I want from my roguelites is to feel stronger and stronger or get a zanier and zanier build until you’re at a place that is unrecognizable from the beginning of the run: this is just not what Hades is built to do. I’ll add the caveat that I don’t have enough time in the game to know which legendary boons to be building towards, but I want the build variety to reveal itself to me without having to seek it out externally.
From scrolling through hundreds of Steam reviews I saw the same thing over and over – some version of “I typically don’t like roguelikes, but I loved Hades because…”. The “because” is usually related to the complex metaprogression system the game has built which includes an ever-developing story of which you get incremental pieces revealed to you after each failed run.
It’s neat, but it’s just fundamentally not what I play roguelites for. The amount of stat-based upgrades you’re able to acquire between runs make me feel like I’m not actually getting better at the game, it’s just getting easier.
How does it rank on the tierlist?
Don’t get me wrong, Hades is far from a bad roguelite and even farther from a bad game. It’s snappy and polished and the metagame is expertly crafted to keep people engaged. Ultimately, it’s just optimizing for things that don’t trigger the dopamine center of my brain that so many other roguelites are able to tap into.
Just a few weeks ago a non-gamer friend of mine who knows I have a roguelite podcast asked if I had played Hades because he picked it up over the weekend. How cool is it that people who aren’t into our weird little subgenre are finding it and getting sucked in because of this game?
I told him I liked it and kept my pedantry to myself.
The RoguePod LiteCast Verdict: B Tier
Listen to the podcast to hear the whole review!
What is RoguePod LiteCast?
RoguePod LiteCast is a podcast project that my buddy David and I embarked on over a year ago where we cover a different roguelite every other week in pursuit of building the most comprehensive roguelite tier list out there.
The worst thing about having a roguelite podcast is trying to define what a roguelite is, so we keep it pretty simple: any game that has procedural generation, permadeath, and isn’t a traditional roguelike (think- Nethack) counts in our book.
In this episode we covered one of the behemoths of the genre, the 2020 megahit HADES in anticipation of the (now dated) Hades II 1.0 release. We add games to our tier list based on a) how much fun we personally had with them, and b) how well we think they succeed specifically as a roguelite.
Subscribe to RoguePod LiteCast wherever you get your podcasts and check out the full tier list at https://roguepod.show!
