Games
The hotly anticipated game sequel Hades II presents a rare and elegant meld of design and expressiveness. By Katherine Cross.
Hades II is peak video game storytelling
It’s not often a game throws you in the deep end, only to catch you immediately. Save for a very brief cutscene at the beginning, you get no context, and certainly no training, for the moment you appear at the mouth of Erebus. You are Melinoë, daughter of Hades, and you have to begin the long descent from Erebus deep into your rightful domain, battling shades, spectres, memories and all manner of twitchy bosses.
You’re also going to die quickly, unless you’re especially quick on the draw. Welcome to the Supergiant’s hotly awaited Hades II.
Still, you get caught, and then the game really begins. Your health expires, you teleport yourself back to the Crossroads, and finally get acquainted with just what the literal hell is going on. You are the sister of Zagreus, the original Hades’ protagonist and the daughter of the late Lord of the Underworld. Your brother is missing and now the dreaded Titan Chronos is launching an assault on Olympus itself.
Here at the Crossroads, under the watchful, almost parental gaze of the witch queen Hecate and strategist Odysseus, you are training to be a Titan-killer. With a rich supporting cast of supernatural friends and frenemies such as the swoony personification of vexatiousness, Nemesis, you rest up and recharge. You build your power at the Crossroads through upgrading your abilities, weapons and even changing the face of the Underworld itself to aid your quest to reach the darkest depths and ascend to the highest summits to restore order to the Greek mythos. You just might wreak a bit of vengeance and have a few torrid affairs along the way.
The supporting cast includes the vast Greek pantheon, and it is here we must pay reverential tribute to the aesthetic unity of this game series. Hades II somehow surpasses its predecessor with truly gorgeous, expressive character artwork that is unmistakably of this series, while still evoking ancient Greek myth in recognisable ways. This infuses the entirety of the world, mystically caricatured in ways that are both charming and eerie all at once. There is a blend of the classics with the auras of modern Wicca, and it’s used to beautiful effect.
Where in the first game you played a roguish warrior, here you’re a witchy mage; the game leans into those aesthetics, suffusing your world with crescent moons, spells, hexes, pentagrams and more, all under the aegis of Hecate’s labyrinth of a pointy hat.
But enough about how it all looks: how does it play? It’s rare that a game this sprawling feels so flawless. Whenever I found myself frustrated, I took solace in the fact I was fighting my own skill-level, not the game’s mechanics or controls. The combat is breakneck, tactical and rewards clever manoeuvres and strategic button-mashing. Whatever is vexing about this game is, at the end of the day, always a surmountable challenge.
This being a rogue-lite game, Hades II sees you descend – and eventually ascend – into dungeons where you have but one precious life to give. Once your health runs out and you have no tricks up your sleeve to cheat death, you’re punted back to the Crossroads. There is no penalty, save for the fact that to get back to where you were, you have to do all that fighting and descending all over again – including bosses. For lovers of rogue-likes – where death sends you back to the very beginning – and rogue-lites, this is par for the course. For neophytes to the genre who may find this infuriating, I suggest you let this game catch you. You might just be willing to give it a chance in turn.
This game presents a fascinating instance of rogue-lite mechanics being used diegetically. The first game had you team up with Sisyphus himself in a thuddingly obvious bit of symbolism– the second one feels even more confident in its extended training montage where Melinoë is trying, failing, and then failing better faster, until at last she bashes her head through the wall and achieves something. I’ve been using the word “die” here loosely in its classic gaming sense, but in point of fact Melinoë does not die when her health runs out: she uses an emergency teleport to get back to the Crossroads and rest.
She will not join the armies of ghosts around her. Not yet. Instead, she’s trying to improve and last longer on her adventures. As you play, you’ll find yourself fully inhabiting that sensibility, sharing in Melinoë’s frustrations and triumphs as she blazes a trail through the Underworld and up to Olympus. You gain permanent boosts to your power in the form of everything from the Tarot-like Arcana buffs, weapons upgrades, and using Hecate’s cauldron to alter the Crossroads and the wider game world. As you gather resources from your adventures, you can grow on a permanent basis, in a satisfying ladder of progression that makes even some of the most annoying runs rewarding in some small fashion.
But the real dynamic gameplay comes in the random assortment of divine “boons” accrued through the game. In each combat zone you encounter one of several gods who offer you a randomised list of powerups to your abilities that can dramatically alter your play style, contributing to the sense that no two runs are exactly the same. In one, I got an area-of-effect hammer ability from Hephaestus that almost trivialised several fights I’d struggled with. In other runs, I got so many bonus health boosts that I felt invincible. In still others, one of my companions’ gifted trinkets gave me an unassailable boost to fighting a boss that I won’t spoil.
What is striking is that, especially compared with the first Hades, it all feels so smooth despite the seemingly infinite combinations. There’s never a combo of available boons and buffs that leaves you desolate or unprepared for what you’re facing. Instead, there’s a chance that, with a little luck and skill, you’ll become overpowered. Add in the game’s God mode – which gives you additional permanent damage resistance each time you die – and there are many paths to enjoying this story and feeling like a heroine of legend, even if rogue-likes/lites aren’t quite your thing. You will want to fight your way through to the end, living, dying, repeating, like Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt in Edge of Tomorrow, to find the Titan of Time and put him out of his misery.
It is truly remarkable to experience a game that presents such an elegant unity of design and expressiveness. There’s nothing quite like a game that manages to make its ludic aspects part of its narrative. Only Tactical Breach Wizards and I Was a Teenage Exocolonist manage similar tricks with such Olympian grace as to make one feel privileged to witness it and, even better, to have made it happen. It’s this sort of game that reminds you why some stories can only be told with a video game.
Hades II is available for Windows, macOS, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 13, 2025 as "Gods gift".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
