Supergiant Games' early access roguelike Hades has had its next major update, which includes a final battle at the Gateway to the Underworld.

The BIG BAD update went live yesterday, and the patch notes show there's loads of new content to keep fans busy, as well as a bunch of bug fixes, of course.

Some of the update's highlights include a brand new biome - the Temple of Styx at the very edge of the Underworld, a Final Battle that may let Zagreus escape at last, and some brand new enemy types to face on your journey.

Read more

Hades is the latest game from Supergiant, a studio that sometimes seems to rival Klei Games in terms of classiness and poise and sheer polish. Hades is all about ancient gods smashing things up in the underworld. It's a Roguelite in which you fight your way through a shifting maze of classical horrors again and again and again. There is so much that's good about it I'm aiming to write something more comprehensive next week. For now, though, I wanted to talk about something I probably don't think about enough in games: the texture of the in-game world.

This is mythology, right, so it's all ancient temples and grandeur. What makes Supergiant's spin so memorable, though, is that the art really delivers a sense of what this world is like to touch. And what it's like to touch is slightly surprising. Everything around you in Hades is made of stone, but it's stone that seems to shatter like glass. It's glossy and heavy, but it's also fragile. It splinters and explodes as you barrel your way through the world, giving everyone you encounter a bit of a shoeing. Are you powerful, or is the world flimsy?

Glossy, polished, angular stone. This gives Hades a good deal of its character, I think. What a strange, lurid, heavy crystalline world this is. And it's all in service to the theme. Gods are weird in Hades, as they are in a lot of mythology. They're skittish and decadent and childish and unpredictable, and they like lavish temples of smooth reflective surfaces. And the whole thing's a bit precarious, too. These creatures fight all the time and fall out and smash each other in, and so their world has retained some of that depraved delicacy.

Read more

Supergiant's Hades is in many ways a departure from the studio's earlier work. Unlike Bastion, Transistor, or Pyre, it's a roguelike dungeon crawler, and it's also the first of the team's games to be put out in early access.

One thing that ties all of Supergiant's work together, though, is a strong narrative. Hades' protagonist is Zagreus, a blurry member of the Greek pantheon who is seen only through fragmentary texts that identify him as the son of Hades, lord of the underworld. (He may have later been merged with the myth of the god of wine, Dionysus, further obscuring his original tales.) The developers took this loose foundation and built up their own character, a rebellious young man who wants to escape his father's underworld, tasking the player with battling through an ever-shifting maze of enemies in an attempt to reach the surface.

Creative director Greg Kasavin has worked on writing and implementing the narrative on all four of Supergiant's games, but this is the first one to draw on an existing mythology. He tells me that this narrative foundation first came from the structure of the game they wanted to make.

Read more