Spoiler warnings for Mass Effect 2.

I'm not sure why I liked Kelly Chambers so much. There's definitely more exciting characters in Mass Effect 2. She was just cool is all. They seemed so good together, her and my Shepherd, two straight-talking women on a ship full of neverending melodrama, quipping back and forth along the bridge. But I was trapped in a loveless relationship with the odiously boring Kaidan Alenko. So Kelly remained elusive: the steadfast second in command, a constant source of warmth, good sense and pragmatic kindness.

Anyway, she melted. In fact, most of my crew died in that final mission, but Kelly was the first, melting down into flesh chowder in a giant frosted glass tube. Afterwards I read that the only way to save everyone was to max out your relationship stats, upgrade your ship to the nth degree, and hightail it over to the suicide mission the moment you can. Reader, that's exactly what I did. I went back to the start and put another 30 hours into that game, telling myself I was getting value for money. But in my heart of hearts I knew it was all for Kelly.

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Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: skulls, Sudoku and a recent classic.

If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing,
here's our archive.

Castle of Pixel Skulls was an impulse buy on Switch - an old-school platformer that promised to be maddeningly difficult. I am particularly bad at this sort of game, but I wanted in, and I've really been enjoying myself, and that's because it's one of those screen-based platformers, where each room - each level - is a single screen.

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Microsoft has now published its full list of games arriving on Xbox Game Pass this month, and it seems like a particularly busy one - with several indie darlings and Codemasters games set to join the mix.

As previously announced, award-winning roguelike Hades arrives on Xbox Game Pass for PC, cloud and console on 13th August. We named Hades our game of the year for 2020, so if you haven't checked it out yet, now's your chance.

Art of Rally, a stylish driving game Martin described as "brilliantly playable", arrives on Game Pass for console, PC and cloud on 12th August.

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The critically-acclaimed Hades will finally launch for Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S on 13th August, Microsoft announced in tonight's E3 2021 showcase.

It'll also arrive on that date via Xbox Game Pass, meaning subscribers will get it at no additional cost.

UPDATE: Hades will also launch for PlayStation 4 and 5 on the same date, 13th August, according to the PlayStation blog.

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Hades is already difficult to beat with a regular controller or keyboard yet it seems someone decided that wasn't challenging enough, as the game has now been completed with a pomegranate. Yes, you heard that right.

In Hades, Poms of Power are used to level up your boons - hence the reason for choosing the fruit - and yesterday streamer Dylan "Rudeism" Beck uploaded a video showing himself beating the game's final boss using a pomegranate controller. He created it by "chopping [the] pomegranate up and sticking a bunch of wires in it," using 10 pieces of pomegranate flesh and hooking them up to specific inputs using a MakeyMakey circuit board. The setup allowed Rudeism to tap the pieces to move or attack, but left him without a way to aim. "You don't need to aim, that's fine," he said.

Things didn't always go smoothly: the wires would sometimes come loose from the pomegranate, while the pomegranate juice and seeds created a mess, but Rudeism still managed to beat Hades using the pom. Here's the video of that below - watch out for spoilers if you haven't yet completed the game.

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Magic. Have you ever really considered what it means? We're told what it means a lot, especially in games. We're told it means fireballs and lightning bolts and turning people into sheep. But is that really magic, or is it simply a term used to describe something we've become accustomed to? It's a thought that's been nagging at me.

It occurred reading The Tombs of Atuan recently, the second Earthsea book by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's a book about a wizard but something about the magic feels different. It feels incomprehensible. It's not defined by dice rolls or numbered values or rules, but worked out somewhere outside of explanation, just past the edge of understanding. A climactic battle happens where you can't see it: in the wizard's mind. He holds off a terrible evil but there are no explanations to lay it bare, no parameters by which to understand it. You understand it only as something extraordinary. And it feels like magic.

Or, and you'll know this one, the moment Gandalf the White rides out from Gondor to repel the Nazgul. I remember reading the book, many years ago, and thinking, 'Yeah go on Gandalf, mess them up!' And I expected a fireworks display. But all he did was produce a beam of light. At the time, I was disappointed, but now I'm delighted, because it works. It's an epic confrontation, you understand that, yet you don't really know what went on, only that Gandalf won. It's... incomprehensible.

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Hello! And welcome to a special article where a bunch of us sit down to talk about our game of the year. And for 2020, that game is Hades. We hope you enjoy this conversation, and we hope you're leaving such an unusual year with some good memories of the games you've played.

Chris Donlan: There are a lot of Roguelikes and Roguelites - what makes Hades stand above the rest? Is that even the right lens to be viewing it through?

Malindy Hetfeld: I have a counter question if I may. Just to clarify. I'm not sure what the roguelike lens entails, because that means we all have a fixed idea of what that genre is about.

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There's good news for those hoping to make their Hades PC saves more portable, as developer Supergiant Games has announced Hades is getting cross-save between Switch and PC.

According to the tweet from Supergiant, all you need to do is open your Nintendo Switch version of Hades, select cross-saves in the main menu, then connect either your Steam or Epic Games account.

Oh, and there's some nice Hermes artwork to go along with the announcement too:

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My most recent attempt to complete Hades ended in a pretty devastating way: only a few blows from finishing the final boss, after a good 40 minutes of intense gameplay, I was tragically smacked down and sent back downriver to a smirking Hypnos once again. And to make matters worse, today I learned someone's completed a Hades run in under eight minutes.

For those uninitiated, Hades is the latest roguelike from Supergiant Games, and tasks players with escaping the Greek underworld using a variety of powers gifted to them by other gods. While Hades is designed to keep players entertained with story beats and various upgrades between attempts, the runs themselves can be brutal and unforgiving. Which makes it all the more impressive that speedrunner Vorime has managed the whole thing in just seven minutes and 16 seconds.

As spotted by Rock Paper Shotgun, Vorime currently sits atop the Hades leaderboard on Speedrun.com, and managed to set the world record on Tuesday. The seven-minute record measures Vorime's in-game time, and doesn't account for time spent in menus and picking abilities, with the whole attempt taking 20 minutes and 32 seconds in real-world time.

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I love what Hades is made of. It's made of mythology, of course - Zeus and Nyx and all that other spontaneous, terrifying, pitiable lot who have been lurking in their own form of Early Access for millenia. And it's made of everything the developer Supergiant has learned from making dashing, finely poised action games like Bastion and Transistor - and storied, wilful, luminous oddities like Pyre.

But it's also made of stone so smoothly polished it reads like glass or water. It's made of lap pools of blood, of palm columns shot through with arteries of twinkling jewels. Even when you're pushing a raft across lava there's a sense that the rocks around you are just so, that they melt and ooze because artists have thought about their insides, and are in love, above all else, with texture. After every run of Zagreus' attempts to escape the underworld, he returns to a house that is positively lurid with texture and sharp edges and glimmer. The famed gods live in a sort of McMansion, or a Las Vegas hotel's Presidential Suite, bad taste spared absolutely no expense. Of course they live somewhere like this. Maybe life and death is just one big casino. Maybe these gods play dice and then hit the slots.

Most of this textured stuff is designed to shatter. Hades is a Roguelite brawler, so each run is a run into hell and, hopefully, out the other side, and in between failures you spend earnings on new abilities and unlocks. But brawler is too padded and fleshy and imprecise a word, the clumsy heel of a palm, the stub of a haphazard elbow. During the run, during the failures, you are a wrecking ball with the focus of a laser, taking down pillars, slamming things into walls, blasting stone and crystal into shrapnel clouds of thick, gritty air. Supergiant chose Zagreus as a protagonist because he is a bit of a pencil shadow in the mythological texts - hazy shape and no real substance, a whisper of graphite. The writing team styles him as the kind of irresistibly arch Ivy League hardnut that Donna Tartt writes about so well, bruised cheekbones and dewy forehead, lip a dissolute twist just waiting to attain its precarious hold on a Gauloise. He is charismatic and chancy, refined without being remotely delicate. But then the game's action comes along and turns him into the part of every episode of The Property Brothers where teardown kicks in - mallet meets plasterboard and the sky is busy with splintered timber. The kitchen becomes a crater in seconds. The violence is backed by the unflinching heft of metal. What a complicated fellow.

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