Hades II

[h2]A clever roguelite that builds atop its predecessor[/h2] In this opus, the first goal, not unlike in Hades 1, is to kill Chronos. In other words, it is to finish one run. I appreciated that the game was commenting on my progress. Even killing an enemy that had killed me last prompted a one liner. Then I did the deed, and it defies expectations and gamifies how you should do it more. And THEN, there is another addition, and if you've played the first game, this will surprise you: [s] you gain access to the surface, effectively adding double the content as you previously thought, especially as in the first game, it is well-established Zagreus cannot survive on the surface.[/s] There are incentives to try the multiple weapons and all aspects, mostly in the form of increased currency gains and rewards. This was fun and allowed me to master every encounter and get more comfortable with every weapon type (as long as I can dodge and deal damage, I was okay even with weapons I was less proficient with), and eventually choosing one of my preference for my last "achievement"/more difficult runs. Something else that I thoroughly appreciated is that a rare resource will always be available at the last shop of the game, strongly incentivizing you to save money for an additional resource after your run. As it is very expensive, though, this means an additional soft restriction to your run. The music is also noteworthy, especially Polyphemus's theme as well as the Tartarus miniboss theme. A small but nice QoL feature is when you open the "God" relationship menu, it opens automatically on whichever god you are standing in front of. Something I liked less (and that is subjective) was that to progress some quests, you essentially had to get good [/b]RNG[/b] to come across an NPC in a run, or have them trigger the right dialogue in between runs, forcing you to go through a run to progress some quests. You can of course intentionally die preemptively in a run to circumvent that last aspect, AND the game has Chaos Trials, which are basically you running only one level (out of an entire run), which can help expedite some quests. This is absolutely subjective and I finished the game after like 100 runs (they are quite short and many of them were failures, intentional or not), so a lot of it was also me playing a lot. I did not address much the story, voice acting, art, as this would be too long, but they are all excellent. There's romance too. I preferred this game's story (I found it poignant and more human) than the first game.