Late to the party as usual, I discovered this brilliant gem of a game just as its sequel is about to be released. Hades charmed me every which way. First and foremost with the unbelievable quality and quantity of content; the care put into every little detail; the ingenuity of Greek mythology adaptation; the flawless writing and acting; the art; the music; and last but definitely not least, the rich queer representation.
Obviously, I heard about Hades at the time it was released, but my prejudice against the idea of restarting and redoing a task a hundred times prevailed over my curiosity. In it, you’re basically trying to escape the Greek Underworld, and you’re fully expected to (repeatedly) die trying. My understanding was that “when you die, you lose everything you earned along the way and you have to start all over again”. Which isn’t exactly true. The game is very carefully and skillfully designed around the concept of starting afresh over and over. You don’t lose everything: only largely randomized build options and one sort of currency (of about ten) that gets you more largely randomized build options, healing, buffs, and the like. You get to keep all the other currencies, which allow the kind of big-picture progress that makes the game get easier and easier the more you play it.
Within my first few attempts, I realized that the game is designed around being redone also in terms of content discovery. There are dozens of NPCs in it: from the Olympian and Chtonic deities to various heroes and monsters of Greek mythology, and they all have seemingly inexhaustible amounts of incredibly well-written and well-delivered dialog that you can only sample one brief conversation at a time. Here and there, small subplots arise, stretching over several attempts, as you strive to meet some requirement for their resolution, or just wait for the favor of the Fates. There’s also an economy of giving gifts (and receiving some in return), that ties the progression of relationship plots to the amount of playing.
Some of these relationships can become romantic! And, I won’t lie; despite everything I just wrote above, I might’ve given up on the game before the credits rolled if I hadn’t been spoiled with a crucial piece of information: that one of the romance options is Thanatos, Death Incarnate.
Namely, getting through the first level of the game took me a disproportional amount of time and effort. It wasn’t until 30 or so attempts that I managed to beat the boss at the end of it for the first time; I hoped that, maybe, just maybe, she’d be gone for good; and when I got to her the next time to find her alive and well, I pretty much rage-quit. I didn’t feel like playing anymore. It was too hard.
Now, at the time, I hadn’t yet met Thanatos in game, because you can only meet him on the third level, and only after certain main plot milestones are met. But I met him on Tumblr. 😏 The incredibly sweet friends-to-lovers romance between him and the player character, Zagreus, is unsurprisingly a hugely popular ship, and once I made up my mind to pretty much stop playing and thus felt at liberty to peruse fanart, I was at once exposed to mouthwatering masterpieces such as this:
Even though I was vaguely aware of this ship before, I didn’t realize it’s a canon ship that I could actually experience in game. And once I realized that, I returned to it with renewed (and unassailable) fervor. I have since finished it; I completed all but two Steam achievements for it, and all but one ingame achievement. The only game I’ve ever played to this level of completeness was Darksiders: Genesis. And yet, after 120+ attempts, I still haven’t exhausted all of Thanatos’s dialog.
Thing is, he is incredibly fucking elusive. After you meet him for the first time, he may appear on any of the first three levels; but the chance for his appearance is fairly low, and of course, he can only appear once per attempt. If he does appear during the run, he will very likely appear in the hub after the run too, but it’s not 100% guaranteed. At first, he is willing to converse when you meet him during the run, and then in the hub as well; but after a while, he will only talk with you in the hub.
My experience has been like this: I may meet him once or twice in a row, then there’s a dry spell of three or four attempts before he appears again. I wasn’t bothered while there was plenty of other stuff to do: various subplots, achievements, conversations with other characters. But I mostly exhausted all of that around the 100th attempt. Nowadays, most characters have nothing new to tell me, there’s nothing going on, and Thanatos is the only reason I keep playing the game at all. Which is a bit of a pain in the butt, given the 1 out of 3 expectation that I’ll even see him on any run.
To be clear, I could’ve tied up his romance plot at the same time as all the others (definitely before the 100th run). I’m purposely holding back the final gift because I want to exhaust his dialog first. So my complaint is self-inflicted, I suppose. But I also can’t help feeling the design of it is unjust: it’s like punishing the most devoted players. And while this is the only objection I have to the game as a whole, the more frustrated I get, the larger it looms in my awareness, slowly casting all the good stuff in shadow. A bit longer, and I’ll be ready to turn to cheating.
And now I want to briefly address the elephant in the room, and that is the uncanny resemblance of Zagreus and Thanatos to Harry and Draco. Like Harry, Zagreus has wild black hair and if both his eyes were human, they’re be a luminous green. But more importantly, he’s rebellious, courageous and decisive; and he seeks to flee from an abusive caretaker. Like Draco, Thanatos is a platinum blond (with the same fucking haircut, I mean, come on), incredibly prickly in his interactions with Zagreus, but otherwise respectful of authority and attached to the notion of his station. Unlike Harry and Draco, Zagreus and Thanatos are friends, but they’re still fiercely competitive around one another. It’s just too good to wave off as coincidence.
The tantalizing similarity with my main ship at this time aside, their romance is just the sweetest I’ve seen in ages. Even at his prickliest, Thanatos is the only member of the Hades household who’s obviously stricken by the idea that Zagreus might leave; who would obviously miss him; who obviously wishes him well from the start and helps him survive despite his misgivings. His keepsake–🦋 the pierced butterfly 🦋–rewards getting though fights without taking damage. When you meet him in game and beat him in a little competition, he gives you a heart. I might’ve been a bit unfair to other helpful NPCs here, but no one else gives you a heart. 💜
Anyway. Yeah. I remain deeply into this game and specifically into this pair. I’d like to draw them and write for them, and I’m bummed I didn’t try the game on release, while the fandom was at its peak. I have already bought Hades II, and although I’m looking forward to it, I’m afraid that I’ll spend the game hoping to see Zagreus and Thanatos and that I’ll be very sore if there’s no mention of their love (which is very likely). We’ll see!