I don’t know which innovations turn off your interest but I really can’t recommend Transistor enough, I think it’s still their best game.
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Agreed
I guess I’m referring to Supergiant’s tendency at the time to combine some gameplay ideas and make a game by striking a balance and doing some signature production around it. With Transistor it was the push and pull of the scripted and real-time combat, a combination that does not sing for me.
so I finished Bastion recently and thought it was Fine, nothing special. always bounced off of roguelikes.
picked up Hades y’day and have had 2-3 runs so far. really appreciating how the combat loop is constructed, it’s a very tight experience with a meaningful powerup every few chambers, choosing which path to take, earning the multiple types of currency. it feels like they looked at the ‘typical’ reasons people like me bounce off roguelikes and ensured they had some tangible metric of overall progress every chamber or two. you’re earning coins for charon, or gifts for various chars, hearts to extend your run, or even just lore progression for the codex. it seems pretty tailored to adhd brains like mine
my last run i got to (and died to) megaera so im interested to see what happens if i go further
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The final area is my favorite, so it’s fitting to be the final! It’s full of sewer rats and it is basically a level select zone
got up to chamber 29 (elysium) now. game is good but it couldn’t be my goty, not unless i see more than what’s already there, it would have to do something super creative narratively.
idk if i could ever consider a roguelike my goty so theres that. kudos to the game for being super fluid and tight
loving the ‘little mac’ loadout (fists of fury), but im best with the bow. trying to stack alpha damage bonus vs undamaged enemies to one-hit mooks and get to the boss with full health
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The boss fights in this are total slogs, I hate them with my life, I would be enjoying this much more if damage was at least doubled. Runs are just so long. I think I’m averaging 20+ minutes but I still haven’t won. When I make progress I don’t really feel like I made smart choices or played well. They just kinda happen and there’s no real thrill to it. I’ve yet to go YEAH THIS TIME IM GONNA MAKE IT and start getting jittery from the hype. Instead I just hit a room that isn’t really fun and kinda lose enthusiasm cuz I’m dreading the idea of starting over. And then I die. It’s the complete opposite of the way I’d feel playing Spelunky or Nuclear Throne. Never really feel like I’m in any kind of zone.
I think it’s well done and I get why folks love it and I will probably play until I win but I don’t fully love it, it’s not nearly fast enough for my tastes.
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still not sure how we got to be so old in just the past few years
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I like this a lot as a game to plug away at while I do more important things (listening to music and podcasts). The characters, story, and other accoutrements are fun but don’t really matter. The reason I’m still playing this is that I can mute it and pay half-attention very effectively.
So, like, it fits a pretty specific niche for me. Looking at it outside of that, I think the gameplay is somewhat fun but yeah, sludgy and overlong combat and a real dearth of meaningful decisions.
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20 minutes isn’t average time fwiw, it’s speedrun time. The lowest time limit you can select is 5 minutes per world. Making the game faster means optimizing your inputs, positioning, and build, constantly, in every room. The game will never push you to meet the 20 minute par time unless you push yourself to do it. It’s a hyperactive MOBABrain game for people who like keeping their APM up and practicing combo execution by having to do them constantly to keep buoyant above the necessary damage threshold.
I guess what I’m saying is Hades is MMORPG combat but in the shell of an arcade game and much, much faster, and polished, and it was able to worm its way into my brain for 65 hours before I went “I saw everything” and uninstalled it.
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oh yeah this 100% is the appeal for me
is there any supergiant game that doesn’t have
sludgy and overlong combat
it’s definitely begun to wear on me. game makes my wrists hurt
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I finally beat elysium and my reward is an even more boring dungeon every time I slog through that battle with TWO enormous health bars that is just the same pattern over and over for 10 minutes and yeah I think I’m about done too
If I could start at a later point that would be cool but having to go through every stage every time is just tiresome
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reminds me the best power up in ridiculous fishing is the one that starts you at 200m depth instead of starting from 0. like let’s skip this kiddie shit already and get to the tough part
like ridiculous fishing, hades overvalues perfection when dealing with low level mooks. at least here there’s a healing bonus when you change rooms, but you still have to spend the time
recommend the bow primarily for this reason, it clears low level rooms fast especially with the special autoaim boon
I’ll have to try this - fun of the game seems to be how best to cheese it
this isn’t working much for me either, i beat the (trash) boss in elysium for the first time today and got to what i presume it the final boss. i dont feel im playing better or had a particularly lucky run, the numbers in the background are just more juiced than they were a few runs ago, so why should i give a shit about the action really? why not just mash my face against shitty zone 3 boss until ive passively accrued enough resources and gotten buff enough to just tank the whole thing?
otherwise i have the same problems here as i did w bastion and transistor (the action is a slog and the rooms are too flat and big; but also i just dont find the material very interesting).
i’ve been switching off with shiren 5 depending on if i want to “feel engaged with myself and the world” or “give myself over to my disconnected self-loathing”. its a fun pair
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i enjoyed hades a lot for the first ten hours or so (have minimal frame of reference, my roguelike experience was an hour of shiren 1) but it started to feel like a grind
tell you what though somehow surviving my first encounter with a monster house in shiren 5 was tense as fuck!!!
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Yeah I dropped the game shortly after my prior post. It’s not a bad game, but it’s probably the most overrated game I’ve played in recent memory.
It’s sold as “a rogue-lite that makes rogues appealing to everyone”, but I found they did so by sanding down everything interesting about rogue-likes/lites, ridiculously overproducing the set dressing, and finding (IMO) poor solutions to reasonable problems in rogue-likes.
“Too many gamers are stymied by the challenge of rogue-likes and many don’t progress far into these games.”
- They solve this by passively increasing your health and damage output quickly enough and to a significant enough degree (along with generous health refills at multiple points mid-run) that most players can reach and beat the final boss without learning specific game-related skills. At a certain point, winning a run is a foregone conclusion since you are basically an unstoppable tank. There’s no incentive to actually optimize your gameplay unless you’re looking to speedrun or beat specific ancillary challenges.
“There’s too much randomness in rogue-likes, frustrating players who feel they are getting bad luck and have no idea what to do.”
- They solve this by basically removing as much gameplay randomness as possible to the point of becoming bland. Individual chambers in a level have no gameplay identity and basically smear together except for the 2 or 3 “special chambers”. Levels feel twice as long as they actually are. There are no bad weapons: all 5 (+ variants) are very powerful, you can choose the one you want every run, and none of them are particularly bizarre or shake things up. There are no secrets in the game hidden behind random events or items or challenges, every player gets to see everything. There just isn’t a whole lot to see beyond endless filler dialogue.
“Rogue-likes are Skinner boxes, constantly pressuring players to play and re-roll in hopes of a good run.”
- They solve this by making every run a good run once you’ve gotten enough experience. Even still, the game is still a Skinner box with the Boon system. You are offered “mystery treasure box A or B?” and spinning a roulette wheel to see what status effects you’ll get, providing some randomness to keep playing, though you still get at least 3 choices every time and are told exactly what each Boon does. All of the Boons make you stronger and the rare Chaos Boons that (briefly) alter your gameplay are 100% voluntary. Later, after you’ve gotten the “re-spin the wheel” skill and know which boons are best/fit your desired build, you are just waiting for certain Gods to appear and re-spinning until you get what you want.
All of these are somewhat reasonable concerns with rogue-likes and games in general, with the overarching question being “how do you incentive players to want to become better players in the face of a challenge”. There are a lot of ways to approach this, but I think with regard to Hades they seemed more interested in giving players the satisfaction of beating a roguelike (again, and again, and again).
I’m being harsh here but I worry is going to drive changes in similar games over the next few years considering it’s a massive success.
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Wouldn’t worry too much about this specific point. 95+% of self-proclaimed roguelikes are already shit in a lot of other ways. The devs this will “poison” are already poisoned.
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This is a very good post that highlighted why dying in Hades feels so bad for me. It’s never because of some combination of mechanics resulting in a surprising outcome, which is something that happens often in, say, Spelunky or Shiren. There’s nothing like triggering a trap that knocks down a wall that angers a shopkeeper who shotguns you to death, right? So far in Hades runs are largely the same aside from boons. And if I die it’s cuz I failed to dodge a bullet or misread a room and hit a trap. Like, this may have a bunch of rogue-lite trappings but right now it feels more like a 2D Devil May Cry – a game where enemies aren’t much of a threat and the real challenge comes from killing them efficiently and stylishly – that is steadily nudging me towards a victory. And I’m glad it’s doing that cuz there’s no way I’d keep playing it otherwise. Without all the upgrades and alt weapons this is a total drag of a game. But with the right build blowing stuff up is pretty pleasant.
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I finally got this on switch and I definitely feel the addictive quality of it. Every run feels like I accomplished something in the meta progression or character moments with or with out nectar. Minotaur and Theseus are my current road blocks. My only real complaint is how boss fights feel like DPS checks in that it comes down to how fast your build can deal damage before you get bored of dodging the patterns. You don’t really have any options to create openings so its just your mental endurance against the pattern. By my observation bosses are also immune to any knockback boons so you can’t really buy any space or time their sequence.
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