Die Young, Start Over, Die Again

Christmas used to mean video games. That specific window between being old enough to ask for them and young enough for it to still count as a real gift—Harvest Moon, Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time under the tree, the next several days gone, meals eaten too fast, sleep negotiated down to the minimum. My mother spending real money on something I’d still be thinking about twenty years later, though neither of us knew that then. The holiday wasn’t saved by the presents exactly. It was saved by having somewhere to go that wasn’t sitting with relatives pretending to be interested in conversations about people I’d never met.

The feeling I’m chasing now is the same one: something dense enough to last the break, heavy enough that finishing it by the second holiday would require either exceptional skill or no sleep at all. Not brutal, but not soft. Something that pushes back.

Hades is that game. Supergiant—the studio behind Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre—put it into Early Access recently, and it’s already more coherent than most games that ship as finished products. You play as Zagreus, son of Hades, trying to escape the underworld. The gods of Olympus keep gifting you abilities on the way down; the underworld keeps killing you anyway. When you die—and you will die constantly, enthusiastically, in ways that feel both fair and infuriating—you land in a pool of blood and start over. The structure is roguelike, but the story accumulates across deaths. Each run tells you something new. The colors are extraordinary. It’s currently around twenty euros on the Epic Games Store, and I’ve already lost several hours in it without noticing, which is precisely what I needed.