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Hades

Supergiant's roguelike, where dying moves the story on

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Supergiant Games' action roguelike about Zagreus, son of Hades, trying to fight his way out of the Greek underworld. Every failed escape sends him home to a house full of characters with something new to say. Built in public through two years of early access from December 2018, it reached version 1.0 on PC and Switch on 17 September 2020, sold a million copies within days, and won the BAFTA for Best Game. A sequel followed in 2025.

In most roguelikes, death wipes the slate. In Hades it is how the story moves on. The player is Zagreus, son of Hades, trying to fight his way out of the underworld and up to the surface. Every attempt runs through randomly arranged rooms of monsters, and almost every attempt fails. Then Zagreus wakes up at home, in the House of Hades, where his family, his mentor and half of Greek myth are waiting with something new to say about how it went. “Every time you die, you go home,” Wireframe’s review explained, and the home is “a constantly evolving place full of exposition, improvements, and a three-headed hellbeast to give a few chin scritches to”.

Supergiant Games, the San Francisco studio behind Bastion, Transistor and Pyre, made it in public. It spent nearly two years in early access before version 1.0 arrived in September 2020, and it became the studio’s fastest-selling game.

Fast facts

  • Developer and publisher: Supergiant Games
  • Creative director and writer: Greg Kasavin
  • Early access: Epic Games Store from 6 December 2018; Steam from 10 December 2019
  • Version 1.0: 17 September 2020, for Windows, macOS and Nintendo Switch
  • Consoles: PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S from 13 August 2021
  • Sequel: Hades II, version 1.0 on 25 September 2025

Built in early access

Supergiant launched Hades on the Epic Games Store during The Game Awards in December 2018, with a team of fewer than 20 people. Early access was part of the plan from the start. “We were really interested in a game that we could develop out in the open once it reached a certain point,” Greg Kasavin, the studio’s creative director, told Gamasutra, “and make it the best game it could be by gathering feedback along the way.” As the writer, he also liked what it did for the story: characters and events could be rolled out over time, like a television series after its pilot episode.

By the time version 1.0 came out, on 17 September 2020, the game had been in players’ hands for nearly two years. Wireframe called it “a poster child for the good Early Access can do”, with the benefit of “mass-scale user testing before its ‘final’ release”. Three days after launch, Supergiant announced that Hades had sold more than a million copies, 700,000 of them during early access.

The run

Each run is a dash through the underworld’s layers, room by room. Zagreus picks a weapon before he sets out: “a simple sword for your regular combat, maybe, or the Twin Fists of Malphon (aka holy boxing gloves) to get up close and quickly batter things… even a machine gun of sorts”, as Wireframe listed them. Zeus and the other Olympians, who want him to reach them on the surface, offer boons along the way. Hermes might give him an extra dash; Athena might make his attacks deflect incoming blows; Zeus adds lightning; Artemis can make “arrows shoot out with every strike of your weapon”. “There are dozens of options for each god,” the review said, “so no run is ever the same.”

Zagreus has one life per run, with ways to stretch it. Between runs he spends what he has gathered on lasting upgrades at home. That takes the sting out of losing. “Death is inevitable, but really it just acts as impetus to start over, push harder, try something new, upgrade yourself,” wrote Wireframe’s Ian Dransfield, who gave it 94% and could find nothing in it he did not like.

Writing for a game you lose

The House of Hades is where the writing lives. Zagreus’s mentor Achilles, Megaera (“Meg”) and the rest of the household react to what has just happened. In the same issue of Wireframe, the narrative designer Antony de Fault explained how it works: the game holds a library of short conversations, each tagged with a priority and with conditions that must be met before it unlocks, and when Zagreus meets a character it serves up the most pressing one. If you have just beaten Megaera for the first time, Achilles will skip his small talk and bring her up instead.

De Fault thought this “the first time it’s been applied well to an inherently addictive genre”, though the sheer number of lines could show its workings: characters sometimes congratulated him on something he had done hours earlier. He compared the game with Supergiant’s previous one, Pyre, where failure was also part of the story: “Hades solves death by simply making dying over and over the point.”

Awards and the sequel

Supergiant says Hades won Game of the Year from more than 50 publications in 2020. In March 2021 it won five BAFTA Games Awards, including Best Game, and in December 2021 it won the Hugo Award for Best Video Game, a category the science-fiction convention DisCon III created for that year only. The console versions arrived on 13 August 2021, and an iOS version followed through Netflix in 2024.

Hades II followed the same path. Its early access opened on 6 May 2024, and version 1.0 launched on PC and Nintendo Switch on 25 September 2025, taking the fight “beyond the Underworld” against the Titan of Time.

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