a very timely analysis of hades one (1) and why the ending is kind of ass.

In modern times, the Greek Pantheon is often portrayed as a reality TV series with gods -- the real housewives, husbands, and partners of Olympus featuring larger-than-life personalities with exceptional privilege and power caught up in the everyday malaise of family drama, with a tinge of sex and murder. Most of you have come in contact with the stories in some form. There are television, literature, film, stage, and of course multiple video game adaptations featuring the Greek Pantheon. Sony Santa Monica's God of War series is perhaps the most well-known, with the earlier entries in the franchise featuring an angry Spartan killing his way up and down the pantheon. These first three God of War games are a run off from the 90s -- they're grime, guts, and blood. A digitised Liefield and Millar comic book arc where one man, cooler, angrier, and stronger than everyone else kills everyone else but always finds time to fuck. But the franchise top of mind when discussing the gods is Supergiant Games' Hades series. Compared to God of War, Hades is gentler. People often whisper, death is temporary, everyone is luxurious and no one is ashy. You do kill your father in both. Once in God of War, and over and over again in Hades.

Hades is a roguelite, with the looping nature of the game serving two purposes. Most obviously, it’s an abstraction of the gods' immortality. The player controls Zagreus, son of Hades, an immortal god who's been in his mid-twenties for who knows how long, desperate to break out of the underworld to meet his mother Persephone on the surface. In a ludic sense, most video game protagonists are immortal. The protagonist's death at the hands of the player tends to be easily reversible by loading a save state. Roguelites turn death into something ludically diegetic and, occasionally, narratively so. Hades' reactive dialogue is its innovation in this field. After every run, members of Hades' court will comment on how well Zagreus did. Hypnos might tease if a run ended prematurely at the hands of a jobber, while Achilles has advice on besting the Hydra you've been stuck on for 5 runs now. Win or lose, everyone has something to say.

Hades is also a coming-of-age story, and this is the loop's second purpose. Everyday life is a practice of navigating loops and mazes. A fall from the edge of a bed can be lethal for a toddler. In a year or so, that same child can crawl and stumble through the home navigating the rooms as if lost in a labyrinth. Starting school expands the loop, and settles them into a routine. In adolescence the house shrinks, and the town is the new maze. Maybe they're allowed to stay out late, maybe they're allowed to stay at a friend's for the weekend. At some point, what was a difficult trek becomes trivial: you know all of your town's local haunts, you can reach the final boss of Hades in your sleep.

The end of every loop is a fight to the death with Hades. It's not nearly as consequential as it sounds, win or lose you end up back in Hades’ court for more dialogue and to plan your next run. The fight is Zagreus and Hades' simmering relationship coming to a boil. At the beginning of the game the two can barely stand being in the same room as each other. Hades is immediately insulting, calling Zagreus "stupid boy," and Zagreus is in turn sarcastic and disrespectful. Make no mistake, Hades is an abusive father by any definition. He's emotionally distant, cruel, and repeatedly raises his hand to kill his son.

Obviously violence and murder mean something different when the end result is, at most, a minor inconvenience. When Zagreus is killed by Hades, it's the equivalent of being sent to his room. It's never final. Violence in the underworld is sparring, it's arguing, it's fighting, or it's just passing the time.

Patricide and filicide are common throughout Greek mythology and history. Hercules murdered his entire family in a god-addled rage. Hades, alongside his siblings, killed their Titan parents to claim Olympus for themselves, and perhaps most pertinent is the story of Oedipus.

Oedipus' tale is tragic - born to King Laius and Queen Jocasta but destined to be his father's murderer, he was abandoned to die as an infant. The servant Laius commanded to do the deed took pity on the child and instead arranged for him to be raised by another pair of royals, who brought Oedipus up as their own. Oedipus discovered he was fated to kill his own father and marry his mother. Distraught, the man left his home for the city of Thebes, unaware that the parents who had raised him were not his blood. During his travels, he quarrelled with an older man. They came to blows, and Oedipus killed him. When he arrived at Thebes he found the city under attack from a sphinx with no king to defend it. The sphinx would challenge humans to a battle of wits, asking a riddle and devouring them if they answered incorrectly. Oedipus bested the creature and the city in need of a king anointed him. Of course, Laius was the man Oedipus killed in a quarrel, and the queen he betrothed was his birth mother, Jocasta.

In 1899, Sigmund Freud coined the 'Oedipus Complex' in his landmark work the Interpretation of Dreams. Here Freud posited that the children were in competition with their parents of the same sex for the affection of the parent of the opposite sex. In Hades, the prize is Persephone. Having split from the game’s eponymous god of the underworld, Persephone resides in a cottage on the surface, living in solitude and relative anonymity. Hades stands as the final obstacle to protect this status quo. For Zagreus, the surface, and his mother, are emancipation. After several successful runs, Persephone decides to return to the underworld.

Peresphone's agency is what's won. In defeating his father, Zagreus gains control over his mother. Persephone's escape from the underworld was an escape from Hades himself and while the game foreshadows the reconciliation through its many other reconciliations, this is the one that grates. When you're victorious in a run of Hades, Zagreus emerges from the underworld and has a conversation with Peresphone. The catch, and how the game keeps the player running its roguelite loop, is that Zagreus cannot survive on the surface. Eventually he'll die, often mid conversation with Persephone but not before urging her to return to the Underworld to set things right. From Persephone's perspective she's reuniting with the son she thought died in her arms as an infant, and then watching him die. Over and over again. She left the underworld but hell has found her.

In an interview with the 'Origin Story' podcast, Hades writer Greg Kasavin talks about the direct connections the Supergiant team has with the story as written in the game, "It's something we could relate to in our own way having grown up with parents with very high expectations." Kasavin's parents immigrated to the States from Moscow, Russia. Like many immigrants they discovered their University credentials were worthless, and had to redo them from scratch. Poverty is a whirlpool; it takes all you can to make it out and escaping it is another thing entirely, some combination of luck and superhuman effort. Dogma, or stubbornness, is canonized and mythologized and out of distorted concern for their children, they insist on one path to 'success.' It ironically limits their options despite 'opportunity' often being the chief reason for immigration for the first place.

"I think of Hades as an immigrant story," Kasavin explains, "in the mythology [Hades is] charged with moving to the underworld and supervising it. He's not from there. He moved there to take a job and he had a son and stuff like that." Hades, as a reluctant immigrant to the underworld, is unquestionably a success story. Despite his stand-offish nature, the Underworld's denizens take to him and respect him. Hades' underworld subverts the frequent comparisons many adaptations make to Christianity's hell depicting an, for the most part, almost utopian setting.

There's pathos afforded to Hades that allows the player and Zagreus to understand how he became the person he is in the game. He’s a proud man who drew the short straw to manage the worst branch of the family business and despite that has carved out success. He thrusts his paranoia and distrust of the outside world and his extended family onto Zagreus, lies to him about his mother, and then comes to despise his curiosity and desire to connect. What more could the boy want outside of these walls? Why is he not content with the life I’ve built for us both?

Zagreus forgives Hades. In the same interview Kasavin gestures at this forgiveness as inevitable over a long enough timeframe. "The differences between the gods and the rest of us is that they have unlimited time," he explains, "They literally can't even kill each other to solve their problems. They have a really good incentive to work their problems out as long as it takes."

American author bell hooks, in the preface of her seminal work The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love writes, "As a young woman in my twenties who had not yet found her own powers, I often wished the men in my life would die. My longing for my father’s death began in childhood. It was the way I responded to his rage, his violence. I used to dream him gone, dead and gone." She continues in a later paragraph, "My reconciliation with my father began with my recognition that I wanted and needed his love—and that if I could not have his love, then at least I needed to heal the wound in my heart his violence had created."

hooks talks about establishing a relationship on her own terms, all the bits she wants and needs, filtered from the undesirables. It's obviously appealing. This summer as both my father and I faced separate invasive surgeries, I found myself with a need to connect with the man who was at one point distant to me except for the hot sting of hand to flesh. A provider made cold by the world and since thawed out in his older age.

This forgiveness and repair is an active choice. It's one for me, Kasavin, and hooks but it's not for the player. It's hardly a decision Zagreus himself wrestles with. He never leaves the orbit of his father, never gets enough space to navigate the world without his presence hovering over him, and his forgiveness is born solely through the [re]completion of his family.

Supergiant's game uses Greek myth to mythologize the nuclear family, now that mother, father, and child are reunited under the same roof, the game is finished having arrived at its thematic conclusion. Hades reluctantly apologizes to his wife and son and comes to an agreement with the latter for him to continue running his escape gauntlet to stress the underworld's defences. Zagreus moves from rambunctious rebel pursuing freedom from his father to joining the family business alongside his mother; the inmate becomes a warden, the house of Hades always wins.

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