Few cocktails are more perfectly balanced than the negroni. One part gin, one part vermouth, one part Campari. A little bit of crushed ice. An orange twist. Insert chef’s kiss emoji here. Invented in 1919 by a Florentine bartender, the negroni has been a staple of bars across strata and culture. Despite its immutable reputation as a classic, over the past century, mixologists have played at shaking up its core ingredients, to varying degrees of success. The negroni sbagliato, which trades gin for sparkling wine, took off in popularity in 2022, thanks to an offhand remark from an HBO star, and is barely a negroni. (“Sbagliato” is literally Italian for “wrong.”) Most recently, I found myself twisted in knots while sipping a riff I’d never seen before, philosophically repulsed by the raft of needless complications to a time-tested formula yet still delighted by its flavor: a strawberry basil negroni.
Hades 2 is the strawberry basil negroni.
Out Sept. 25 for Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and Windows PC after 15 months of early access, Hades 2 faces some lofty expectations. For one, it’s the first sequel ever produced by Supergiant Games, a studio that has never missed. And it happens to be the follow-up to Hades, the studio’s 2020 action roguelike that’s widely considered one of the most influential games of the past decade. In Hades, you played as Zagreus, the son of the Greek underworld’s titular overlord, desperately trying to escape his father’s oppressive rule. From an isometric perspective, you used a variety of weapons to fight through various randomly generated chambers of the Greek afterlife, gathering temporary power-ups from Olympian gods along the way. But the genius of Hades was that failure was only failure in name; every time you’d die and get sent back to the main hub, you’d get a bit closer to earning an upgrade, or learn a bit more about a character’s relationship with Zagreus. This brilliantly concocted mix of story and gameplay, of always moving forward, has lent Hades legions of fans and accolades (and, if Steam’s weekly release figures are to be believed, attempted copycats).
Hades 2 switches things up from the start by putting you in the grecian sandals of Melinoë, the younger sister of Zagreus. The Titan Chronos has overtaken the Greek underworld, imprisoning Hades, Zagreus, and many of the other characters you came to know in the first game. You’re tasked with freeing them, restoring the House of Hades to its rightful state, and kicking Chronos to the curb. Your goal, in other words, in an unmissable nod to the roguelike genre Hades 2 is part of, is to kill time.
On a fundamental level, the act of saving Hades looks a lot like the act of escaping Hades. From an isometric perspective, you use a variety of weapons — a staff, a battleaxe, or a pair of daggers, in addition to three truly inspired tools — to fight through various randomly generated chambers of the Greek afterlife, gathering temporary power-ups from Olympian gods along the way. These powers, called “boons,” take inspiration from the gods who bequeath them. Boons from Hestia, the goddess of fire, imbue your attacks with incendiary effects. Aphrodite can weaken your enemies. Apollo can daze them. Zeus goes zap.
Combining boons over the course of a run is one of the true joys of Hades 2. When paired with the combat, which is fine-tuned to the point where one questions if even a single pixel is out of frame, the effects are legitimately marvelous. It doesn’t take much to turn Melinoë into a dashing, sprinting lightning storm. It takes even less to turn her into a fireball-hurling devil. Even after dozens of hours — comprising nearly 50 runs in early access on Steam Deck plus an additional 25 runs playing the 1.0 update from the start on Switch 2 — I still find myself on the edge of my seat before every room, wondering what upgrade is behind the next door, and whether or not it’ll accentuate my current build.
That each room is easy on the eyes is no small thing. The hazy glades of Erebus seem to creak with ancient wisdom, as if you’re fumbling your way through a forest maze older than time itself. The underwater domain of Oceanus glimmers like an Aegean pearl, steam sizzling off bronze machinery as armies of evil sea monsters dart around you. These gallery-worthy visuals are underscored by music from Darren Korb, whose rich, melodic soundscapes punctuate the action, highlighted by a handful of tracks featuring achingly gorgeous vocals from longtime Supergiant collaborator Ashley Barrett. There’s a level of unrivaled artistry to Hades 2 that makes it immediately apparent why this series has generated such a devoted fanbase. Playing Hades 2, even for a minute, feels like coming home.
But coming home doesn’t always mean everything is in its right place. Picture returning to your parents’ house for the holidays, and discovering that since you were last there, they’ve bought a new stove. You still know where to cook. You still know where all the pots and pans are. But the stovetop itself doesn’t heat up the way the old one did; you burn your eggs.
These changes are most starkly felt through Melinoë’s array of witchy powers. The cast ability, a fairly basic projectile attack in the original Hades, has been reimagined as a Solomonic circle of sorts, surrounding Melinoë and immobilizing any enemies caught in its boundary. But you can also use witchy powers to charge up your basic abilities — your attack, special attack, and cast — for alternate effects, essentially doubling the moves at your disposal. If you acquire a boon from Selene, the goddess of the moon, you’ll unlock a randomized power that charges up the more you use your witchy powers, replete with its own mini skill tree that resets every run. A handful of gameplay tweaks transform a svelte combat toolkit into a bloated one.
The bloat becomes even more evident when you return to the Crossroads, the hub area of Hades 2, between runs. Melinoë’s passive abilities are organized by her Arcana Cards upgrade tree. To unlock additional Arcana Cards, you spend Ashes, but how many cards you can activate at once is determined by your Grasp. To increase your Grasp, you need to earn Psyche from interacting with shades in your runs. Unlocking new weapons means finding metals like Silver and Bronze, but to mine them, you first need to swing by the Cauldron — a giant pot of stew that allows you to exchange resources for permanent upgrades — and perform the Night’s Craftwork incantation, but you’ll need a Moly flower to do so. Various upgrades at the Cauldron require you to find Moss or Iron or Lotus flowers or Cattail flowers or Glassrock or Nightshade or Shaderot or Fate Fabric or Garlic or, I kid not you, literal Rubbish. These are just a portion of the resource types that appear in Hades 2.
Don’t have the resources you need to unlock something? All good, because you can trade your Bones currency for a variety of resources at the Wretched Broker’s store (well, once you summon him with a spell from the Cauldron). Or you can earn more by completing a series of checklist tasks for Mr. Manifestation of Doom Himself, Moros (once you’ve summoned him with a spell from the Cauldron). Or you can get more by planting seeds at your farm (once you’ve summoned its presence with a spell from the Cauldron).
That’s right, you have a farm in Hades 2. It only comprises a handful of plots, and there’s not a whole lot you can do besides plant seeds and go on runs while they grow into plants, but there is a farm.
The farm makes itself most useful when you try to unlock a second series of biomes, set outside the underworld, which is an exercise of attrition unto itself. To do so, you first have to cast a spell that requires a resource called Shadow. But to get Shadow, you need a significant amount of Ashes, Psyche, and Fate Fabric. The easiest way to get Fate Fabric is from the Wretched Broker (once you’ve summoned… yeah, you get it). After casting the incantation, you have to actually complete part of a run in the aboveground segment, before you’re sent back to the Crossroads for narrative reasons I’m redacting. Then you have to gather four different types of plants, including something called Thalamus. But no no no, you can’t actually just “find” Thalamus. You have to grow it. At your farm. And it turns out the seeds required for growing Thalamus only show up in one specific type of chamber that has no guaranteed chance of showing up on your runs.
There’s certainly a school of thought in contemporary gaming where excess is praised for the sake of excess, where piling on systems is justified in the name of a sticker price, where more is more and less is less. But I don’t come to the House of Hades to parse a Destiny wiki’s worth of proper nouns. I come to the House of Hades for the express purpose of wielding godlike powers to smite hordes of Chthonic nightmares who get between me and my family. Hades 2 provides the latter. It also provides the former.
Make no mistake: Hades 2 is a terrific game. Meticulously crafted and relentlessly engaging to an almost dangerous degree, this is a true work of art. It’s also just a freakin’ blast. We’ve all played some Hades clones over the years (some good, some bad, some ugly), and Hades 2 makes it crystal clear who’s king of the form. No doubt here, this will make game of the year lists across the industry. It will almost certainly make my own. But despite all the time I’ve spent with Hades 2, I still can’t answer the question of why. I can’t tell you what this game aims to do that Hades didn’t already do first, and better. And I can’t stop myself from wondering, perhaps unfairly to its developers, since I have no insight into internal decision-making at the studio, about the potential novel ideas that were tabled to make room for a sequel.
Consider Supergiant’s oeuvre. Its debut, Bastion, helped usher in an indie game renaissance in 2011. In 2014, Transistor shattered notions of strict genre confinement. (Full disclosure of my biases in this review: I have a Transistor poster. And tattoo.) Pyre, released in 2017, was proof of concept for nonlinear character-based storytelling, and had a killer multiplayer mode to boot. Then Hades Hadesed in 2020. Every time this studio has produced a game, it’s pushed the medium forward. Why now, after 15 years of straight bangers, return to the well? What about Hades merits refining an existing formula, rather than writing a new one? And is it even possible to improve upon Hades in the first place, perfect as it is?
It makes me think of the martini. Countless variations exist, the cocktail having been shaken and stirred by literally every bartender who’s clocked into a shift since its 19th-century invention, but we all know which recipe is the best; a certain British superspy famously swears by it. The original remains the gold standard, 150 years later. Will the strawberry basil negroni have that staying power? Riff on the classics all you want. At some point the menu needs a new drink.
