Why is this game so popular?

[Wingress]

I have every Supergiant's games, but nothing come close to Hades popularity wise, what caused it to go viral?

[Suzaku]

Addictive gameplay, interesting story, charming characters, exquisite art and music, Dusa. Take your pick.

[LT2483]

Pfft, that list was unneeded when it contained Dusa.
Seriously though, Supergiant built up a bit of a following with each game, then built hype - then released a properly replayable game that was their (most would agree) best yet. Word of mouth did the rest.

[Doomdork]

I think that its because this game is the first from them that managed to nail EVERY aspect. All of their games prior (especially Pyre) had fantastic art, music, voice acting and world-building but the gameplay always ranged from average to mystic basketball. Hades managed to add an engaging gameplay loop into the mix to make it a masterpiece.

[Wingress]

Origineel geplaatst door Suzaku:

Addictive gameplay, interesting story, charming characters, exquisite art and music, Dusa. Take your pick.

Well arguably Transistor have all of these....except Dusa that is, so I guess Hades just do it a lot better in every aspect then? How's the music? they keep surprising me when I think they can't do it any better.

[TommyEV]

I mean, the 4th game is likely to attract fans of the previous 3 games. Bastion couldn't magically attract fans of Hades.

Besides, I think most people would agree that it is their best game yet.

[kekkuli]

Dusa. And very nice gameplay overall. And also Dusa.

[travistotle]

Honestly, until this game I thought Supergiant was the most overrated developer out there. I thought Bastion was ehh. I never understood why people praised them SO FREAKING HARD; it was like everyone had a nephew who worked there or something. I played this game for a few hours after the rave reviews and was like "okay, I get why people like it but there's not much to it." And yet, I kept coming back for another run. Then I started getting interested in the story. Then I started unlocking weapon aspects and crazy OP Duo Boons. Now I've got almost 100 hours into this game and I keep coming back.

I think part of the praise is that it's really the first rogue-like to have an interesting story. Up until Hades, a rogue-like seemed like a genre that was almost impossible to contain a good story. On top of that, it's just super polished, and a pretty airtight experience overall, as far as gameplay goes. A run never takes too long, and there's just enough variety to keep you wanting to come back. A good rogue-like is addictive, and Hades is definitely an addictive experience. It doesn't quite take my title for best rogue-like, that still goes to Dead Cells, which imo has this game beat on raw gameplay and depth, but it's an easy second place for me.

[VeeKain]

It's just the peanut butter and chocolate of the gameplay/story loop man. The combat is fast and fun, every weapon feels good and has nice mutations to it, Instead of feeling set back and "starting over" this game gives it a feeling of context and progression that goes beyond just getting stronger. I found that my attachment got stronger as well.

I consider the other SG games fun but never found the gameplay loop satisfying in the same way. They literally took the trendiest subgenre that I find most the annoying and made it charming and meaningful to me.

It's popular for a good reason. It has all the things that SG has done right before and put them in a perfect package, in my opinion anyways. Sorry for rambling. Not sure how else to put it.

[Kimarnic]

Because it has some good waifus and husbandos

[Nordland Wolf]

Origineel geplaatst door Wingress:

Origineel geplaatst door Suzaku:

Addictive gameplay, interesting story, charming characters, exquisite art and music, Dusa. Take your pick.

Well arguably Transistor have all of these....except Dusa that is, so I guess Hades just do it a lot better in every aspect then? How's the music? they keep surprising me when I think they can't do it any better.

Transistor has an "invasive" story that you cannot skip and slow down the pacing of conseguent playthrough and you can experience it's addictive gameplay only replaying the story over and over, there is no "infinite" side content to play only with the battle system. So after a couple of playthrought you are basically done with the game, there is nothing to experience after that.
Hades is a roguelike instead, and it has a massive replayability and with the randomness of every run, every time there can be something new that you can find and play with. Also the story is not forced on player and is treated as a "side content", so if some people are interested in it, they can spend all the time they want discovering all that the game has, while if some other people are not interested in it, they can ignore all of that and just play the game without any time loss, like an arcade game that still retain alot of content. So unlike Transistor, the game give players more choices on how to play the game and there is nothing forced to them, like Transistor does, and player choices is one of the most improtant factor for a success of a game.

[Nordland Wolf]

Origineel geplaatst door travistotle:

Honestly, until this game I thought Supergiant was the most overrated developer out there. I thought Bastion was ehh. I never understood why people praised them SO FREAKING HARD; it was like everyone had a nephew who worked there or something. I played this game for a few hours after the rave reviews and was like "okay, I get why people like it but there's not much to it." And yet, I kept coming back for another run. Then I started getting interested in the story. Then I started unlocking weapon aspects and crazy OP Duo Boons. Now I've got almost 100 hours into this game and I keep coming back.

I think part of the praise is that it's really the first rogue-like to have an interesting story. Up until Hades, a rogue-like seemed like a genre that was almost impossible to contain a good story. On top of that, it's just super polished, and a pretty airtight experience overall, as far as gameplay goes. A run never takes too long, and there's just enough variety to keep you wanting to come back. A good rogue-like is addictive, and Hades is definitely an addictive experience. It doesn't quite take my title for best rogue-like, that still goes to Dead Cells, which imo has this game beat on raw gameplay and depth, but it's an easy second place for me.

The thing about Bastion success is the year of it's release. At the times indie were small games with very low production quality buth with very interesting ideas. Bastion was one of, if not the first, indie game that had everything developed with high quality. Story, graphic, music, gameplay, voices, everything was top notch, while all other indies sacrified some of those aspect to develop the remaining ones at top notch level. Bastion at the time was the proof that indie games cold be high quality games in all aspects.

[Zebedee]

My favorite game by Supergiant is Transistor. But I can see how Hades' gameplay is actually better. Transistor always felt clunky with the real time and planning phase never quite really meshing for me. Pyre has really smooth real time play but it's a game you're hard pushed to recommend playing to see each of the outcomes once you've done it once - you've already headcanoned the ending the first time. Hades manages to take the huge range of choice and make it interesting to replay to uncover it all.

I'm not really a fan of the gameplay Hades uses but it really does manage to capture everything Supergiant have been doing well over the years in the one game. Masterpiece, and rightly recognised widely for being that.

[Trof]

Don't care about Dusa, but the rest is true. Game is replayable unlike any other rougelike I know. After 50+ runs there are still unique dialogs - amazing!
And yeah, gameplay is fun which always comes first

[Silent Guy]

It's highly addictive

[Foxassassin]

Origineel geplaatst door Metal-Overlord:

The thing about Bastion success is the year of it's release. At the times indie were small games with very low production quality buth with very interesting ideas. Bastion was one of, if not the first, indie game that had everything developed with high quality. Story, graphic, music, gameplay, voices, everything was top notch, while all other indies sacrified some of those aspect to develop the remaining ones at top notch level. Bastion at the time was the proof that indie games cold be high quality games in all aspects.

Well, if you're going to mention Bastion, you have to mention Dust: An Elysian Tail, as they were both original indie games that were heavily publicized by Xbox when indie games first really started to take off. That gave Bastion a TON of publicity. I remember seeing adds all the time on the Xbox homepage back then.

Honestly, there's things that Bastion does better than Hades, but both are great games. I haven't gotten to play Pyre yet. But Transistor's story was neat, but didn't resonate with me as well.