I was starting to think they would never put out a product I could love the way I love bastion... but then hades dropped and I was happy to see I was wrong about that

I like it when you say *boon*

I still haven't got around to this game, but I am one of those weirdies who likes Pyre as much as the first 2 so you might have finally convince me to try it out.

Let's go, this gon be good.

New video let's go!!

Gemsbok never misses. Love it.

Compulsory engagement contribution: deployed.

Love the content, looking forward to more

A friend got me this for my birthday last year, glad to see you put out a video on it! Maybe I should play it more haha.. How have you been btw? Sorry I haven't been commenting here for a while, just graduated and I've been busy

@TheGemsbok

10 ай бұрын

I've been well. Currently working on the next couple game videos, as I'm trying very hard to get a video out each month for the rest of the year (to make up for the several months earlier this year that had no video because I was working on the Demon's Souls analysis). Anyway, congratulations on graduating!

I am not a music guy, but I did immediately recognize Bastion's music a good 10 years after I've played the game. Amazing studio, hope Hades 2 will be a success.

It's been months since my wife and I wrote an essay on this game and I still can't stop thinking about it. Everything in the game just works so coherently, between the gameplay mechanics and story, how the gameplay synergizes with the workplace and family drama in the narrative, and how that relates to ideas around corporate bureaucracies and labor (Pact of punishment and the archives spring to mind). Even the criticism related to the lyre, although annoying in practice (And is a valid criticism), still conceptually makes sense considering that practicing any skill is always going to be a tedious experience. I've beaten the game twice and I still feel tempted to play again, but I have to pull myself back because the game completely consumes my personal time 😅

Hades is one of those games, much like Disco Elysium and TheWitcher3 etc., which I know is amazing, but I will never play because either I already know everything about it already (from essays and such) or because I just don't have it in me anymore to internalise it properly.

I actually always considered Pyre to be one of the best examples of narrative and gameplay being tied together, and I thought that Hades was a step back in that regard. I agree that in moment to moment gameplay Hades makes more sense, and it's impressive how many reactions NPCs have to what you're doing, however, when it comes to Pyre, I wouldn't separate the decision making you're doing outside of matches from the matches themselves, considering how much they affect one another and I think active sports gameplay has a lot more going on because of that. Player's choice is one of the most impressive things about Pyre to me because even losing a game doesn't stop the story, altering it instead, and because you're always fighting against other character's who have their own motivations and because sometimes those characters are quite likable, the player might want to lose the game intentionally or at least feel very conflicted as they're scoring goals and sealing opponent's team fate. I never once felt as invested and emotional during Hades gameplay as I did during some of the Pyre's final matches, where while I was jumping around and throwing a magic ball, I actively felt that with my gameplay performance I'm changing that world's and its people story, especially towards the end of the game. Meanwhile Hades doesn't have any narrative to gameplay choices, all quests have a single outcome and you can do all of them, get all trinkets, romance everyone, can't even fall out of favor with an Olympian if you ignore them in duo rooms too often. No high stakes, no sacrifices, do everything you want as much as you want at no cost, nothing about the gameplay changes as the story goes on. And there's an argument to be made that it's like that because it's a rogue-lite game, but I'm not sure if it really has to be this way or if it is, then perhaps Hades limited its potential by the choice of the genre. Especially considering how actually similar Pyre's and Hades' setups are, both are about escaping the underworld prison realm and having a cast of friendly and rival NPCs, and I feel like Hades could've had some powerful moments and actually top Pyre in every regard, where you have to make sacrifices to achieve certain things, where you can't get it all. Bastion and Transistor had a couple of big choices, Pyre is full of them and Hades, sadly, has none. I also find that Hades was a lot more surface level when it comes to tying gamey(but not strictly gameplay-related) details to the story and the world, it's often laughed away in a "Haha, weird thing, right?" kind of fashion. The most disappointing example of it is the narrator, they acknowledge it that it's just some disembodied voice talking to Zagreus and joke about it, which at first I thought was neat, until I finished the game and realized that it's the only Supergiant game, where narrator isn't a character in the world itself.

@TheGemsbok

11 ай бұрын

In the most recent of his 'Microvideos' collections, Matthewmatosis has a brief essay where he compares games to the 'take a penny, leave a penny' trays found near the cash registers of some stores. His point relates to the fact that such systems of convenience and benefit rely on there being some who will charitably make the effort to leave a penny rather than taking one. Games often rely on artifice and subterfuge---not only because of hardware constraints, but because of budgetary and visionary constraints as well. They tell you your choices matter, and your characters matter, and they are affecting the world. But often your choices are non-options. Sometimes both forks of a choice lead to the same outcome or only a slight dialogue difference (like all of the terminal polls in Transistor), and sometimes the only impactful choice comes right at the end and affects only an ending sequence or final cutscene (as is the case in both Bastion and Transistor). Part of our suspension of disbelief as players is assuming that won't be the case---that our choices and our characters really do matter. But we don't grant that assumption out of sheer good will. We do it because we have occasionally encountered games whose developers had the time, talent, budget, and willingness to go the extra mile and make it true. I think Pyre gets a worse rap than it deserves, in part because it does 'leave a penny' as you've noticed. Some of your choices do make a genuine mechanical and narrative difference throughout the game. Now, that's not what's targeted as a relative weakness in this video. Only the relationship between, on the one hand, its themes and main plot arcs, and, on the other hand, its core gameplay, receives criticism here. But we can all be glad that games like Pyre leave a penny (following through on removing freed characters from your roster, and so on), in part because it means games like Hades can take a penny. Because I was giving Hades the benefit of the doubt that choices I made (such as whether to romance the potential partners, or whether to reunite the three pairs of estranged characters, or whether to free Sisyphus, or whether to employ the Extreme Measures conditions of the Pact) really mattered to both gameplay and narrative, there were only two small moments where I was disappointed to find that wasn't the case: when Meg's fight was unchanged by her relationship restarting, and when Sisyphus stuck around by his boulder in Tartarus after being freed. Everything else matched well enough for me. I do wish every developer was able to leave a penny with every game, and I have occasionally criticized devs who managed to do it to an exceptional degree in the past noticeably failing to do it in a similarly structured new release (like Elden Ring). But the reality is that most devs for most games can't or won't. Especially for a small team like Supergiant, it's never clear how much of a game would need to be traded away for it to better account for branching choices. But now that they've put in so much work to establish the formula, perhaps Hades II will be able to leave a penny. I hope so, though I'm not holding my breath.

@MrFr2eman

11 ай бұрын

@@TheGemsbok That's an extremely reasonable way of looking at it ;D And I understand the realities of the development but it's sad to witness regardless, when a developer, who previously made some exceptional stuff with a few bumps, switches to a more conventional but solid experience. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of Hades' shortcomings are result of the early access work process they had, constantly pumping out content every couple of months, I bet it would be extremely difficult to weave some larger decisions into the game under such conditions, like figuring out what are the consequences of taking a way a main NPC, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the game's quality of moment to moment experience you described also came from that. So maybe the sequel will manage to have the best of the both worlds, although like many people said, it's extremely worrying to see the developer, who always made unique and experimental IPs to make a sequel right after they hit big success.

Got a "roguelike" game mode for you to try that'll buff your win/loss ratio maximum past the one in Hades, if you want: Hitman Freelancer. 100% in that is an enormous grind, and while the variation of tasks and the sheer bredth of options available in Hitman's base gameplay save it from tedium, the kind of dedicated player who is actually pushing Freelancer to 100% will win far more than they lose...even if they do their runs in Hardcore mode. (That *is* a genuine difficulty spike, with a lot of little effects, but once you get used to how the game works in that mode, you'll still be achieving a pretty high success rate. As long as you don't pick the bugged prestige mission of "arrange a meeting" since prestige missions are required in Hardcore and the game has about a 20% success rate of recognizing that you've done that action for purposes of objective and challenge completion.

@TheGemsbok

11 ай бұрын

Interesting! Oddly, the only game I've played from the Hitman franchise is the spinoff puzzle game Hitman GO. Did get 100% in it. Unsure of my W/L ratio there, though . . .

@rashkavar

11 ай бұрын

@@TheGemsbok Well, regular Hitman gameplay, at least in the 2016-2021 trilogy, is more of an immersive sim, but enabling and encouraging replaying and mastering levels and the various options they offer. Freelancer is a recently added roguelike gameplay mode that kinda doubles down on that with random targets, new mechanics and different ways of unlocking items. It's not the best it could possibly be, but it's still fun.

@TheGemsbok

11 ай бұрын

Ha, yes, I'm familiar. Was joking about the 'ratio' in my prior comment. I'm sure I'll play a proper Hitman game, someday.

12:17 I mean learning to play an instrument takes time and can at times be tedious so that one’s fair hahaha

Nice video. Personally I have a gripe that after Transistor Supergiant fell into a routine and peppering their games with unnecessary amounts of dialogue. What was intriguing about Bastion and Transistor was that they were story-heavy games with low amounts of dialogue, having less of he obnoxious "character explains all aspects of their character to the player" stuff that most dialogue heavy games are saddled with.

@TheGemsbok

11 ай бұрын

In my opinion, Bastion is the only time they've really used a light touch in the story department (and I agree it's all the better for it). Transistor may not have nearly as many dedicated moments of conversation as their more recent games do, but it has far more mandatory moments of dialogue and moments where you have to hold still to listen to narration than Bastion. And it was the first game of theirs to dedicate thousands of words of text to character bios, in-universe articles, and so forth.

@emeritus5418

11 ай бұрын

@@TheGemsbok Sort of agree, Transistor mainly had a problem with exposition, and I think it's because they couldn't come to terms with how much of the world they wanted to tell you about, so they ended up having a bunch of mostly irrelevant world building through out the game but forgetting to explain the relevant information until a long exposition dump by the final boss. On the other hand the characters themselves were quite good at not constantly explaining what they felt about things. The big blemish was of course Sybil, who had an incredibly important role to play in the story, and a quite well written one, but the only way to discover it was reading text documents you unlocked hours later by experimenting with the charm buff. What do you make of Hades 2? Personally I'm very displeased with them deciding to make a sequel, and I don't see how you can really improve Hades much, or tell a completely different story that still manages to fit the gameplay loop so well.

@TheGemsbok

11 ай бұрын

I'm of two minds about the sequel. On the one hand, yes, it is always disappointing to see stagnation from a creator previously notable for experimenting widely in mechanics or narrative in almost every release (that's the substance of the sentiments in the conclusion of my video on Elden Ring). But on the other hand, as I say in the conclusion section of _this_ video, I don't think Hades is a perfect game. Even if the sequel has a narrative that fits the structure slightly worse, I wouldn't mind trading that for greater variety in bosses and enemies, and some more 'Bastion-like' methods of storytelling, and a better incentive structure for raising the difficulty as far and as fast as manageable. If it just ends up feeling like a reskin or alternate version of Hades, though . . . well, we already have Hades. So that'd be a shame.

@emeritus5418

11 ай бұрын

@@TheGemsbok Well, I don't really see them going back to the Bastion style of minimal dialogue when everyone praised how much dialogue was in Hades. I also don't think the writer is going to suddenly change the way he writes the dialogue, more of the same I think. As far as better bosses and enemies and difficulty, that seems to me more like the goal of an expansion, rather than a sequel. I find sequels who only have to goal of improving, rather than overhauling, generally tend to be quite bland when all the dust's settled. It'll probably be a perfectly fine game, but even if it's Hades-with-fewer-flaws it'd have been more exciting with them doing something new.

I mostly agree, and I played Hades for maybe 10-15 hours, BUT I stopped, because it felt like I couldn't progress the story with a more chill experience. Like I lost almost all the time, and prefer how much more chill pyre, transistor, and bastion, are, compared to Hades, and therefore I never got to see more of the content. It was just too hectic for me, I'm sad to say. But maybe I'm missing a way to make it more chill?

I do declare decisively 😊🎉 I am declared best at foment influence revolution ❤. How do you AcTUALLY play this game is the main question of WE. 😮. Small differences BRO…. Obviously yo. 😢. PACT OF PUNISHMENT!!!!!

I enjoyed the game but it is very repetitive. Once you beat Hades, you finished the game. There is nothing more than challenges to increase difficulty after that.