Hades was already perfect in my eyes, I was fully expecting this game to just be more of the same but maybe a bit longer.
My god. They somehow made a masterful gameplay loop even better. These people are geniuses. I think this is forever gonna be one of my favorite games of all time, unless they make a Hades 3 that dethrones it (please omg 🙏).
Literally the one and only downside is that it's technically unfinished (as of June 2024) and I REALLY want to know what happens in the story! Beating Eris and then being given the boot back to the crossroads made me sad!
But I can be patient for a game as perfect as this!

I've played little of it, but what I have experienced, it is basically more Hades but with a different vibe. You're not a warrior, you're a witch. You're not using weapons of a traditional fighter, but spells. It's already a fun experience right now, and I think if you're a mega fan of the first game, you can feel justified buying into this game's hype and purchasing the early access version. I've had fun with it, but I'm going to let this sit in the backlog until it gets to 1.0 (also I still need to roll credits on the first game, I haven't done so yet.)

It is a little crazy to me that this game is better than Hades 1. By all rights, this should have been in the same situation as Silk Song; getting so absolutely devastated by feature creep and endless reworking perfectionism that it ends in a thematically appropriate Sisphusyian purgatory.
but it's 2024 so it's out in early access what the fuck are team cherry doing
It's not exactly a straight upgrade from the original. It doesn't have the same warm heart, the already steep difficulty curve is getting harsher and Dusa isn't even in the game yet. And still, somehow, it's better. Mel is slightly colder than Zag, but her neuroses and anxieties reveal a loving heart damaged by her circumstances. In turn, her lovers are far more standoffish than even Meg at her thorniest - Mel x Eris 4everr, they need to hate fuck in the next patch.
The gameplay is faster, more expressive and more varied. The music is somehow even more instantly iconic than the first. The graphics are beautiful. It has TWO dungeons! Fuck. Fuck. Silk Song is fucked.