I don’t know who this game is for.

Roguelikes are unique in how well they fit the disparate ways casual and hardcore players engage with games. Runs can be enjoyed in short, non-committed sessions, or repetitively for hundreds of hours. Deep mechanics combined with high variability through randomness provides quick novelty for newcomers, and experts are challenged to adapt and get creative with the situation they’re given. However, in an attempt to streamline itself, Hades changed the formula in ways that make it less appealing to both sets of players. The amount of variety has been reduced dramatically from standard roguelikes, with the progression of areas being constant, the cast of enemies being small, and the synergies between boons being much tamer than in something like Synthetik or The Binding of Isaac. Even its meta-progression confounds both groups, requiring a heavy time investment to get to the point where gameplay can evolve beyond its most basic version. The weapons are an especially good example of this, since fully upgrading a new weapon’s unique bonus requires fifteen of a resource primarily gained by successful completion of a run. The most unique forms of each weapon are also locked behind upgrade investments in different weapons, along with dialog triggers the game never cares to communicate, meaning most players won’t be able to use them all until the fifty hour mark at best.

Fifty hours of investment doesn’t seem too bad in the context of a roguelike, but the aforementioned lack of variety in the boons makes it a drag. Each god has a theme for their boons, like Poseidon’s causing knockback and Ares’ spawning whirling blades, with very few surprises. Active effects also can’t stack, and simply fill in a slot to change your attack, dash, magic cast, et cetera. You’re not allowed to create a build where your magic is buffed with all the active effects you could find to hilarious results, the only option is to pick which god's predictable modifier should fill which slot. With only ten gods who can give boons, the ability to reroll, and knowledge of which god will be in each upcoming room, filling up on the active effects you want is fairly trivial. The passives can provide a nice boost, but provide comparatively small advantages that usually don’t change how you approach combat. After coming to grips with the game and getting a few completions, playthroughs are less of an interesting experience on their own and more of a formality to unlock other content. The most indicative example is the game’s difficulty-modifying Heat system, where completion rewards are earned for each unique level of Heat. In other words, you don’t get a ton of rewards for completing a run with the maximum amount of modifiers, you only get the same as if you had completed a run with just one change. This hurts the hardcore demographic the most, who are punished for immediately trying to challenge themselves. It’s a waste of time compared to completing a run at rank 1, then 2, then 3, and actually getting rewarded in a way that will eventually make playthroughs more fun.

The elephant in the room I have yet to mention is Hades’ story, which is the part that received the most consistent praise. However, it’s subject to the same problems that the gameplay suffers. Completing a single run is hardly the end of the story, and the credits only roll after ten victories, which is already expecting a time investment of around twenty hours. However, the epilogue, where the central conflict of the story is actually resolved, takes about ninety hours to reach. Players need to rank up affinities with the gods and collect a seemingly arbitrary list of dialog lines reliant on other unspecified criteria to unlock it, and I wouldn’t blame people who didn’t even realize the game has an epilogue at all. Who does a structure like this really reward? For casual players who just want to see how the story ends, they have to play the time equivalent of about ten standard single-player campaigns, when only about 30% of people bother to finish most games at all. The length is so gratuitous that the only players who get to experience the complete story are the ones who never needed that aspect to motivate them in the first place. I have to give Supergiant Games credit for voicing so many character lines and writing so much dialog for these characters, but when the majority of it is inconsequential commentary on your gear, boons, or current status instead of the actual narrative progression that players want, it can’t help but feel like so much wasted effort.

So to bring us back to the start, who is this game for? For casual players, the amount of time investment to see the complete story and get the full gameplay variety is way too high. For hardcores, the action is too strategically stagnant and the higher difficulties too unrewarding to compete with other roguelikes. The best I can guess is that it appeals to people in the middle, who enjoy the story details as they come, but not enough to where they want to actually complete the game, or enjoy the action enough to play for a while, but not much longer than the credits. This seems to be backed up by the achievement statistics, where only one in five people get the ten wins required for the credits, and only one in twenty will see the epilogue. It’s not that Hades is necessarily poorly made, but the shallowness and high time investment means that the vast majority of people will just get bored and quit before the game has shown everything it has to offer. I would have much preferred it to either be about a third of its current length, or to just be restructured as a linear action game with weapon switching and selectable buffs, like the studio’s previous game Bastion. Either approach would have made the shallowness less of a problem, and actually give the story-motivated players the conclusion they deserve. Obviously though, in spite of a (hopefully) reasonable argument, saying this game doesn’t appeal much to anyone is a laughable thing to state, given its universally positive reception. So, while I have to give up on knowing who this game is for, I can be certain it isn't me.

Beat: Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4) | 2.5/5.0
Developers: Guerrilla Games

I finally went ahead and finished this thing, but it took everything out of me to keep from throwing my controller - not out of rage or difficulty, but because I just lacked the patience for so many design choices from the “Killzone” crew. Maybe that’s the problem, really. Adjusting to a new genre is a challenge, and the market is already flooded with bloated open world titles. There are some fucking cool mechanical monsters here, but Zero Dawn is a narrative nightmare and a structural mess.

The story starts off quite strong, stealing a few tears thanks to Aloy’s rather impressionable father figure. The plot of Aloy’s origins and the creation of this world becomes a driving force for many of the main missions, and I initially ate it all up. But the method of storytelling becomes extremely tiresome after you realize most every main quest involves finding a cave and listening to audio log after audio log....after audio log to discover the truth behind these mechanical monsters and why they dominate the planet. This is by far the worst way to tell a story, sacrificing its pace and wasting so much of the player’s precious time in the process. By the upteenth audio log, I just didn’t care anymore. It’s even worse when the dialog is often written in college BS-ing fashion, always avoiding the fastest way to a point and instead opting for flowery expressions and religious mumbo jumbo to explain its secrets. I wanted to care, truly, but I found myself struggling to get through such repetitious and uninspired level structures. Slogging through the stealth just to get to these caves is another misstep, that ultimately led to me running through a lot of the finale gameplay.

The side stuff isn’t any better. Nearly every side mission falls into the tracking variety, requiring the player to follow footsteps before following fruit trails that end in following blood tracks to a place where a creature or human ambush waits patiently for you to kill. It’s all mundane and I hated all of it. Merchants stop selling new stuff about midway through the campaign, so I rarely felt like I was getting stronger. Leveling up should be fun, but I found entire trees to be useless and later unlocks to be shockingly unhelpful.

So it lacks creativity in its story and mission design, and the progression sucks, but the thing that kept me playing and returning is the way it channels Monster Hunter. Every mech has weak points and particular ammo to take them down that much faster. I found a few ammo types to be worthless and the castrated weapon wheel to be a nuisance in more difficult fights, but I liked the tearing modifications. I liked the override mechanic before It lost its usefullness. I enjoyed the weapon modifications and socket system before I realized that switching them out in the middle of and in between fights is absurdly unintuitive.

At its core, Horizon is played best as a stealth title. The problem for me is that this already bloated, repetitious game doesn’t deserve the sort of time it takes to slowly make your way through each new bloated, repetitious level design. I found myself very irritated the more I played, and I remain confounded by its praise.