My gold-standard for rogues, between just the gamefeel in general and the huge variety of weapons, items, interactions between them and an absurd amount of secret unlockable I can and probably will play this forever. I have put in a truly embarrassing amount of time on this game between PC / Switch and it's one of my all time favorites as a result.

I'm marking it as Mastered, because while there's still things I believe that I haven't unlocked I did manage to unlock the Gunslinger so I'm rounding up.

I think as a Rouguelike this game suffers somewhat from a lack of actual content with only four stages in each run and a relatively small variety of weapons and upgrades compared to other rogues I've played and of course Zagreus is the only character. After a few wins I found I was able to find a couple of winning builds and use keepsakes to deliberately achieve them pretty consistently, to the point where getting wins began to feel somewhat trivial and runs began to feel samey. Again nothing wrong with what's on offer here but in terms of actual content it's light compared to some others.

What I will say is that the game wraps the conventions of its genre in a story that demands them in a way I haven't ever really seen before. Characters are charming and well-voiced, finding out about them is fun, the amount of dialogue is staggering and the way everyone in the underworld responds to the specifics of your successes and failures is very cool. I can see why this has developed a following of people who generally don't really like rogues because beyond what I would consider Good but not Great rogue mechanics, there's really a lot to enjoy here.