Supergiant showed off their strengths in this game that is a culmination of their previous ones. Taking the strengths of early access to create an addictive roguelike with interesting upgrade paths, fun characters that are a very interesting spin on Greek Mythology, and snappy gameplay. I was glued to my seat from minute one, and loved exploring the Underworld while smashing apart enemies, collecting loot, and seeing more about the character that the team had brought out of these old Greek legends that if you're even semi-familiar with will put a smile to your face. As much as I think this game is a great introduction to roguelikes for many people, and would be my go to recommendation for the genre, I cannot rate it higher due to glaring flaws in its execution in my opinion. First of all, is the progression, which can taper off completely near the end of the game. Roguelikes live and die by their progression, as that is the core appeal of the games, short runs that can get very far, that have lasting rewards between runs to get further the next time. Hades starts off with excellent upgrading progression, but falls off about midway through the game to having most upgrades being insignificant in the latter half, this is a shame since there are clearly a lot of avenues by which it would have been possible to add more which can make the end game of Hades feel like a slog where it feels like very little is being unlocked. This also bleeds into the end game having less variety than it should have. Secondly, is how story progression is made. Story progression is made through dying and being able to speak to NPCs again, where they will sometimes have more dialogue if you completed new objectives or met certain thresholds. The problem with this however, is that it feels like it was programmed with very strange priorities, and also cannot be done in one return to camp. What I mean is, if you are very successful in a few short runs, then you will end up stacking dialogue with characters that you can only proceed by dying. Later on, this can mean completely locking yourself out of progressing a character's story until you die 20 times to pass through all their progression dialogue so you can finally get back to their new character dialogue. There are some characters who I have spoken to upwards to 40 times that I cannot unlock the relics of because I had so many progression dialogue sections unlocked for them that I was still catching up on them. The only way to fix this as a player is to kill yourself over and over again, which is incredibly tedious, and could be fixed easily with better priorities on the NPCs for which dialogue comes first.