I don’t know my rogue-likes or my rogue-lites, but from what I’ve played of this I can definitely tell it is not for me.

It looks visually stunning of course with how well the backgrounds are designed with a good contrast to the characters that really makes the whole world feel lived in. Even during enemy encounters nothing ever felt so cluttered and I usually have the perfect visual clarity in understanding where the enemies and Zagreus are. The soundtrack compliments the game really well with instruments that really sell the whole Greek gods mythos with a really nice crunchy sound design during combat that makes slaying enemies so satisfying. All the voice actors absolutely nail their performances of these characters in making them larger than life immortals as you can really hear the personalities just from the voices alone. At least in its presentation, Hades is pretty close to being flawless in all honesty.

But it doesn’t click with me. As well-designed as these characters are, they don’t really intrigue me whatsoever. They might have more going on beyond what archetypes they fulfill, but from as far as I got with every character and their bonding I can’t say I ever became more invested over them. I think the story as a whole is kind of interesting? I like how they leave a lot of the motivations for the characters actions but upon certain revelations i can’t say I ever had a strong emotional reaction to any of it. Maybe if I was more invested in the characters the events would hit harder for me, who knows. Its serviceable, but I want to be optimistic and assume I didn’t invest enough into getting more into the intricacies of the narrative.

My biggest grip though in Hades is definitely within its gameplay. I can’t imagine going 30 hours grinding through the same areas over and over slowly progressing to the next area and beating the boss. Apparently this is like the whole deal with roguelikes? Yeah, I definitely can’t get into this. The combat itself is pretty simple with the different attacks and the powerups you can get as you traverse through the chambers. However, its simplicity also makes it awfully repetitive to play the tenth escape attempt. Is it cool to see Zagreus being able to interact more with the NPCs whenever you fail? Yeah, but it just isn’t worth it for me from what I’ve seen of the story so far.

I think this is a good game if you can vibe with what it’s going for. It's not for me, but I’d ultimately still recommend it to many because I can see the appeal of it and the possibility I might not be giving it a fair shot.

Just about everything that could be good in this game was not, but I do still have respect for the developer for putting this out on a large and very public market, for pushing RPGMaker to its limits, and for committing to remaking Changed with improvements to all of it.

I think the general concept of a fetish game wherein the player takes a sorta victim role BUT the game is super hard to survive for said victim is actually pretty clever and novel. A lot of the time games of the sort will either be very easy and practically be a gimme for the player to see the... scenes or animations they want, or they'll just be VNs, both of which make it sometimes feel a bit too unrewarding for someone who's playing such a role. While I don't really mind those formats and styles, though, I think the kaizo tier shitty trial-and-error gameplay of Changed is based by comparison. Is it rewarding? Even if I were into most of the stuff in the game, hell no. But it's still interesting as fuck.

Puro is a legit solid character who is a diamond in the rough, and while I find some of the stuff he says to be a bit ehhh, he's generally got a nice little arc for such a compact game. He comes from a place of ignorance and propaganda and yet finds his spine along the way of the story, becoming more confident in the value he carries even after having been discarded as a 'failure' from birth. I like him quite a lot and him being the poster-child for the game is well earned. He's lovely and I think if I took anything away from the game it'd be that he's huggable and lovable. Puro's pretty much where the positives about the writing end, though. The game reeks so heavily of unwitting anthropocentrism and it leaks into so much of the dialogue and environment that it's almost uncomfortable to read at times. It probably wouldn't bother most people but it's... what it is. I'm not a fan of the unnecessary gendering of characters in the game either, seeing as the majority of them are just blobs of slime shaped vaguely like furries. Some of them are given slight breast shapes for no apparent reason too. Well I mean the reason is pretty obvious, but it's almost disappointing. I'd have found it pretty interesting if they really did roll with and commit to there being no concept of gender for random latex parasites as it'd push the game even further into 'unusual' territory and perhaps push the envelope more than it does (which is not a whole lot when it comes to the writing).

I would guess that the vast majority of people going into the game for kinky reasons have an almost paradoxical quality in that they want to be transfured for whatever their reasons are, yet they likely also put humanity onto a pedestal just as K and Puro do, as if to suggest it means anything of note to 'lose' it or change it. The game's plot and characters posit that it does, that somehow there's an extra intrinsic value to remaining a human and that they simultaneously destroyed the world but are also somehow entitled to it. Apparently they were victims of circumstance, of a virus that they did not create, and through no fault of their own did they carpet bomb parts of the world to take the rest of it with them. It helps not that K is presented as a sympathetic antagonist toward the end of the game, only wanting to save humanity -- that is, only the rich elites who survived in bunkers during an apocalypse. Yeah. The elites. I find it sad and almost toxic in a way that his greyness is presented more through his methods and the fact that he 'discarded his humanity' rather than because of the cause he supported effectively just being hyper-eugenics that would benefit only the worst of society.

But that's probably unpacking a bit too much about this fetish-based content. I don't think a lot of the kink games I've seen or played are ones that deal very much with morality or philosophy or questioning what exactly the implications are of the kinks around which they're centered. They really don't have to; as evidenced by this game's relatively high success in sales compared to what I've seen of the market (at least in terms of passing observations), people probably did indeed get what they wanted out of it. What they wanted out of it, as described in the previous paragraph, was that anthropocentric wanking of humanity while simultaneously demonizing it as something to transform away from. And uh, they got it. It just helps that said anthropocentrism is something that permeates the world so heavily that nobody would bat an eye at that fetishistic writing even if they weren't into the kink in question. Certainly they'd bat an eye at the sometimes sexual and always kinky fail animations, but that's another story.

I guess I haven't really talked much about the gameplay, have I? It's a walking sim with a lot of reflex tests and a few number-finding or box-pushing puzzles. I guess it's less of a walking sim and more of a sprinting sim. Everything in the game moves around with completely fucked AI that makes them way harder to dodge than they need to be, giving almost no room for intuition and limiting the benefits of the trial-and-error style the game obviously went for. Indeed, just about everything in the game is something for which you just die over and over again until you get lucky or 'solve the puzzle', but the RNG sprinkled around it is hilariously counter to that general design philosophy. And don't get me started on the bosses... some of the worst rooms in the game were boss rooms for a multitude of reasons, the least of which would be the tedium of death-running back into a given arena with the subpar controls and movement for another trial-and-errorfest. The game just has a ton of moments where I was thinking "there's no way they're gonna put [insert frustrating design] here, right?" and then they DID. It's funny but it's also loaded with suffering.

All that said, the game looks pretty damn unique with its MS Paint art style imposed over the limited grid-based RPG Maker VX engine. The CGs are all quite low in detail yet surprisingly high in quality for being drawn with such crude utensils, and for that I commend the artist. The engine in general is pushed to look better than it pretty much ever has, with so many original assets taking the places of the rather ugly default ones that I wouldn't blame people not for knowing what the game was made in! I wasn't a huge fan of the character designs minus Puro and the first boss, with many of the miniboss creatures seeming to just be people's furry OCs with... less than interesting designs and color palettes. I don't know what they looked like normally if they really were based on people's OCs, but I can guess they probably didn't translate all that well to Changed's style if they weren't already not the best looking. Regardless, they at least add to the sorta older 2000s-early 2010s feeling this game has as a whole. It reminded me not only of old Flash games but also weird old RPGMaker projects in general, not to mention old lower-quality kink works made before a lot of sex positivity went more mainstream in the later 2010s. It just has... a quality about it that's alluringly quaint.

When it comes to presentation, I suppose it's worth mentioning that only the game's sound design really brings me down to earth again. The sound design of the game in general is not up to par with its visuals and general gamefeel (as shaky as the latter is). With a somewhat inconsistent soundtrack and ill-used or underutilized sound effects, the game doesn't sound nearly as good as it looks. I found myself muting the game a number of times, especially during the aforementioned terrible boss fights. It also doesn't sound nearly as campy or weird as I would hope to retain the Newgrounds-meets-Furaffinity energy I mentioned in the paragraph above, instead hitting a lamer "indie love letter to 8 bit era" sound mixed with "I forgot to buy or make sound effects so I'll just use defaults".

Even after taking many shots at the game, I will say I enjoyed myself at times throughout it, particularly at any time when Puro was on screen. I once again think it's pretty respectable and brave for a creator to push an obvious kink work into a public space during an era when NSFW (-ish) stuff on Steam was only just beginning; I would imagine that's likely part of why it got so much notoriety from furries when it did. It didn't have a lot to compete with and for good reason, as the sort of media it is is one that I don't think most people are either ready for or comfortable with releasing like this. But you know, I think I have infinitely more respect for it trying to be an extremely unique and bizarre game than all of the hentai feet Candy Crush clone games the medium (let alone just Steam) has. It's certainly a piece of art that I can't help but look at in awe.

If you're particularly into this game's stuff - that is to say, (mostly exclusively M/M or ambiguous) human-to-fur species TF, warm latex, goo/slime, and a bit of (seemingly exclusively F/M) vore - I think you'd probably find quite a lot of value in it. Don't be deterred by people saying it's "hard", as in reality it's just frustratingly dependent on badly designed trial-and-error gameplay rather than presenting any level of challenge beyond occasional reflex tests. It's not particularly long, either. Now if you're a bit curious about some of those kinky things but haven't explored them before, maybe give Changed a shot or look at some of the CGs and animations on YouTube, cause I'm sure they've been uploaded to hell and back. Lastly, for people who decidedly aren't into those things or only like a few, I'd say don't really bother with this game... and don't play it as a joke and write a 'haha i don't get it now i'm on a watchlist LOL' type review either, cause frankly that's just wasting your time. There's plenty of funnier stuff that's more mainstream enough that your zinger 'haha i don't get it now i'm on a watchlist LOL' review would probably get more likes at the very least. Probably something a bit more vanilla would do.

I guess to conclude this I wanna say that I hope if the dev(s) of Changed put anything out in the future, it'll continue to grow in quality. The idea of actual fetish-based works (rather than vanilla ones with coats of paint) having enough quality to be considered respectable games in their own right without being bland is cool as fuck. I've looked at Tribal Hunter as another potential game to try out for that reason, but its presentation and style is so dull and bog-standard that I'm repelled even if it has good gameplay, making it have seemingly the reverse of this game's issue. I do hope something comes at some point that inexplicably has good writing while being kink-focused cause that'd just be funny and badass, honestly. At the very least the remake of this game, Changed-Special, is said to fix at least a fair few of the biggest mistakes made in the game's general writing and things left out of its exposition.

Even if I'm not really into the exact things this game's got in it, I think Changed is a worthy piece for those who are. The level of filter it has and the sheer moxie it has in the face of its market and peers are way too cool not to give a thumbs-up to.