Hades (from Supergiant, maker of Pyre, Bastion, Transistor)

you're well on your way!

there is sooooo much to discover in the game. i read a review about being 40 hours and huge, interesting, gamechanging (potentially) systems unlocking, and that's very true. and also, the path to 40 hours is also filled with all sorts of things to find along the way.

this is a very, VERY polished game. it's obvious that they put a lot of thought into what is interesting and compelling at each stage of the game - absolute beginner, working your way up to the boss, and also what happens afterward. if anything, i am MORE compelled after beating the game than i was at the beginning, which is kind of disturbing and has seriously ruined my life the last couple weeks!

the music in this game is really awesome and there's the correct amount of it.

the game this reminds me of most is disgaea 1 on the ps2. in the sense that you go out and do your mission then come back to the underworld hub and chat with all your dudes. like karl said the loop is really satisfying and the characterization is done well (and there's the correct amount of it).

SHIT

DON'T READ THAT!

messed up the spoiler tag, getting mod assistance now, sorry

The difficulty hasn't bothered me so far, either! I'm not sure if it's genuinely not as hard as I feared or if it has so many other objectives that are within my grasp and thus distracting me from the difficulty.

that's good!

like so many other things in this game, i think the difficulty curve is perfectly tuned. it's well-tuned for single runs because no matter how good you are, you're going to be able to clear the first few rooms (probably - i mean the one time my mom played a videogame was SMB1, and she stood perfectly still on the left side of the screen for almost the entirety of the time limit, and then when the hurry the fuck up! music started and i told her she was going to die, she ran to the right and immediately hit the very first goomba. then she got mad and said she would never play a game again, and then hasn't for the last 32+ years). most likely, you'll get a little bit further each time through, and when you die it rarely* feels like you got totally screwed, and you'll probably feel like if you tried again you'd do better.

the difficulty curve is also well-tuned on a macro scale. hard to explain without spoilers but very true, i think

* except for those fucking poisonous rats godDAMMIT

a few tips for the final boss:

i posted this earlier but then had to have a mod delete it because i fucked up the new spoiler formatting tags. but in short:

• In early attempts, aim for specific Calls. Get one of the Athena (invulnerable, deflect) or Ares (invulnerable, spinning rift) calls, and if you can, try to pair it with a boon or two that helps build up the God Gauge faster, too. then, you can use the call to counter Hades most powerful attack - that huge-ass spin move that does massive damage. he has a tell, before he does it: a small thin white circle appears around him, and then about a second later he kicks your ass. if you have a good Call, though, you can activate it when he does the spin move, so you're invulnerable while also kicking HIS ass. very satisfying.
• level up your Keepsakes, specifically the
• In later attempts, adjust your build to fight Hades, rather than normal encounters. i say "adjust" because in the earlier stages you definitely need to be thinking of how to defeat lots of different kinds of encounters. but toward the end, start thinking about what you'll need to fight Hades, specifically. there are a lot of ways that plays out, but i struggled for long to just REACH Hades that it took a while longer before i realized i could tailor my build toward that final fight.

WTF IS WRONG WITH ME

whatever, no more spoiler tags for me. this is a spoiler zone. i am sorry

I finally did manage to beat the final boss! As I suspected, I needed Athena for that, having the deflecting dash and putting the deflecting boon on the shield's special attack. If you put some speed effect to it (from Hermes and/or from Daedalus hammer), you can just keep throwing it and it'll deflect a lot of the attacks on the way. This is especially useful against the dragon boss, as you can just stand in front of its heads and keep spamming it with the shield again and again with most of its attacks being deflected.

Karl's tip on how to use Athena's call seems very useful, but I didn't get it and instead finished off the final boss with Aphrodite's call. It seems to be the one call that does the most damage instantaneously, so if you other ways of deflecting the boss's damage and building up the god gauge, it works as an awesome finisher, doing hundreds of points of damage.

Specifically the WHAT!?

I can get to Dad Boss almost every time but can't beat him. Thanks though KM for saying that you can level up the Keepsakes, didn't know that. Boney's keepsake seems like the best, as far as i can tell.

Skelly, not boney, sorry

Yeah, Skelly's keepsake seems to be the best one to have, especially on the final two levels, where the bosses feel like they're almost impossible to beat without taking massive damage.

So my strategy has been to chose the one god's keepsake who's basic boon I really want to have for the first level, as the Furies are pretty easy to beat without dying once you've levelled up, then change for Skelly's keepsake for the other levels.

Thanatos keepsake is my favorite as I've mentioned - maxed it gives +2% damage for every encounter your clear without taking damage. gives an incentive to stay on your toes in otherwise relaxed encounters. I've gotten as high as +26%.

I guess if I ever start planning builds in advance I'll have to switch to a god's keepsake yeah. ugh.

seriously it's real fun to complete an insane Asphodel or Elysium encounter and unexpectedly get the +2% notification.

Specifically the WHAT!?

― Dan I., Monday, September 28, 2020 2:22 PM (seven minutes ago)

lol, in the chaos of trying to post that post, i also forgot to complete that thought! lol, what a fucking disaster

some of the more useful keepsakes for hades (the boss), SPECIFICALLY, are:

• Lucky Tooth (grants you a one-time revive when you die, up to 100 HP depending on how leveled it is)
• Distant Memory (up to 30% ranged damage, only useful for certain builds of course)
• Bone Hourglass (this one is more out of the box and might not even work very well (sorry), but every once in a while you might have a run where you can give it a shot. it extends the number of encounters that you can use items purchased from Charon (either in person or at one of blue shops). the idea is to use it during Elysium (or maybe even for the Cerberus/Hades section as well), buying a bunch of buffs near the end (just before Theseus and the Minotaur), and then rushing through Cerberus so that buffs still apply when you fight Hades.
• honestly one of the best things (the best thing?) about this game is that almost all of the keepsakes can be useful for the final boss, in certain ways, depending on your own preferences, aiming toward certain builds, trying to accomplish some of the bounties/heat conditions, and the luck of the draw. i'm at 55 attempts now, and almost every single one has felt different, and i feel very encouraged to try out ridiculous strategies (like the bone hourglass one above)
• now i'm just using bullet points for no reason, but another weird/fun thing you all should try is spending NO money! there are various boons and mirror options to help increase the amount of money you get, but you need a little luck to really take advantage. if you use the first weapon, Stygian Blade, one of the Daedalus upgrades you can get is called Hoarding Slash: "Your Attack deals bonus damage equal to 5% of your current gold". that might not sound like much, until you think about having 2000+ gold while you fight Hades - very useful to be dealing an extra 100 damage on the final boss!

here is my ULTIMATE QUESTION for you all, the one i really wanted to know:

do you use the "you have multiple casts but you have to go pick them up after you throw them" mirror option, or the "you have 1 cast, but it autoreplenishes so you don't have to go pick it up" option?

i have to admit that once i switched to autoreplenish, i never went back. i think it probably makes sense to go chase it for other playstyles, though - for example, there's a spear Aspect that changes the special so that after you throw the spear you can sprint forward to retrieve it, rather than pulling it back to you (as default). if you were already doing that, it might make a lot of sense to aim your special in the same area as your cast, so that when you sprint toward it you also pick up your cast at the same time

i really need to get back to work, but one final thing i've recently realized is that there is a balancing point between the damage you deal and your HP. it's natural to be focused on conserving/regaining your HP when you're purchasing things or picking a boon. but if you're about to face dad and you can only pick one thing (or door, in the Cerberus labyrinth thing, (or item, at Charon's last shop)), it often makes more sense to pick something that gives you a boost to damage, rather than your health, because when you hit him harder, you're also taking less overall damage by the end because you can defeat him more quickly.

finally beat theseus and the minotaur this morning with a high-damage doom fists/athena call build that left me with 1 hit point and 0 death defiances going into the next area. lasted a little while but still lots to figure out.

the fists aspect with the scorpion get over here special is awesome

Dear Bone Hydra,
You are a butthead.

Yours,
Zag

How have you been making out so far, Leee?

just beat the game for the first time. adamant rail with the MIRV mod and a shitload of doom, chill on the attack, heroic athena dash, ares call. got to the last boss with 4 death defiances and just kited while spamming AOE damage. good shit. love this game.

I just made it to Bone Hydra, and I have one last weapon to unlock. I'm also stockpiling darkness till either I have a surplus of keys to unlock more abilities or I can level up my death defiance.

Otherwise, I'm trying to collect nectar.

Is there any way to tell which boons/upgrades I haven't used yet while I'm escaping? Maybe I'm still a little too underleveled to worry about min-maxing my fated list, though.

There is a way! When you have an option for a boon that’s on the fated list, a little scroll icon will appear next to the name of it.

But I’d say don’t worry too much about completing all those, because you’ll end up using them all eventually just by playing. a boon that seems really bad on one run may be essential with a different weapon

got to the bull of minos for the first time on my first run with the adamant rail. seems like a much easier weapon than the others, but the fists are so fun

i thought adamant was overpowered the first time i used it, too, but in returning to it i've sometimes struggled!

also, the bow is by far the hardest for me! it seems really strong at the beginning but underpowered by the end. every time i make it work, it's by pairing it with a dash-strike boon and just spamming the crap out of it. granting, i do that sometimes too with other weapons, but i don't feel as forced into it as i do with the bow

the aspect where the special flurry arrows all target the last-attacked enemy allows for a little more tactical thinking imo

i only tried that aspect once, and did very poorly with it! i don't think i was being very tactful with it, though. i remember being frustrated that the arrows kept targeting enemies that were already dead, so i think i was changing targets too quickly

Bow is my least favorite weapon. Feels like it takes forever to clear a room with that thing.

That's my feeling too. It requires more finesse and less running around like a cat on fire.

I beat the Bone Hydra! And unlocked my first set of additional abilities! An he played around with weapon aspects! I.e. all the little unlockables are what make this game approachable.

How does Stubborn Defiance work? It sez once per chamber, but does that mean level (e.g. Tartarus) or once per room/encounter? Because functionally it seems like the latter.

stubborn defiance works once per encounter, and there's no limit to the number of times it works.

death defiance is limited (starts with 1, but you can level it up to 3 using the mirror), but heals more.

i always tend to die on the bosses, not the encounters, so i almost always go with death defiance (if you have that plus the leveled up keepsake that gives you another life, you have up to 4 revives against the final boss).

Stubborn doesn't work against bosses, either?

I've bought most of the renovations from the House Contractor, an he the only things left are upgrading troves and urn drops, which don't seem that useful. Am I underestimating them or can I just trade them in for keys?

Stubborn doesn't work against bosses, either?

stubborn works against bosses, but only once, and it will only heal you up to 30%. compare that to death defiance, where you can get revived three different times against a boss, and at 50% each time. this thread has some good discussion on stubborn vs death defiance, but it's full of post-game considerations so maybe read it later! :)

I've bought most of the renovations from the House Contractor, an he the only things left are upgrading troves and urn drops, which don't seem that useful.

i thought that at first too, but the upgraded troves can be very useful, in multiple ways. the most useful is that an upgraded trove can give you up to 150 darkness. if you have Dark Regeneration (up to 90% of Darkness you collect restores your health by that amount), you'll get like 50+60 more HP per trove than before.

I went with that loadout and did pretty well!

One thing I didn't think through though was when I was approaching the halfway(?) point in Elysium with the Stygian Blade, I was low on health and had already used up my Death Defiances. I got a Daedalus Hammer and had a chance to go with Cursed Slash, but went with something else. I instantly regretted it, and lasted only one encounter more.

Absolutely had the experience of giving into the hype about the game--spent an hour or so with it, thought, "well, the art and aesthetic and voice acting are cool but the gameplay just doesn't feel great." ended up sitting on it for like five hours, fell in love with it. Similar to Karl's experience way above, I (think?) I've gotten to the final boss a few times but have died having their health down to a sliver. Same deal I had with Sekiro: get boss close to death, immediately stop thinking clearly and go into adrenaline mode and fuck up.

The build I had that I did the best with had a lot to do with dash knocking enemies back, and cornered/walled enemies taking more damage. Honestly seemed *broken* good.

i think i can only come up with two criticisms of this game

1) eurydice's song sounds like evanescence
2) the dash-strike and related boons seems a little too powerful. i mean, it feels good, like Unctious says. but it's so reliably effective that many of my builds seem to feature it, so i spend a lot of my time in the later fights dashing around like a maniac 95% of the fight. especially if you have Athena's deflect on it - instead of dodging, it becomes easier to just dash straight in and be in a state of near-constant invulnerability, while inflicting curse and other statuses. it is very, very fun, but seems more dominant than intended?

I actually like Eurydice's song!

you must keep going if you wish to hear the true version of it

i think the shield is bad now

Wow the gun sucks so much, I hate it

So wrong

Reached Theseus! Asterius gave me a whupping though.

awesome!

here's a really fun strategy you can try with Theseus/Minotaur (no spoilers):

try to get the Aphrodite Call (the one that charms the enemies) and also a way to increase your god gauge a little faster. then, when you get to that boss fight, charm the living fuck out of them so that one of them is always fighting the other. if you save up the god gauge a little, you can even inflict charm on both of them at the same time, so they're both attacking each other while you're attacking them. fun to pit one eternal ally against the other

question about Charon, hidden behind spoilers because i think this would be a late-game thing

has anyone beaten him in combat? i've tried it twice and managed to whittle him down to 1/3 health each time, but both times i was very early on and didn't have very good boons yet

I beat Theseus! I think the important boons I had were Artemis's and Aphrodite's; Artemis's one that shoots heat-seeking arrows every time you attack was probably the MVP. Then got as far as Hades, put him down, and thought, "That was surprisingly easy." Cue: his second form, and dying.

just passed the credits, end was abrupt/weak but it's kinda a favor that they grafted anything at all onto a game like this, let alone stuff so extensive and witty and purty and voice acted and all

at first i thought it was way too overstuffed, like 'ooh, a new cast- cool! and we're mining... AND gardening... and a frog is following me. and they really have a tech tree for a shovel, huh' etc etc etc. (and the hex upgrades seemed convoluted at first and still remain middling, i think it's just the UI maybe and some of selene's voice cues)

but ANYWAY this surpasses the original in basically every way, everything they added paid off in terms of depth, i felt like i could achieve the intended 'flow' with the combat more than the first because of the new systems. first game was awesome but pretty twitchy at times. in this you have more subtle control over your build in a way that rewards thoughtful consideration, even just thinking "wow, that's a garbage item, when the fuck would i ever want this" before an aha moment later.

the first game essentially had the same inventory system, right? but it was barely used. i also found the upgrades in charon's wells to be a lot more cohesive in terms of being used in some sort of sequence that could pay off dramatically, especially in tandem with the hexes and casts

anyway, this can obviously be twitchy if you want but it can also pay off to slow down, even in the middle of an encounter. i think that lets the design shine a bit more

they released a patch today.. it looks like they actually made some story changes?? honestly didn't expect them to do that.

Major spoilers below for late-game plot points, also CW for discussion of shitty behaviour of Greek gods.

I guessed that Hecate was actually a version of Melinoë quite early on, because I didn't know Melinoë's place in Greek mythology and looked it up like a nerd, and there was talk of how she was often equated with Hecate. Also, Chekhov's Mask - has to be a reason for her wearing one, right? Was still a bit uncertain if it'd play out that way, as they're obviously playing a bit with the myths and the sources themselves often disagree - pretty sure they don't even nod towards the bits of myth that suggest that either Zagreus or Melinoë or both might be fathered by Zeus raping Persephone. Anyway, I was quite satisfied that I got that and also immediately knew Dora was Pandora of box fame - though I think that one might be super obvious, did anyone not clock that?

what's the ACTUAL deal with rarity and level?

i'd thought the basic concept was rarity as an increased base stat- say a 'common' attack boon will add +4 attack but the 'rare' version adds +7 attack or something. and levels are boosts to that base stat. (so in my understanding, with enough levelling, the 'common' attack could end up as powerful as the lvl 1 'rare' attack.)

BUT THEN there is a demeter (?) boon which increases the rarity of a random boon every x encounters. so now i don't know if i understand- why is it increasing rarity vs level? is that specificity meant to build incentive for a 'get all legendary boons from each olympian' achievement/prophecy or something? or a rarity boost is just that much bigger and more powerful versus a plain old level up. i dunno, just seems so fiddly and roundabout unnecessarily and everything else in this game is so tightly designed that i figure i'm missing something.

i generally go for boons based on their ability vs stats. but a couple boons will deliver a power increase vs a percentage increase (thinking of a persephone one here). i tend to think those must be better since the game makes sure to point out that multipliers will apply to the actual power stat. anyway now i'm babbling and confusing even myself. i don't even want to know if there's an order of operations for boon multipliers. i imagine THAT doesn't compound, i hope it's just additive

anyway, it's impossible to search for good info on this, and i'm not watching a fucking youtube, sorry. bring back 35 page ascii guides on gamefaqs

Levels from poms usually have diminishing returns, whereas increased rarity doesn't.

Like if you have a common boon that starts at 40% and level it up to level 4, it might go 40% > 60% > 70% > 75%

Whereas if you kept it at level 1 and increased its rarity instead, it would go 40% > 60% > 80% > 100%

Also, some boons can't be leveled up but can be rarified. So in general rarity is more potent than pom levels. The tradeoff is that it's much harder to increase rarity, and rarity is capped at Heroic.

thanks, and yea i've seen how levelling brings diminishing returns, i can see why rarity is worth pursuing now to an extent. but it does seem like the game emphasizes rarity beyond what its actual impact is. i suppose i'm only just getting up to double digit heat tho, maybe those kinds of margins are important later on, especially for finding duo boons. (i think having a legendary boon increases the chance of a duo, but i could be wrong)

i guess small gameplay spoilers?

my favorite weapon from the original, aspect of pan, doesn't seem that good in this. about to try aspect of morrigan, a bit finicky so far but carries a lot of oomph. i guess i just like when i'm spewing missiles and arrows and other ordinance all over the place any time i use a special or whatever. zeus chain-lightning remains the best for that along with artemis stuff. but still wish aspect of pan had the same bite. even with some hammer upgrades it feels like something's missing