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

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.

once you beat hades we should do a rank the gods

I finally beat this, twice, with the shield. shield is good

Does anyone know how big the actual voice acting script was?

Any point in getting keys after I've unlocked so weapons and mirror skills?

you can trade them for nectar (5:1 i think), and also it can be useful to get them during gameplay because they can restore your...fated persuasion? forgot what the mirror name is, but the one that lets you re-roll for more boon choices

you can trade them with the wretched broker for nectar or occasionally titan blood

almost 100 hours in, i finally unlocked one of those 6 giant COMPANION things at the bottom of the keepsakes. seems like a gamechanger, at the least the one i got!

^hidden aspect of hades

Getting my repaired Switch back in a few days, I can't wait to dive into this.

This game is so much fun. Really struggling to get to grips with the bow/rail gun though, the only two I haven’t completed a run with. Love the Poseidon boons which power up the dash and create waves when you smash enemies off the walls. How fast are people completing runs? My best is 21:25 so far

my best is around 21 as well, but i haven't yet gone for a total speedrun yet - i usually do some extra chambers before cerberus to get some extra boons or poms.

Really struggling to get to grips with the bow/rail gun though

rail gun is my best, and bow is my worst! which is weird because i think they often should have similar strategies. the main attack on both is high-speed but relatively low damage per hit, so a really helpful thing is to get a boon that amplifies it (dionysus/poison, maybe zeus/lightning, or aphrodite/weak. when you get one of those, you're suddenly doing the weapon damage plus the boon effect, and the DPS starts ramping up quickly! there are also some really good Duo boons that lets you do extra damage when an enemy is weak, poisoned, etc. if you can get both poison AND weak, and then a duo that amplifies both of those at the same time, you'll be unstoppable

i think that strategy ^above^ works well for the rail gun, but maybe that's because the rail gun is good for focusing attack on a single enemy, which is great for bosses.

the bow has that same rapid damage thing going, with the special, but it spreads it out across the room. in my bow runs i tend to be really good at clearing out rooms with many enemies and getting to the bosses, but struggle to do a ton of damage to the boss itself.

I haven't beaten it yet so please discount my two cents as you see fit, but I prefer the melee weapons because I prefer to dash in and button mash then dash away, and the two projectile weapons don't really allow for that.

Anyway, I'm one nectar away from getting all the keepsakes, but that choad Hades keeps avoiding me when I respawn.

I had just about tamped down my election anxiety and was actually doing productive work all day and then I bought this game over the weekend, oops.

My takeaways:
-Such a pleasure to hear some really good (for a videogame and sometimes just plain really good) dialogue and voice acting
-My favorite weapon is the bow, least favorite the gun
-The key to winning is to constantly run around like a lunatic and boy does it make your fingers ache
-I haven't used calls yet because my controller is an old USB Super Nintendo controller knockoff and I'm too lazy to remap the buttons
-The random element of the boon/item system combined with the consistent levels is, like, a masterstroke of game design. I have some favorite boons but the game is so good at leading you down different build paths
-One of the battle music tracks sounds like a song off Michael Brook's Cobalt Blue

Oh yeah one more, my best run was with the spear when I got some boon that chained the special through I think up to 7 multiple enemies + tons of Hangover and Doom + quickshot, I walked into a room and spammed the special button and everything just died.

^ Cosign. Hermes's boons seem like the worst at first, but if you have the spear or the shield, and you get the forge improvement of hitting more enemies while throwing them + the Hermes boon that makes your special faster, you can clear most rooms really fast, and spamming the special works well against all of the bosses as well. For maximum effect, get the Chaos boons that give you extra damage for back attacks, because you're guaranteed to get them a lot with those two weapons.

Yesterday I was playing with the shield, got a legendary Hermes boon to make the special 40 % faster, and was able to beat Theseus and the Minotaur (which is normally the most irritating boss encounter) in a minute or so, cos I could just spam them with the special, and each attack was guaranteed to hit both.

It's also fun when you luck into getting deflect boons on your attack, special, and dash... you can get really lazy and just button-mash successfully. Hades will still crush you, of course.

i just got the credits after 47 runs and there's so much more i actually want to do

oh man, just keep going for another run or two. the real game is about to actually start

i'm on #99

dash damage and deflect is key, remember, you're going to be dancing around the screen the whole time anyway

Got my first clear, with the bow no less! I got really lucky with drops, first a +4 for the special and then a bunch of boons that buffed special damage. Add on that the keepsake that gives you +1% damage every time you clear an encounter without taking damange (which I assume is persistent for that run), and I mostly spammed special to the end. It was a deathless run too!

congrats! pretty rare to have a deathless run (at least for me), nice job!

Well, I've put a few hours into it now and this game is certainly slick as all hell. Part of that is probably due to having been in early access so long, but it also feels like the ultimate culmination/refinement of Supergiant's approach to ARPGs. Like, this is the game they've been building up to for years.

I like it a whole lot, though it hasn't hooked me quite as much as I expected it to. Which is kind of a relief, because I was actually *worried* about getting super sucked-in. Maybe that could still happen though. Favorite build so far has been the crossbow with hangover damage from Poseidon. At least, that's the one I've gotten furthest with. It makes dealing with gangs of witches pretty easy.

This game is amazing. 50+ escape attempts and I have made it to Elysium once. I have been playing this in the same way that I used to play Rogue itself - headlong rush forward without any plan. The great thing is that even with this dismal strategy, I can see myself making slow progress. The combat is properly intense and then the dating sim parts are welcome cool down.

35 attempts, finally feeling like i'm getting the hang of it. lost to redacted that last few times, always at least make it to elysium. i think every weapon is viable now, but i'm having the most success with the spear, shield, and gun

which boons do we prioritize the most? a high level status effect on my basic attack or special, plus support fire from artemis worked well for me

I like taking Tidal Dash which knocks back enemies, and then the boon (forget who offers it) that adds burst damage to knock back... level that up and you can steamroll almost anything (if you're using the bow it's a good strategy because your special can take out projectiles = you are nigh invincible)

maybe burst damage is called rupture? I forget

I made it to [final boss] with Athena's dash deflect / upgrading the sword so that its special dislodges the cast / powering up the cast so that it does large exit damage. Still got my backside handed to me though.

i'm not very much on a quest to complete all the quests (or whatever the tasks at the desk in the bedroom are called). i've played 107 games, beaten it somewhere in the mid-30s range. highest heat is 7, but i think i can take it up a few more notches.

it's hard to talk about the best boons because it's all so dependent on the weapon, and not just the weapon, but which weapon Aspect as well. the ones that have alternate move sets, especially, change everything

I'm not far in but liking this so far

Two more clears! The last one I even felt hampered with the first unlockable aspect of the spear that doesn't feel natural (i.e. if I wanted to spam the special, I'd have to alternate button presses, not mash the same one), so I seem to be learning (mainly: use hit and run tactics against the final boss).

I've gotten enough Titan Blood that I could finish Skelly's favor, but I'm waiting for the Stygian blade to get the darkness/gem bonus before unlocking.

my favorite characters (not by boon or strategy or anything, just overall):

cerberus
eurydice
skelly
asterius
poseiden
hades
zagreus
dionysus
charon
achilles
persephone
tisiphone
artemis
orpheus
chaos
dusa
house contractor
patroclus
athena
hermes
megaera
sispyhus
aphrodite
zeus
nyx
theseus
ares
demeter
hypnos
alecto
thanatos

oh shit, i forgot the chef and the bartering thing in the lounge. both of them pretty low-tier

Agree that Thanatos is pretty boring... I mean, it's nice that there's a both straight and gay option for romance (or bi, if you romance both), as well as the monster option, but did they have to make the gay option so whiny and mopey? Meg is way more interesting.