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

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.

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!