When it comes to in-game rewards, Hades practically showers the players with gems, darkness shards, and new weapons in a steady stream. This includes subplots featuring famous Greek characters, like Achilles, Orpheus, and Eurydice. Sometimes there are new characters to meet that provide you with story revelations and subplots that you can only uncover even more of through subsequent runs in the game. In Hades, after a brush with death, new story elements pop up when you return to the hub world. Roguelikes usually treat their narratives very lightly, with each run being like a new start with an arcade game, a total narrative reset. The game remembers previous runs, with Zagreus even making a remark if you manage to defeat the enemy that bested you in the last run. Zagreus’ escape attempts are actually “canon”, in the sense that each run actually happens in-game and isn’t just a complete reset every time you make a new run. Hades actually bakes its feedback right into the design of the game in a remarkable way. Whether it is a new item or weapon, it can sometimes take quite a bit of grinding to get the right parameters to unlock a new reward within these sorts of games. Oftentimes, if you lose a run in the Binding of Isaac or Dead Cells, the rewards can seem minuscule. Roguelikes by design have feedback loops, but not necessarily great ones. And for added effect, if you die on the way to get those souls, they are gone forever. The best example would be the Dark Souls games, where if you die, you lose all the souls you’ve collected and you must risk your life to retrieve it at the place you lost it. The challenge then for the player is to not experience that negative loop as much as they can.
Negative feedback loops, on the other hand, can be sinister in design, but can also be what draws players to play it in the first place. Winning big will net you even more than usual, and even if you lose, the next game is only a click away. An example of a good feedback loop is Fall Guys, where even if you do get knocked out early on, you still get a handful of Kudos and experience points, which can then lead you to better cosmetics down the line. This can come in both positive and negative feedback, with Hades being especially good at giving players positive feedback whenever they end a run of the game.Įvery game has its own feedback loop, depending on the genre and the game mechanics at play. When it comes to feedback loops in video games, it mainly pertains to how a player’s success and failures will impact the likelihood of future success or failure. What makes Hades truly different from its contemporaries, namely other roguelikes like The Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, or Dead Cells, is the game’s clever usage of feedback loops.
If you are a fan of those two games and their narratives, Hades will be right up your alley. Hades is an isometric roguelike, taking cues from Supergiants’ previous endeavours, namely Bastion and Transistor.
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