Hades

Supergiant’s Early Access dungeon crawler is in diabolically good shape

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You would think that Early Access would be anathema to such a developer as Supergiant. This is a studio, after all, that has earned its stripes making exceptionally polished, complete games that tell stories with a clear beginning, middle and end. Early Access games, meanwhile, are by definition unfinished, and often rough around the edges. So, as we speak to Hades’ writer and designer Greg Kasavin, there’s really only one way to start. “Why?” he repeats back to us with a chuckle. “It’s an excellent question.”

It’s perhaps tempting to imagine that there were commercial reasons behind the decision to put Hades into Early Access. Maybe Pyre didn’t sell well enough and the studio needs money in the bank. Yet that doesn’t fit with what Kasavin has already told us. And his response is consistent with what he said when we covered the making of Hades’ predecessor a year ago: “I think it’s absolutely the case that each of our games has been, in some respects, kind of a response to the previous one.”

“The reason we really wanted to do it was to give ourselves the opportunity to create a living game, which we haven’t been able to do before,” he says. “All of our previous games have been one-and-done affairs. This time we were really interested in designing a game around replayability. We’re doing this not because we think it’s intrinsically superior to what we’ve done in the past; we’re doing it because it’s different, and new.”