Spoilers ahead for the ending and true ending of Hades II.
Hades II never tries to conceal its true nature. From the very beginning, you know your sole task is to kill Time. The roguelite genre, inherently fueled by monotony, makes for the ideal machine for it.
In Hades, improving your mechanical skills and making numbers go up was masked by the promise of fulfillment. Fulfilment of seeing the main character Zagreus rebel against an authoritative and abusive paternal figure. Fulfilment of helping the lost and the damned regain a semblance of their foregone humanity by helping reestablish bonds. Fulfilment of breaking past traditions and proving the impossible by escaping the Greek underworld, giving everyone a middle finger.
Motivated by exclamation marks over people’s heads and copious amounts of nectar and ambrosia, each cycle promised a reward—not just being one step closer toward mechanical prowess, but to have an opportunity to learn, to listen, and to amend. The culmination of the main story doesn’t stick its landing, giving shitty figures only a pat on the back while falling flat on women’s autonomy, in particular the role of Persephone, who is portrayed as Zagreus’ mother first and queen of the underworld second. But the cycles up to that point are hinged on that initial potential, and there’s fulfilment to find in the journey itself.
With Hades II, developer Supergiant Games seeks to capitalize on its predecessor’s success by offering more on top of its previous foundation. The renewed Sisyphean task now has a comically large number of features and mechanics to contend with, and most of them are intertwined. Now, it’s not enough to get to the end of a run, you also need to take into account which materials and resources you need for the next incantation or the next item that leads to a cutscene or a conversation, presented almost as a trinket dangling in front of your eyes. You only get a glance now; maybe, if you put in the effort, you’ll get to hold it at some point.
Yet, as I plunged through the 1.0 update after spending over 70 hours into the game during early access, pretty much every encounter and revelation felt almost deliberately unceremonious. The story gives its main villain yet another pat on the back, offering Chronos, the god of Time, an act of mercy right at the very end, and then putting you with a what if, gentler rendition of him. As other writers like my friend Jay Castello have pointed out, this act is carried by Zagreus, not Melinöe, the sequel’s protagonist, and fits thematically with who he is. But after this happens, Melinoë is left with the same task. She must continue killing Time—the “bad” permutations of him who remain in other timelines—to prevent the cycle from repeating all over again. “For how long?”, she often asks. Nobody has a concrete answer.
Sure, at the end of the day, it’s a video game. The show must go on and all of that. Yet, aside from equally unfulfilling character storylines, there’s one more trinket that you can only progress towards after seeing the game’s credits: finding the three Fates, who have been MIA since the start. It’s an arduous process, with the objective itself morphing as you progress, asking to solve riddles and perform specific tasks in order to answer the Fates’ call. All of this, of course, involves doing more runs, the only way to keep the story moving.
Encountering the Fates echoes the sentiment of the rest of the bigger story reveals, but the sequence is more poignant. The three figures greet the hero with mockery, explaining they had nothing to do with the events that transpired and intend to do nothing to prevent them from happening again. Instead, they’re ceasing their weaving for the foreseeable future. Maybe fate will fall upon the hands of the Greek gods themselves, or in each individual human. At the present time, however, after spending dozens of hours looking for answers and pushing through absurd obstacles to get to them, the Fates pull a George Constanza and say this was all about nothing.
My immediate reaction was disappointment. But it gradually turned into a more introspective thought. Perhaps Supergiant’s goal was to provide a commentary on the cyclical impulses plaguing games, especially those designed with longevity in mind. A studio that never did sequels found it commercially viable to break its ethos and try to repeat history, and success means dismantling what came before and showcasing that the chase of so-called “forever games” is fraught. The Fates themselves, then, represent Supergiant speaking directly to the player. Congratulations, you’ve finally found us, even after we gave you a barrage of unnecessary, impractical tasks to prevent that from happening. You’ve ticked yet another item on your virtual to-do list. But if you’re expecting something more than a trophy on your Steam profile, you’ll be disappointed.
As much as the gods enjoy manipulating the protagonists of each story, and as interwoven as everybody’s fate seems to be by the three puppeteers, the culmination of Hades II is that they don’t care. They have no influence. The unsatisfying ending is proof of Supergiant’s intent to showcase that we were the ones being played. You can continue forcing the same cycles for as long as you want to, no matter how shallow and monotonous your path becomes.
But perhaps that’s too much of a charitable read. At this moment in time, it’s not the course that history should take. After all, we’ve witnessed the lasting scars that solving problems with a pat on the back can leave.
Diego Nicolás Argüello is a freelance journalist from Argentina who has learned English thanks to videogames. You can read his work in places like Polygon, the New York Times, The Verge, and more. You can also find him on Bluesky.
