Karlach Cliffgate is one of the most compelling characters in any videogame.

One could, I think, say this of a lot of characters in Baldur’s Gate 3, but even so she’s a special case. In a game defined by some of the best character writing in the medium, bar none, her story still stands out from the others’ as exceptional.

Despite her late addition to the game’s Early Access and her omission from the game’s box art, Karlach has easily cemented herself as a fan-favourite character. She’s a staple of fanart and licensed merchandise alike, prominently gracing the cover of Dungeons & Dragon’s 2025 “Heroes of Faerun” rules supplement, and continually given voice by her performer, Samantha Béart, in actual-play one-shots for web series and tabletop conventions even years after the game’s initial release.

I love Karlach. I’m surely not alone in that fact.

When we meet Karlach in the first Act of BG3, she’s just escaped a decade in Avernus, the first layer of the Nine Hells. She’d been conscripted by the Archdevil Zariel, to whom she’d been sold by her former mentor to fight as a foot soldier in a never-ending demonic conflict called the Blood War.

However, there’s a catch—in order to give her the edge fighting demons, Zariel replaced Karlach’s heart with an engine. That engine is powered by souls and literal Hellfire, and it isn’t designed to operate outside of its home dimension. When we meet her in Act 1 she’s burning so hot we can’t touch her—so hot she’s physically unstable and will explode unless we can successfully find a piece of infernal iron and use it to jury-rig a temporary fix.

Beyond the inciting incident which first bring the party together, this creates a pleasant congruence to hers and the other origin characters’ quests. Gale also has a big dangerous piece of explosive magical technology lodged in his chest when we meet him. Wyll, Shadowheart, Astarion, and Lae’zel are each, to varying degrees, in the thrall of or on the run from immortal patrons who prevent them from being masters of their own fates.

This internal symmetry is an integral part of the game’s storytelling. What makes the story interesting is not so much the granular differences between Wyll trying to break his warlock pact and Astarion’s attempts to escape the influence of the vampire who turned him: It’s how these different characters with their different experiences and different outlooks on morality and life—guided, of course, by the player’s hand—respond to these extreme circumstances.

Still, compared to other characters, Karlach’s personal story arc doesn’t appear to have that much going on. Though her backstory is intense, that’s all theoretically in the past. Her character quest for the first two Acts revolves around soliciting the help of a blacksmith, Dammon, to find a fix for her unstable engine. The quest is progressed each time by finding another hunk of infernal iron. Your objective for most of the game is simply to buy her time, and her personal ambitions revolve mostly around catching up on the decade she’s missed and building herself a new life.

Her characterization for these two Acts comes less through big, momentous story beats1 but through incidental dialogue—bits of banter during downtime, weighing in on crucial decisions in others’ arcs with words of encouragement.

Karlach is the only character who is uncomplicatedly “Good” from the jump. Every other character joins your party out of express self-interest or some form of ulterior motive, only begrudgingly warming up to you as you prove yourself time and again. Meanwhile, after half a lifetime in literal Hell, Karlach is not just happy to be alive, she wants to make life better for everyone else.

In this way, Karlach can act as a sort of moral barometer for a do-gooding party. Key to her appeal is the fact that she inspires everyone around her to be better. You gain her approval by helping people in need and lose it whenever you resort to cruelty or cowardice. She will always cheer for others to do the right thing. Having her in your party for the resolutions of Shadowheart and Astarion’s respective questlines is a joy unto itself. No matter how dire the challenge facing you and your party, Karlach remains ruthlessly optimistic in your eventual success. In short: She is everybody’s best friend.

This relentless, unflinching optimism is what makes the eventual wrinkle in her personal quest so affecting. When eventually you fully-upgrade Karlach’s engine, permitting her to touch another person for the first time since her ten years in the Hells, Dammon warns her that the fix is still only temporary, and that unless she returns to Avernus she is likely to die.

Initially she takes this in stride, confident you can find some solution, but even once you arrive at the titular city and are afforded every resource to make it happen, it turns out that’s just not the case. There is no way to fix her heart. The only cure is to return to the Hells, and Karlach is adamant that she will never do this, going so far as to make you promise you will let her die rather than send her back to Avernus.

Even with her fate effectively sealed, Karlach perserveres with her trademark optimism, determined to live what little life she has on her own terms. Once in Baldur’s Gate you, the player, can take her to visit her parents’ graves. You can take her out on a “first date” if you’ve been pursuing her romance option. You can do your best to help her enjoy her twilight days in the city that she loves.

The last objective in her companion quest is to confront Enver Gortash, the Archduke of Baldur’s Gate and the man who sold her soul to the devil. Gortash is a major player in the game’s third act, and he is the one person whom Karlach seems to unreservedly hate.

Since she realized she was not long for this world, and with your character’s story leading you into conflict with the Archduke, Karlach has been quietly chafing for revenge. Yet once the deed is done and she sees his lifeless body, she finds no satisfaction in the act.

“Is that it, then?” she asks. “I’ve killed the bastard that ruined my life, and my prize is that I get to crawl into a corner and die? Am I fucking missing something?”

Gortash might be dead, but Karlach remains under a death sentence. Killing him didn’t fix her heart—all it served is to remind her that the people she loves will keep living, without her.

It is one of the most powerful moments in any story I’ve read, watched, or played, underpinned by a gut-wrenching performance from Béart. It is the kind of emotional payoff that can only be leveraged from a story whose length is measured in the dozens, if not hundreds of hours.

It is also what makes Karlach different from every other companion in the game. Every companion in BG3 has a potential “Bad” ending—the option to pursue misguided, self-interested, or outright evil ends; to wind up dead or sometimes worse. Every character has their own sword of Damocles hanging over their head, both in the form of the mind flayer tadpoles lodged in each of their heads from the story’s inciting incident and the hanging threads of their own respective questlines.

However most characters are unlikely to get their worst ending. With relatively little effort you can spare most of the game’s companions. Wyll can break his warlock pact with his patron fiend. Gale can abate the magic bomb in his chest. Astarion can kill the vampire who turned him and held him hostage for 200 years. Shadowheart and Lae’zel can break from the designs of their respective evil goddesses and become masters of their own destiny.

If you beat the game they will all keep on living. Karlach’s is the only one whose “best” outcome (in her own words) still results in her death. Only she has no way to change her fate, at least none that she’d ever accept.

The only way she can live is in hell, and by her own declaration she will never go back.

So it is that when I beat the last boss of the game and was presented with three separate dialogue prompts to send her back to Avernus, I felt a little…cheated?

It’s not that I don’t want to save Karlach—she’s literally my wife—but it feels cheap to do so in that way. I saw this woman weep over the thought of spending another second in that place. Who am I to betray her trust?

For all that the epilogue added in the game’s Patch #2 update that sees you and her2 carving your way DOOM-style through Hell while she smokes two cigars at the same time is cute—for all that it lets her live—it feels wrong on a guttural level to me.

Because when she laments to you that “you’ll just keep going, won’t you? Watching the stars. Warming your hands on the campfire. Dancing, eating, making fucking love all night,” it hurts you, the player, because you know it rings true. After all this is done, you’ll go back to doing whatever you did before you ran into her on the road to Waukeen’s Rest and the best she can hope for is to die to ensure that happy future.

Giving me the option to change that robs this moment of its teeth. Not only does it undermine much of the stakes of her involvement in the game’s third act, it robs Karlach of something far more precious: Her agency.

To this point, whenever you talk to Karlach outside of combat, you have the option to try and persuade her to return to Avernus. No matter your line of argumentation, no matter what you say to her she will outwardly refuse, to the point where pressing the matter will have you lose approval from her.

That after all that the game offers you the opportunity to overrule her with one simple dialogue prompt seems hypocritical. It does a disservice to the game’s themes of agency, and breaking from fate’s prescriptions. It flattens Karlach as a character from a person into something more resembling a prop. In that way, it’s a moment that exemplifies my frustration with storytelling in videogames, and specifically in roleplaying games.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is ostensibly a game about autonomy. The thematic form this takes, to parrot the Sid Meyers quote, manifests in the form of a series of interesting decisions. You, the player, have been infected by a mind flayer parasite which will turn you into an extraplanar monstrosity if left to its own devices. It is your choice how to respond to this—whether to resist the seemingly inevitable or to embrace your eventual metamorphosis.

You can give in, become a mind flayer, and acquire untold power, but in so doing you resign yourself to giving up your personhood (and a lot of time spent in the character creator) to eventually become a kind of tentacle hentai monster. Each of your companions, also infected, come with their own baggage you can help resolve on your way as they travel with you to find a cure.

What makes these decisions interesting, in part, is that the easiest outcome is rarely the most satisfying. The “best” outcome for any quest in BG3 generally necessitates going out of your way to perform extra steps to satisfy optional objectives, or else making a concession of some sort, anything from forgoing a bit of loot to radically altering the status quo of the game’s narrative.

In a nice bit of symmetry to this, each character’s story revolves around the tension between an obligation or duty hanging over their head and the opportunity for them to chart a new path—generally at some personal cost.

With your help, Astarion can kill the vampire who sired him and prevent his ascension to Godhood through a black mass, but in so doing he condemns himself to be a spawn confined to the shadows forever. Lae’zel can betray the evil Lich Queen who made her into a foot soldier, but in so doing ensures the party will be hunted by her worshippers for the rest of their adventure. Wyll can break the pact he made with a devil to retrieve his soul, but to do so his patron demands his father’s life as payment.

What’s most interesting to me about the resolution of the game’s character quests is the way BG3 plays with player authority. In the moments of greatest turmoil in each companion’s personal quest, the game intercedes by suspending the player’s sole control over narrative decision-making. Because they are not the main character of the side characters’ stories, the player doesn’t have an absolute say on how they play out.

You can often throw in your two cents, attempt to persuade your companion to make the choice you find most desirable, but these are ultimately your companions’ decisions to make. The extent to which you can influence their decisions depends entirely on the amount of reason you’ve given them to trust you. Assuming you’ve spent two Acts of the game pissing her off, Shadowheart isn’t just going to abandon the goddess she swore her life to because you asked her somewhat nicely.

Which brings us back to Karlach. Sweet Karlach. Throughout the game she affirms to you that she’ll never go back for Avernus. Dying, to her, is explicitly preferable to spending another minute in the Hells, even knowing you will keep living without her. But once all is said and done at the end of the game, you have permission to disregard that fact in case it makes you, the player, feel sad.

This is bad for two reasons. It’s bad, of course, because it is a decision without real consequences. There is no concession you need to make in order for Karlach to live (the subsequent cutscene undermines any pretense that Avernus is that bad); she doesn’t even seem that mad at you! But it’s made worse by the fact that it’s an explicit breach of her desire to go out on her own terms—and permit me for saying so, but that makes every decision you made up to that point just a little less special.

It turns Karlach from someone defined by her steadfast perseverance in the face of certain and imminent death, to a thing for you to play with—a pretty face in the epilogue of your story.

Sometimes we, as players, make the wrong decision, and I think it would benefit more games to tell us as such.

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Proponents of the view that videogames are a kind of art contend that the medium’s artistic potential lies in its use of choice and agency as essential parts of the form. What sets Disco Elysium, a detective roleplaying game about the nature of the psyche, apart from Cure, a detective film about the nature of the psyche, is the player’s ability to direct the narrative course of the former.

In theory, the presence of choice affords the ludic medium a greater affective potential than narratively rigid ones like film or literature. The ability of the player-as-audience-member to engage with and direct the course of the fiction inspires a greater degree of immersion—in the sense both of emotional investment and suspension of disbelief—that other media could only hope to achieve.

Properly managed and given appropriate weight, these engagements can provide a catharsis unique to the medium in question. There’s a reason people love to talk about games like Telltale’s The Walking Dead, or the more recent Dispatch: The twists of the narrative feel weightier because the player is invited to lean into them.

However narrative engagements are more complicated than the simple pleasure of engaging with stimulating elements of mechanical game design. Where good gunplay in a Call of Duty or cartwheel jumping in Mario can be satisfying in-and-of-itself, catharsis from narrative decisions comes from the subjective relationship between stakes and consequences, and therein lies much of a game’s potential to derail.

I tend to conceptualize this relationship as a kind of horsehoe: either too little or too much consequence3 is ultimately bad for the story of “choices matter”-style videogame.

Too little consequence for your decisions, or too few decisions to make, and it feels like they carry no meaning; like you’re being forced down the proverbial “railroad” by the narrative.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a game telling a singular, focused story, thought this format is fundamentally at odds with the veneer of decision-making. The free-to-play gacha slop roleplaying game Genshin Impact frequently gives the character the option between multiple lines of dialogue during quests, none of which ever meaningfully affect the outcome of the story. After a certain amount of time this might cause the player to wonder why they’re being given a choice at all.

Too much consequence, meanwhile, or too great a liberty in the possibilities afforded to you as a player, and suddenly you feel like someone has turned cheat codes on. Even worse, it might feel that there are no real stakes to the story because it is trying to account for too many potential permutations, thus diluting the weight of each individual choice to naught.

Almost every roleplaying game published by Bethesda plunks the player in the middle of a large open world with hundreds of choices at their disposal. The player can go anywhere, talk to anyone, spec their character in any way, but these choices are generally pointless and almost never have any material bearing on the story.4

A good roleplaying game must strike a balance between these extremes. Each choice needs to feel like it has consequence—like there’s an appreciable change in the trajectory of the story because of it—but also not permit the player so much freedom that the story lacks a solid foundation. Some elements of a world or story need to be static in order to give it definition. Conversely, no one choice in a videogame can be so big that it invalidates all choices made previous to that point, or so trivial that you begin to wonder why the game is having you make them at all.

There’s a reason I think people still discuss the ending of Life is Strange, a game which notoriously rug-pulls its own pretense of weighted choice in its final episode to present the player a be-all-and-end-all binary decision. At the start of the game player character Max Caufield saves her estranged best friend Chloe Price from being shot when she discovers she has the power to rewind time. Over the next week they rekindle and deepen their friendship, only for the game to reveal in its fifth and final episode that Max’s powers have created a timestorm that will swallow the town of Arcadia Bay unless she reverses her actions and lets Chloe die.

If the decision between saving your girlfriend or the entirety of Arcadia Bay is something of a fake-out, it’s nonetheless a decision the game has been preparing the player to make up until this point. Life is Strange’s story of small-town dirtbag Americana is built around two narrative precepts: 1) cementing the importance of Chloe and Max’s relationship as the underpinning force of the narrative 2) acquainting the player (as Max) with enough suitably believable people in this world that it becomes a genuine dilemma as to whether they should save the life of the deuteragonist of this story, or make the utilitarian, selfless choice to let her die.

Even if sacrificing Chloe retroactively undoes every previous decision in the game, each decision until the end point has forced the player to think about the consequences of their actions. The final decision is the logical extension of your decision-making process to this point. Did you spend the game going out of your way to help others, or did you look out for yourself and Chloe above all else?

It’s important to note that Chloe is not indifferent to which choice you make. She begs Max to let her die in order to spare the town. Save Chloe and she gets to live, but is horrified at how far you’d go on her behalf. Honour her wish to sacrifice herself for the town that never loved her, and she kisses you as thanks for that fact.

Despite the fact Life is Strange most often resembles a fourteen-year-old’s idea of profundity, its ending works because it recognizes that even though the player is the only one with the agency to change the direction of the story, respecting Chloe’s is equally important within the frame of the narrative.

No matter the choices you’ve made to this point, Chloe responds to them in her own internally consistent way. She is a person with her own thoughts and feelings about your actions, and though she cannot control them, she can at least respond to them to the extent that the narrative permits.

To let hundreds of people die on her behalf represents a profound transgression of Chloe’s wishes and autonomy within the fiction, hence why it represents the widely-agreed “Bad Ending” and seems to irreperably sour the game’s central relationship. If you disrespect Chloe Fraser as a person just because she’s a character in a videogame, you need to understand the implications of that fact. In the words of the game itself, this action will have consequences.

Baldur’s Gate 3 has no equivalent to the one moment where you save Arcadia Bay. Your ability to save its titular city is instead influenced by the decisions you make in service of this effort and have made to this point. The difficulty of the BG3’s climax is determined not only by the player’s level and the decisions they make after the game’s point of no return, but those as far back as before the first long rest the player took.

Much like Fallout: New Vegas’ Battle of Hoover Dam, the player can recruit allies and sway allegiances leading up to a climactic final battle. All recruitable allies have prerequisites for providing their assistance. Many of the conditions are mutually exclusive: Saving Shadowheart from the Sharrans in the House of Grief allows her to remain in the party at your side, but prevents you from receiving aid from the convent.

Many of these decisions have been laced through the game since the very first quests on your adventure. Going out of your way to help others in need increases the likelihood they survive into the game’s third Act, at which point they might lend their hand to your cause. Conversely, fail to help a character out of malice or simply because it’s inconvenient to you, and they may well die or simply hold this against you, should they survive further into the game. There are occasional opportunities to remedy your mistakes—a player who spared Minthara in Act 1 can save her from the dungeon of Moonrise Tower in Act 2—but no action is wholly without consequence.

All this conspires to create a morally illustrative kind of game: Your kindness or cruelty will be repaid in kind.

While there is a maximum number of allies whose aid you can potentially enlist in a given run, there is no playthrough of the game in which you can recruit every potential ally. In this way the game both tempts and teases the would-be completionist. There is no way to 100% the game on one save file. The game’s refusal to permit this of you is what gives it texture, and inevitably colours the player’s decision making.

There’s a common bit of advice for prospective Dungeon Masters of Dungeons & Dragons’ fifth edition, the game on which Baldur’s Gate 3 is based, that says to never tell your players “No.” Defenders of this position contend that any amount of prescriptive storytelling places unjustifiable limitation on the freedom of players to do literally whatever they want—a thing, they claim, is essential to tabletop roleplaying games.

In case I need to spell it out for you: this is bad advice.

Contrary to the received wisdom of the millions of people who have seen exactly one episode of Critical Role, you can’t just “Yes, and” your way through a game of Dungeons & Dragons. There are several reasons for this, not least of which being that sometimes the dice just don’t permit it.

This is part of what makes tabletop roleplaying games narratively interesting. There are implicit stakes to every decision if the possibility of failure, however remote, always exists. It’s for this reason that a lot of people use the home rule of an automatic failure on a roll of 1. D&D has multiple classes which are given the ability to just auto-succeed any skill check with a difficulty threshold smaller than 10, which trivializes a lot of encounters that otherwise have a 50/50 chance of success.

Even if you were to do away with ability checks entirely, you cannot simply “Yes, and” your way through a D&D campaign. Every combat encounter represents the potential for one or more player characters to die. Not even because they were underpowered, not even because they made the wrong decisions—sometimes you just roll too low too many times in a row and get wiped by a group of enemies who under normal circumstances you’d be entirely able to handle.

That’s simply how games work. Games have rules, and these rules produce outcomes. Sometimes these outcomes are desirable, and sometimes not, but it’s the uncertainty of the process by which these outcomes are decided that make the medium interesting.

Without consequence—without an internally coherent principle of causality—you aren’t playing a game; you’re doing something more akin to telling a story together through a series of statements or questions. Maybe you don’t mind that fact, but here’s the kicker—“Yes, and”ing still makes for bad storytelling.

Boundaries are what gives stories shape, especially in the ludic medium. Without them, everything is permitted, and if everything is permitted, then nothing means anything. Games are defined by what you can and cannot do, and the tension between those impositions and what you want to do. Gameplay is friction. Characters are friction. Events are friction.

A world without boundaries is infinitely receding from the player’s touch.

I am deeply skeptical of the “sandbox” as a desirable model for tabletop roleplaying or even as a coherent concept for this reason. You can never file all the edges off of a roleplaying game because it is a medium which exists solely in friction. Games, both tabletop and electronic, are fundamentally about presenting the player(s) with a series of problems and seeing how they respond. Narrative is simply how we attribute this mechanical friction with emotional weight.

The DM’s role in this model is the arbiter of consequence. Players introduce cause and you determine commensurate effect.

The minute you draft an encounter, design a puzzle, or make up an NPC, you have already curtailed the player’s agency. A true “sandbox” cannot exist because every sandbox has boundaries. Even a player who claims to want total sandbox freedom still wants to play the game, which is itself a concession to a degree of mechanical imposition from which narrative inevitably emerges. A world with only porous barriers might as well be a void.

The point I’m espousing here is one I understand to be unpopular within certain corners of game fandom: That it is alright for a game to remove some (or all) of a player’s agency momentarily, or to “punish” them for a decision it presents to them for the sake of the text exerting didactic control over the story that it wants to tell.

Some people consider this a cardinal sin, especially in the roleplaying genre. They view roleplaying games as being about freedom of choice.

The thing about freedom of choice is that it’s not innately interesting. Moreover, in a populated world, complete freedom of choice doesn’t actually make much sense. You, the player, may have complete agency over your own actions, but that agency should not logically extend to influence over other people.

Contrary to the many posts on r/DnDmemes whose punchline is rape, you cannot use a skill check to force a non-player character to do something they are fundamentally disinclined to do. You cannot intimidate a pacifist into killing a man in cold blood; a female character cannot seduce a gay man to gain information relevant to the plot.

These limitations are not to arbitrarily punish the players, but to make the fiction interesting. They imply a dimension of agency in characters that are not our own—they force us to recognize them equally as persons with thoughts, emotions, and rich inner worlds.

There is no Persuasion check you can roll in the entirety of the main story of Baldur’s Gate 3 to make Karlach agree to return to Avernus, so why will she do so in the Epilogue simply because you asked?

Ironically, a game which understands the value of imposition hard limitations very well is Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk is a lot of things—a bad FPS, a flat roleplaying game, a dead mall of an open world, and an insult to the myriad better works of fiction that inspired it. Where it works, though—if occasionally it works—is in the character writing.

Characters in Cyberpunk 2077 feel like persons outside of you. They have their own lives on which you intrude in the process of trying to save your own skin. The game’s four romanceable characters in particular, and a handful of others integral to the game’s ending and main plot, strike me as especially rich in their respective depictions.

Unlike Baldur’s Gate 3, whose companions are each romanceable regardless of the player character’s gender, Cyberpunk’s romances are tied to whether the player chooses to be a male or female “V.”5 The effect is to make each romance option’s sexuality an integral part of their character. Judy Alvarez, the female romance option for a female V is undeniably a lesbian, and her sexuality figures prominently in her questline about trying to unionize the brothel for which her late friend and ex-lover worked.

A lot of people were vocally mad on the internet upon Cyberpunk 2077’s release that Judy’s romanceability is tied exclusively to a female player character, for which I cannot commend developers CD Projekt Red enough. Slightly depressing though it is to say, it is something of a bold decision to not coddle the audience of the game with perhaps the most noxiously testostronous pre-release hype campaign of the past decade, and having Judy be something other than an object of male wish fulfillment is worth some small applause.

The discernment of Cyberpunk’s respective love interests gestures at them being whole people. If videogames are ever to truly imitate life, like art, this is an essential quality. Judy’s exclusive preference for women6, though placing her out of grasp of the chudliest of Ready Player One-style Male V LARPers, marks her as symbolic of a kind of reality—there are literally millions of lesbian women out in the world right now, and most of all of them probably don’t want to have sex with you.

The commitment to temperance in realism extends to the outcomes of Cyberpunk’s various endgame missions. Cyberpunk has no unambiguously “good” ending. Every ending necessitates you make a decision, and each decision produces at least one undesirable outcome.

If you choose to raid the evil Japanese megacorporation’s evil megatower headquarters with the help of Keanu “Johnny Silverhand” Reeves’ ex-girlfriend, she gets killed by the final boss! If you choose to raid it with your nomad friends who live in the desert, their leader gets his head stomped in! The only way you can avoid getting your friends killed in your name is by offing yourself first, in which case your game-over is a series of haunting voicemails from your friends mourning how much they miss you.

Heavy-handed though the quests may be, they reinforce the game’s central themes of choice, consequence, and living on borrowed time. Life in this dystopic city is short and fatal. You’ve known this since your character’s best friend died in the game’s prologue, and now this fact has come home to roost. Any happy ending you might have is bought at someone else’s expense.

Even once you beat the last gun-dungeon the game has to offer you, the game isn’t done making you feel bad about your life choices. If you picked the path that sees you stay in Night City after blowing up the aforementioned corpo-fortress, Judy straight up dumps you in order to skip town. In fairness, of course, you should have seen it coming—she always told you she hated this place. The only way to maintain your relationship with her is to pick the nomad ending: sneak in, blow the tower, then run like hell, and Judy Alvarez will run like hell with you.

The thing I like about this is that the game never loosens its grip on its own character writing for the sake of making the player feel good. Characters make internally consistent decisions which don’t always mesh with the decisions you the player make in the role which you choose to play. This is, in some respects, the difference between a theme park and a choose-your-own-adventure novel.

The ending of Baldur’s Gate 3 is a bit of a theme park. I don’t hate it, but I don’t exactly love it either. Either way, it is definitely not in my top 10 favourite videogame endings of all time.

What I mean when I say the game’s ending is a theme park is that it aims for mass appeal. The “good” ending of Baldur’s Gate 3 is designed to satisfy as many hypothetical players as possible, which makes it at once frustrating and surprisingly difficult to talk about. It’s not that the epilogue is bad, it’s just that it has little interesting to add to the game.

Reuniting with your companions six in-game months after the last main quest is cute, but it’s also meaningless. Nothing that they’ve done in the interim can have any narrative consequence because the story’s already over. It finished about five minutes after you killed the last boss.

Instead, provided you got their “Good” endings, most characters seem to settle into a kind of narrative purgatory. Gale is a professor at a magic school. Shadowheart lives in a cottage with 500 cats. Astarion and Lae’zel get at least some gesture towards continuing adventure, but for the most part everyone gets a kind of noncommittal happily-ever-after. Just this once, everybody lives.

A thing one needs to understand about the issue I take with the ending of Baldur’s Gate 3, specifically the ending of Karlach’s character quest, is that it didn’t always end exactly this way. Prior to Patch #5 there was no extended epilogue; no “Six Months Later” reunion at your original camp. Prior to Patch #2 there was no coda with Karlach in Avernus. If you chose to go with her, you simply hopped in the hell portal, and the game cut to credits.

Boom, done. Not great, in my opinion, but at least the ambiguity had some amount of bite. When Karlach returns in the six months later epilogue, she informs us that she has a lead on a permanent fix for her engine. Finally, a happy ending for our fiery friend, while also providing a convenient excuse for her to pop up in Wizards of the Coast properties for years to come!7

Of course, it completely undercuts everything we’ve learned about her character to this point, but such things as consistent writing needn’t get in the way of good vibes!

While it’s impossible to say the precise amount which player feedback figured in the subsequent changes outlined above, it is likely that it contributed to some extent. People were sad that their game girlfriend’s options were dying or winding up in the one place she literally begged them to never go again, with no further indication of her continued wellbeing, so they begged Larian Studios to give her the ending she “deserved.”

But then, I think that fails to see the point of it. The point of Karlach’s entire story is that dying isn’t the ending she deserves, but even you can’t change that fact. Karlach’s is a tragedy of circumstance, a time-honoured form in the theatrical tradition.

None of what happens to her is her fault, and that is precisely why it is such a crushing burden for her to bear. In the end, the only expression of agency she can muster in the face of the fate imposed upon her is death. Fate kneels for no man and time takes no prisoners; the best she can hope is to give it the finger when she goes.

Karlach’s story hinges upon her ability to reclaim her autonomy by going out on her own terms. She is resolved to save her city as one last act of love, and asks only that you hold her in her last moments in this world.8

The constant affirmation of Karlach’s mortality, especially in the last Act of the game, is what gives her such a sense of vitality. She lives more than any other character in the game because, once your adventure is over, she will have no other opportunity to do so. Karlach’s death, her acceptance of it, and her refusal to let it define the terms on which she lives her life is a monumentally artistic thematic capstone on the story of Baldur’s Gate 3. That it is sad is also what makes it beautiful—or at least it would be had the game’s writers followed through on it and just told the player “No.”

“No, you don’t get to save her.”

“No, this isn’t your choice.”

After all, this is her moment. It is her death, and she intends to face it on her terms. Who are we to take that from her?

I mean that as a genuine question. The choice has been put in our hands, but for what reason? The pragmatic answer is that we are the player. The cynical one is that we paid CAD $93.45.

However cynically you frame the answer, it takes on some variation of the shape “As the end user of the software Baldur’s Gate 3, you should be entitled to experience the game in a narrative presentation minimally challenging to your moral and emotional sensibilities.”

The keyword here is entitlement. As a player of a given videogame, you should be entitled to a fulfilling experience, which extends to your own subjective perception of narrative elements of the game. Should these elements fail to satisfy your sense of entitlement you reserve the right to inform the developers of such, hoping, as you might, that they will patch the offending content. Failing this, you can of course take to the internet to vent your frustrations (hypocrite that I am), or simply download a mod to “fix” the “problem” you perceive with the game.

This is a phenomenally incurious way to engage with art.

Consider, if you will, that if your first impulse upon encountering a point of emotional friction within a story is to fix it, that probably says more about your incapacity for self-reflection than it does anything about the quality of the art. I for one will always celebrate any firm artistic decision—even a bad one—over the refusal to make such a decision at all.

Karlach’s ending in Baldur’s Gate 3 can’t make up its mind. Having spent hundreds of hours promising to resolve in a big, sad, emotional way, it gets cold feet at the last second, hands you the action figures, and says “Do whatever you think is best.”

It was better when even Karlach’s best ending was left ambiguous, because it incited a degree of reflection in the player. Confronted with a fade-to-black after telling their game girlfriend to go to actual hell, maybe some people might have felt something approaching empathy.

The new coda to Karlach’s story does not inspire the player to think. It does not ask them to feel anything especially painful. It is not challenging. Rather, it wraps up her story in a little cutscene with music to fire off your dopamine receptors so you don’t have to think about the last 120 hours of the game. Happily, ever after.

But it is not “bad” or “wrong” for characters to die in stories. Indeed, large parts of the human history of storytelling owe their existence to the fact that death is one of the few things we, as a species of free-thinking individuals, share universally in common. Death is an unavoidable part of living and it is through death that art might occasionally acquire the appearance of life.

Part of the integral character of stories is this universality. Convention ensures that though stories themselves may be rigid in form our response to them never is. Your favourite book remains unchanged each of the many hundred times you might read it, but each time you approach it as a different person.

It is our own malleability, not that of the stories we love that makes us capable of feeling deeply about them.

Do you think Final Fantasy VII would be a more beloved game if you could just choose to not let Aerith die? I’m kind of mad at myself for feeling obliged to ask that.

Albert Camus once claimed that there is only one fundamental question in philosophy: suicide. In the first essay of his book The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes that “Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

“All the rest,” he says, “comes afterwards.” He spends about fifty pages trying to muster a satisfying answer to this fundamental question. He fails.

Camus’ conclusion, “the point is to live,” is somewhat dwarfed by the size of the can of worms this chapter opens. Yes, he acknowledges, the universe is indifferent, life is without intrinsic purpose and misery dispensed seemingly at random. You can ignore these facts through religion and philosophy, but these are themselves hollow edifices and do not change that basic fact.

His rebuttal—that there is beauty to be found in small moments and you should endeavour to live if for no other reason than as rebellion against the absence of meaning—is poetic, but it’s also a more florid version of the thing you’d expect to hear from the operator of a help line.

Suicide is not universally rational, but it can be situationally rationalized. No general prescription can ever account for the particularities of why one considers the voluntary termination of their life to be preferable to its protraction, and so any attempt to articulate one will always feel limp.

Of course, Karlach isn’t suicidal. She does not want to die. Rather it’s articulated multiple times throughout the text that dying is preferable to a lifetime in the hells. In the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons there are myriad fates worse than death, and there is a certain dignity in this instance to Karlach going out while she’s still the one in the driver’s seat.

We are told that if she steps foot in Avernus, Zariel will stop at nothing to drag her back into the Blood War. There, with her freedom stolen and her soul forfeit, she will go back to killing demons for the rest of eternity, while her friends and lover live, die, and ascend to their respective afterlives without her.

Karlach haunts Baldur’s Gate 3’s narrative because of this fact. Her presence is an open wound in the story, and each incremental step of her journey a dosage of salt to rub into it. Over time the shadow she casts grows to the point where a couple lines saying “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine,” in the game’s closing moments amount to slapping a band-aid over a raw nerve. You were told it couldn’t be fine. Has the game really spent all this time lying to you?

It’s not that I think Baldur’s Gate 3 is a bad game. Far from it. There are bits of this story, this videogame, that I hope to think about for the rest of my life.

I was being sincere when I pointed out above, way back at the top of this essay, that Karlach’s monologue after you kill Gortash is a genuinely exceptional deployment of the long-form interactive storytelling format at the medium’s disposal. It is one of the most effective payoffs to a character story that I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. It’s just that it doesn’t mesh with her story’s eventual ending.

When a story eats up 127 hours of my life, a lot falls on its finale to land the proverbial plane. I would have felt differently about the ending of this game had it told me “No, she made her choice, it’s not your right to intervene,” and let Karlach go out, as she’d begged me to, on her own terms.

In all honesty I would probably have felt better about the ending if it had simply been presented in a different way. At several points throughout BG3 you are given the opportunity to listen in on narratively significant conversations in your companions’ respective questlines. In these moments, in addition to all of the regular dialogue that your character can take, you are offered the opportunity to let your companions speak for themselves.

I find these to be the most compelling bits of the game’s narrative design. It’s in these moments you get to see what kind of people these characters are, and—depending on the course your adventure has taken to this point—how much they’ve changed.

I recognize these decisions are still influenced by the decisions you the player have made to this point; still governed by a series of numbers hidden deep within the annals of the game’s code. I recognize that these characters are not, in fact, fully autonomous, thinking, feeling persons. Yet it’s an impressive magic trick that Baldur’s Gate is able to pull off time and again to convince you that these are people with complexity and inner conflict, more so even than you who are (by necessity) something of a blank slate.

Watching Shadowheart reject the demands of her patron goddess at the end of Act 2 without so much as my rolling a Persuasion check gave me genuine chills. I may have led her there, but in the eyes of the narrative, that decision was hers to make.

To put my finger on what I dislike about Karlach’s ending is that after the Patch #2 update, no ending is actually framed as her decision. If she goes to Avernus, it is expressly at yours or Wyll’s request—not action but reaction.

If you choose to respect her wishes, meanwhile, your line of dialogue is this: “No, Wyll. Karlach’s made her choice time and again. She’s ready to go.”

I’m sorry, but can she at least be the one to tell me that?

There’s no option to hear what she has to say; no option, even, to simply “Say nothing.” The last line of dialogue she has before you’re presented the choice is her begging you not to make her go back. A woman is dying and her fate rests not in her own hands but in those of two people talking past her. As the capstone to a story about Karlach’s self-determination this is borderline insulting.

I could submit further arguments for why this is bad in a way exterior to the prescripts of narrative—how it ties into ongoing conversations we’re having in Canada surrounding medical assistance in dying, how uncomfortable the optics of a man (and the player character) telling a woman who probably has post-traumatic stress disorder to go back to the site of her abuse feel put in the context of gender politics. But on a base level I just feel this is a lazy attempt to make for more palatable writing. It is uninteresting, unchallenging, emotionless, and represents a level of deference to an imagined audience that I find worrisome.

Games used to be the narrative medium of the future. I say “used to” because to look at the ways in which people principally engage with videogames in their current era, it is primarily in the form of always-online, live-service, multiplayer PvP games. I’m not saying this is intrinsically bad—I myself am hard-stuck Platinum in Marvel Rivals and spend more time than I would like to admit playing games of that exact description.

However, narrative games have fallen somewhat out of favour—at least, that’s what a lot of people would have you believe. People play games you can play with your friends, games you can grind for days on end, games they’ve seen their favourite streamer play.

Why sit down and marinate in a 20, 40, 120-hour story? Why experience something shaped by human hands specifically to elicit an emotional response? More and more bestselling triple-AAA games are about retention, replayability, walking endlessly around in big empty worlds.

I know a lot of people who have “played” games like Skyrim, Tears of the Kingdom, and Red Dead Redemption 2 who couldn’t tell you anything about the story of either of those games. It’s not wrong to ignore the story of these games and treat them as big, lavish, expensive open-world toy boxes for you to play in, but it means you’ll only ever manage to grasp a portion of what has historically made the medium great.

Every now and then a story-focused game like Clair Obscur or Baldur’s Gate 3 does break through (and when they do, they tend to sweep The Game Awards), but they still have to compete with e-sports titles like CounterStrike and Deadlock and always-online mobile game casinos like Genshin Impact and Umamusume: Pretty Derby.

What’s more, story-heavy games walk a particularly difficult tightrope. The player is sinking dozens, perhaps hundreds of hours into a game. They expect it to pay off in kind. Consider the divisiveness of games like The Last of Us Part II upon its release. While movies and television shows certainly receive their own share of online vitriol, that wave of discontent can be massively amplified among fans of such a time-intensive medium.

The result that I’m beginning to see is like that of the patches to Baldur’s Gate 3’s ending—developers making concessions to players unhappy with even small details of a game, even after the game’s “full” release. This recently happened to Hades II, a game I like large chunks of and dislike a few things about, particularly the ending.

Developers Supergiant Games patched the ending with additional content in late October of 2025, after I’d already played most of the game. The new ending is “better,” in a sense, but it still suffers a lot of the same problems on top of having a giant asterisk beside it that not everyone first experienced it that way.

While some games do legitimately require patches to fix fundamental problems with their functionality—the aforementioned Cyberpunk 2077 being a pretty notorious example—more and more developers are using the ubiquity of updates-over-internet for videogames to retroactively “fix” pieces of their games’ stories.

Ironically Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t patch any major parts of the game’s narrative. No new option that saw its protagonist live happily-ever-after, no kow-towing to the male players begging to romance Judy. Instead, they released a DLC story that serves as an expansion to that of the rest of the game. I haven’t played it—my save file is so old that it’s largely incompatible with the present state of the game—though I at least respect the decision by CD Projekt Red to stick to their guns on the story they initially wrote.

I worry the norm it sets if videogames become so obsequious to the whims of their players that their nature becomes essentially malleable. If you play a game and love it as is, and then the ending is patched to a wholly different resolution, is that still the same game you thought you adored? If a game wins an award for its writing, and that writing is subsequently paved over by future updates, is that award still merited?

The most insidious way this tendency manifests is in hypothetical and emerging technologies like AI NPCs; machines of complete player deference—the logical conclusion of the belief that the customer is always right. As games become regarded less as a narrative medium with meaningful affective potential than as a vessel of perpetual entertainment, these are the sorts of measures developers resort to. Each step on this continuum takes us further away from the actual craft of storytelling, and closer to making the player the protagonist of a bad game of improv.

I recognize this is a slightly esoteric place to take what is nominally a very particular gripe about a particular part of an otherwise massive videogame. Yet the particular part with which I gripe is illustrative, to me, of a swathe of disconcerting trends gaining prevalence in the medium of interactive entertainment today.

Audiences are increasingly coddled by stories without meaningful stakes or consequences. Edges are smoothed over, discomforts assuaged. Much has been said of my generation’s apparent puritanism, our distaste for sex scenes in film and our alleged avoidance of stories with emotional and moral complexity. Regardless of whether or not I believe these accusations I’ll say that always giving players an emotional out might do no favours to a generation already poisoned by an over-reliance on sarcasm and reflexive insincerity, and possessing a dearth of social skills from growing up in an increasingly atomized and online world.

The emotional immaturity of the audience is then approached as a condition to be treated. Narratives are retroactively “fixed”; friction recedes; art is pressed flat into uniform packages. As game studios bust unions and gut writers rooms, CEOs pursue the dream of the forever-game.

Each new franchise entry includes the greatest number of endings, the most player freedom, the ability to do the most of everything that videogames have ever permitted before. Every player is a toddler in an endless sandbox. Every NPC is pansexual and your number-one-fan. The entire world is made of pudding, but Karlach gets to live.

This is my nightmare, and it’s what everyone on Reddit wants.

But an empty sandbox won’t make me happy and a robot will never make me cry. You can’t build a house with only doors, and you can’t write a story with only possibilities. At some point something needs to happen or else it will all collapse. Life and art both share this basic concession to reality.

As all people die, all stories end, and stories about people dying are made all the more poignant for it. Art imitates life, and life is all friction. Like the electrons in the atoms of your ass repelling those of your chair, we need firm boundaries lest we fall into a kind of abyss. It is to our benefit when stories remind us that we are not the main characters of reality and fate will not bend to our whims.

Sometimes games need to tell us “No.”

As much as I’d like to imagine our fiery friend happy and alive, that isn’t why I fell in love with her. That she burned so bright in spite of everything is the point, after all. Life would only serve to diminish that.

Happy endings alone do not a story make. It’s better for her and the story to let Karlach Cliffgate die, even if it’s the least she deserves.

Evangeline Robins presents: A review of Hades 2, an isometric hack-and-slash rogue-like videogame developed by and published on 25 September 2025 by Supergiant Games for the personal computer, Mac, and Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.

Reviewed on: A 5^th-Generation Lenovo ThinkPad 14s, (AMD Ryzen 7, 32GB RAM, 4GB Integrated Graphics) with 72% of its memory in use running Google Chrome tabs in the background.

Verdict: “Hades 2 is NOT a game about Freud.”

Hades 2 is the sequel to one of the greatest videogames of all time. Hades 2 is also the last videogame I ever really looked forward to.

In the intervening years between its 2022 announcement, 2024 Early Access launch and full release on September 25, 2025, the games industry has had plenty of opportunities to continue to show its colours, and to disappoint me for putting my belief in its ability to produce anything good, if not humane.

It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed, or even loved, games which have come out in the interim. Rather, it’s that I’ve never let myself get my hopes up. I bought Guilty Gear Strive only after watching hours of competitive matches online. I waited a full year to buy Baldur’s Gate 3—well after it had already swept up 2023’s Game of the Year award(s).

It was only after those games had a chance to find an audience, and I a chance to read the informed and critical opinions of those whom I respect on their merits, that I allowed myself to climb aboard those bandwagons. Except for Hades 2.

Hades 2 has always been an outlier in this respect. It’s the only game I permitted myself any amount of hype for, even as I committed to not playing it till the full 1.0 release.

Part of this because Hades developers Supergiant Games have proved themselves worthy of my trust. Despite being a small, independent studio, they continue to produce games on a sustainable scale which just happen to be some of the most holistically satisfying ludonarrative experiences which the medium has to offer. I’d have taken carte blanche to play pretty much whatever they dreamed up next, no matter how out there, so I find it interesting that the thing they made was Hades 2.

I had basically no expectations for this game, besides more Hades. A lot of what made Hades so addictive to me well after I’d finished its main story was its perfectly-tuned gameplay loop. All I wanted was that same basic structure with a few more weapons and new enemies to fight, and I’d consider the game a success.

Like a woman with all the Stockholm Syndrome of a Pokémon fan, I was perfectly happy to settle for an aesthetically reskinned Copy + Paste of a game I spent the better part of 2020 with. Even if it were only a fraction as good as the original game, I’d have lapped it right up. That’s just how much I loved the Hades.

So, what did Hades 2 turn out to be?

The good news is that it’s more Hades. The bad news, for me specifically, is also that it’s more Hades. Let’s talk about what that means.

For the sake of front-loading the good stuff, I’ll assemble this review in the form of a bacon, lettuce, and shit sandwich—effusive praise up front, mild criticism and general observations between, then the stuff I don’t like before I wrap up the contents in the overall point..

This review has two tranches1, expounding respectively on the similarities and differences between the preceding and successive games. Each discussion of the latter’s similarities, in turn, sort of subsumes the one of its differences. This sort of structural envelopment is the bread, and the bread is kind of the point.

This is not the right structure for every review, but it makes sense to me for this one. To understand what’s the fervor about this game, then, let’s take our first bite.

First item of good news: Everything feels right. If you’ve played any amount of the original Hades you understand this is essential. Even though the sequel has a number of subtle gameplay tweaks and lot of new content to explore, the basic rhythm of everything remains intuitive. Pick this game up and you’ll feel all hundred-some hours of your original playthrough flooding back to you.

Preserving the basic game feel of Hades is an inspired, if not essential, decision for the same reason that all seventeen mainline Fire Emblems have you play turn-based battles on grid maps, or why every DOOM game has a shotgun. Game design is a language, and these pidgin elements ensure a degree of mutual intelligibility.

To the new player, there’s a joy in gradually learning Hades 2’s vocabulary. To the returning player, the sense of their own mastery is addictive.

Dropping into my first run of Hades 2 felt less like starting a wholly new game than doing a run of the original with an unfamiliar set of modifiers. While you do start the game nakedly underpowered for the brute-forcing many players will require to clear later sections, sheer skill alone can get you remarkably far. On my very first run I got as far as it took me nearly five hours to get in the first game, and by my second run I was consistently beating the first-zone boss. All this I did before even unlocking my first death defiance.

The game’s controls remain the same as its predecessor’s. The weapons (in the broadest possible sense) remain tuned to the same tripartite configuration of Attack/Special/Cast. Generally speaking, one of these is useful in proximity, one at length, and one to deal massive AOE damage in moderation, though the rule of “Attack=Fistfight; Special=Gunfight” holds less here than it perhaps did in the first game.

You of course, have a Dash that gives you I-frames, though you’re limited to one and so the first game’s Dash-spam is severely limited.

You still get Boons that juice your shit, though their frequency is slightly different and their emphasis is far less on boosting your Attack, Special, and Cast respectively than it was in the first game.

Ultimately however, these differences are granular. The basic logic of the game remains much unchanged. Though new currencies and collectibles dot the second game’s Underworld, player character Melinoë still grows stronger through repeated failure, night after perilous night.

Similarly to the first, the story bends to follow this mechanical logic, building up in piecemeal vignettes run after run. The recursiveness of it becomes essential to the story being told, especially for a game which is, in a broad sense, “about Time.”

I’ll tell you here as much as you’ll learn in the course of your first run: That Hades 2 concerns the repeated attempts of Melinoë, Princess of the Underworld—daughter of Hades and Persephone, younger sister of the first game’s Zagreus (and born sometime after its events, we assume), who has been raised by Hecate, the Goddess of Magic, and trained in the arts of witchcraft—to kill her grandfather, the Titan Chronos. Sometime prior to the events of the game, Chronos usurped the Underworld from her father and torn her family from her, and now wages a war against the Olympians. With wits, blades, and a little help from her godly, Melinoë must venture down into the Underworld alone to try and kill the Titan of Time, and in so doing find out what happened to her family.

I’m not interested in talking any more specifics of the story herein, in part because—like the original—its scope means that there’s almost always a little more you can eke out of it through repeated runs (making almost any attempt to talk about it except for very broadly necessarily reductive), and in part because I think it’s better experienced fresh, even more so than its predecessor.

Despite the relative obscurity of Zagreus within the Greek pantheon, the story of the original Hades was pretty easy to predict. Once you know Zag is Hades’ son, his relationships to other characters flesh out intuitively. The premise of trying to escape has only one of two potential narrative end states, both of which most players will have experienced by the time they’re done with the game. By the time I first encountered Megara at the edge of Tartarus, I was able to deduce that the titular god was likely the final boss, which made the mystery of what lay on the surface beyond him a pretty simple inference to make.

What made Hades’ story compelling was not so much the actual resolution of Zagreus’ escape attempts (though it did manage to build a suitably cathartic post-game there), but the plot wrinkles and interpersonal vignettes it introduced in between. Much of the early game concerns itself with introducing you to the gods and the various other characters which populate your escape route. Their characterization is reinforced through repetition, until after sufficient time you get a greater glimpse into their personal lives.

The meta-structure of Hades is thus like that of a dating sim, a gradual and cumulative assembly of narrative intimacy played for maximum emotional effect.2

Hades 2 retains this formula—you still need to build up rapport with your companions night-after-night—but the main plot front-loads much more intrigue than the original did.

In the broadest sense, it still gives you an implausibly daunting objective (“Kill Chronos”) and says, “have at it,”3 though the story concerns itself much more with unravelling the motivations for and consequences of the actions of all those involved than the first one did.

Whereas from minute one of Hades you understand that the eponymous dad-God is kind of a dick (if one who thinks he knows what’s best for his son), Chronos’ motivations are much more veiled, his presence in the story less directly tangible, and his effects on the world in the interceding years between the events of both games left largely for the player to discover.

The “mystery” of the original Hades, such that there is one, is a last-minute wrinkle introduced upon your first full clear of the game. In Hades 2, as befitting its markedly witchier aesthetic, the mystery is the essence of it. Whether the new approach lands with you is perhaps a matter of taste, though Suspiria is my favourite movie of all time, so I am wholly onboard for this turn of genres.

For what it’s worth, the character writing also more than lives up to the standard of its predecessor, in my opinion.

The new allies populating the game’s central “Crossroads” hub—Headmistress and surrogate mother Hecate, brooding Nemesis, Odysseus, and precocious shade Dora—are particular highlights, as are a rather self-congratulatory Apollo, Yorkshire-accented Hephaestus, and an apparently coked-out spectre of Narcissus you’ll encounter throughout your runs. In Suikoden fashion, each bring their own little quirks (some might say neuroses) to the large cast, making them at once memorable and sufficiently easy to mash together for those already hard at word in the fandom mines.

A personal favourite of mine is returning champion Artemis, here recast as one of the “Silver Sisters” that form Hecate’s secretive anti-Chronos alliance. She’ll occasionally crop up in your runs with a shout of “The hunt is on!” whilst aiding you with pot-shots from the shadows. However, it’s the fact that unlike the other gods she shows up in the flesh, occasionally even at your campsite to share gifts and sing a tune, that marks a nice evolution to the taciturn huntress of the first game.

The Artemis of this game is quite obviously more comfortable with Melinoë than she was with Zagreus, dropping much of her curt affect, and the not-so-subtle “I have a girlfriend” friend-zoning she gives Zag. And after all, why shouldn’t she be? Melinoë is a markedly different protagonist to her older brother, and unlike him she and Artemis share a longstanding friendship. Her more driven, sincere personality (in contrast to Zagreus’ constant snark)—not to mention her gender—elucidate different dimensions from her immortal co-stars.

Demeter is still prickly, but she’s more of a doting grandmother this time round. Poseidon leans more into the goofy, out-of-touch uncle vibe. Aphrodite is slightly less horny (at least towards Melinoë), and conceals a more calculating side, appearing as she does wielding a spear in her Ariea aspect.

Granted, I do think that some of the changes to the Greek mythological canon could prove divisive to a generation raised on Percy Jackson & the Olympians. The original game plays loose with some elements of the mythos, such as the portrayal of Asphodel as a hellish lava plain, or Sisyphus as a largely sympathetic character, but it generally provides a rationale for these and none of them are so egregious as to really take you out of the narrative.

By contrast, the new biomes and enemies in the sequel can be cool, and sometimes mechanically engaging, but they don’t always mesh well with what one would expect from the stories they’re based on. The second area, Oceanus, is the biggest offender for my money. Essentially, it’s pitched as “a bit of the Underworld beneath the ocean,” which is fine, I guess, and has at least some basis in accounts of the Greek Underworld. The Steampunk aesthetic here is cool, but it really doesn’t feel like it follows as much as the continuity between zones in the previous entry.

Whereas Hades feels like Zagreus is going through distinct zones that still feel like part of the same Underworld, Melinoë goes from a Brothers-Grimm forest, to a Bioshock-style factory(?) beneath the ocean, to Diet® Termina Field, to [SPOILERS GO HERE]. It made me scratch my head the first time I entered each zone in a way I never did in the last game.

Oceanus area boss Scylla is also a strange beast. She’s presented as the lead singer of Scylla and the Sirens, the resident rock band of this part of the Underworld who have a nasty habit of killing their audience members. The fight is tough, engaging, and the music and sound design is incredible, but every time I make it to her chamber a bit of me goes “Why Scylla?”

Scylla’s fight is strange to me given that she’s already paired with another monster in the source material. In The Odyssey, Scylla guards a strait passage from the cliffs opposite the monster Charybdis, who sucks ships down whole in her whirlpool jaws. In the story, Odysseus steers his ship past Scylla’s cliffs, sacrificing six men to her six heads in lieu of his entire ship.

There’s nothing in the mythology that really supports Scylla in this recast role as a rock star.4 It’d make as much sense to have the boss be “Circe and the Sirens,” and then you can both honour the game’s witchy themeing and preserve the alliteration. Or you could still have a multi-boss fight with Scylla and Charybdis. I don’t know.

I recognize that the fact it rubs me the wrong way ultimately comes down to personal taste, but that’s not to say I can’t explain the rationale for it.

Hades 2’s subject matter is somewhat less lighthearted than its predecessor’s. Compared to the original’s interfamilial squabbles, Chronos is presented as a more existential threat whose reign is implied to have a massive mortal body count and potentially world-shattering ramifications. This makes the elements of humour in the game, especially the more over-the-top ones like Scylla, stand out more and occasionally clash with the otherwise sombre tone.

Melinoë is a witty protagonist, but she doesn’t crack jokes nearly as much as Zag did. Comedy relief character Hypnos is asleep most of the game, and beside Dora none of the Crossroads crew are particularly “funny” in the conventional sense. Considering they even toned down Skelly’s farcical nature to account for this, the fact that Scylla’s boss battle is essentially a series of extended comedy bits feels strangely out of place.

Some of the new additions to the Olympian cast also feel more hit-or-miss than the last game. While I don’t hate Hestia’s design, it does feel like the team decided they needed a fire-themed god first and moulded her aesthetic and personality to follow, rather than take elements from the actual Greek tradition. There’s something decidedly weird about the most famously pacifist goddess giving you magic fireball powers (is she supposed to be Prometheus? Hyperion? Or, for that matter, Hephaestus? I mean you already have Selene, why not Helios?), and the “comedy Yorkshire” accents both she and Hephaestus get slapped with are not my favourite decision therein.

While we’re on the topic of designs, let’s talk Big Bad. Twinkdeath Chronos is much less scary than the first game’s final boss. He’s actually kind of a let-down considering on first appearance. how much hype he gets. I do think through dialogue he builds his menace sufficiently over time, and the shadowy model he uses in Erebus is neat, though he hardly feels as though he sufficiently evokes the mystique of the “Titan” moniker, even during the climactic fight.

I will say to take everything I say about mythology with a grain of salt. Years of playing Dungeons & Dragons and reading any number of translations of the classics have made me a particular type of pedant for worldbuilding. I recognize to most people these minor grievances will not significantly impede their enjoyment.

After all, we all know why most people are actually here, and as such I already know what you’re about to ask me. It’s perhaps the most important question to answer when appraising the merits of a Hades sequel: “Evangeline, is it still horny?”

The answer is “Yeah.” (Kind of)

If the original Hades is known for anything besides its perfectly-tuned gameplay, heart-tugging story and characters, and drop-dead incredible score, it’s the fact that the game is kind of, sort of, insatiably horny.

Zagreus is one of the most bisexual protagonists of all time, and the game notoriously has a fade-to-black sex scene in which you get aggressively whipped by your demon girlfriend. Now that’s what I call an action button!

Part and parcel of the original game’s gorgeous character portraits and lavish voice acting is the fact that people quickly set about thirsting for the characters upon its release. Gods, Furies, Asterius the Minotaur? Pretty much everyone’s fair game.

Hades had a reputation for being a game full of hot gods, and if that’s what you’re looking for the sequel does not disappoint. All your favourites are back with new, and equally *ahem* attentive character portraits. Many of the newcomers are just as, if not somehow more attractive than they were in the previous entry, to the point my friend messaged me “oh, he could drive his staff alright,” when I sent her a picture of Odysseus.

Look, I’m trying not to be crass lest someone read my work, but Hecate is played by Baldur’s Gate 3 narrator Amelia Tyler,5 and her title is literally “Headmistress.”

The way Nemesis says “Whatever” makes me cream my panties. This game feels like it was designed to one-shot lesbians.

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It’s not just the sheer eroticism of their key art or the cute interactions between the members of Hades’ cast aided by that rich, lusty voice acting that led to many players wanting to see more steamy interactions between them (and picking up the pen and/or digital paintbrush to do so). The game actively encourages this pursuit. You see, in the vein of games like Persona and Fire Emblem which throw romance mechanics into primarily roleplaying games, Hades intersperses its hack-and-slash bread and butter with a kind of saucy dating metagame involving gifting jars of nectar to various members of the cast.

Initially this is done for the sake of earning Keepsakes from the Olympians, members of the House of Hades, and others Zagreus meets across his various escape attempts, however even after receiving his reward he’s afforded the option to continue showering them in his affections. Do this enough, and he’ll forge a bond with them, earning in—well—earnest their trust and confidence. Do this enough to the domineering Fury Megara, or Thanatos, sadboy personification of Death, and they might ask to bed you, which you can accept in kind.

This option to pursue polytheistic polyamory returns in the second game, with even a little bit of expansion. While the romance mechanic remains pretty straightforward—fill up this gauge with gifts over 10 different times—there are new ways to achieve this with a greater degree of narrative integration.

In Hades 2 you can bring friends, comrades, and prospective lovers to a hot spring in your camp (à là Fire Emblem sauna), which yields not only an increase to your affinity level, but also nice insights into your companion’s personalities when they’re off the proverbial clock.6

There’s also twice the number of potential companions to choose from. The boys are twice as sad, and the femmes infinitely more domme-y.

Crucially, however, double the love interests should not imply Hades 2 is twice as horny as Hades. I think Hades might still inch it out in a contest, though really when it comes down to it both games are horny in different ways. It’s the difference between boy horny and girl horny, between yaoi lust and yuri yearning, really, right down to the fact that Hades 2 is significantly more green.

I come at it a bit biased, but this game has a definite “Girl’s Night” (wink wink, nudge nudge) kind of vibe. I mean, it’s about witches. Your first weapon is a magic wand.

I think part of the first game’s sheer horniness is that part of the metanarrative is basically about how Zagreus needs to get laid. His and his father’s relationship has degraded in part because of the latter’s brooding overprotectiveness, which has contributed to Zagreus’ own pent-up impotence which he sublimates into blind rebellion against his father through his repeated attempts to escape Hell. It’s all very Freudian.

Hades 2, meanwhile, is significantly less Freudian.7 Its flavours of horniness rely less on the “Dad took my Xbox” style of incandescent gamer rage than on attempting to answer the question many a lesbian has asked herself at one point in life: “What if the moon was a woman and I could kiss her?”8

Compared to her brother, Melinoë feels like she has less growing up to do. She’s more mature and focused. She has a direction in life. As opposed to searching for meaning, she has to reckon the fact of her agency with the fact of her duty. It’s a kind of self-discovery to be sure, but one more reminiscent of that of Puella Magi Madoka Magica than High School DxD.

Melinoë’s journey through the depths of Hell is the product of a lifetime of training for this very mission, as opposed to a decision to run away from home on a whim. The expressions of her romantic autonomy tend to work against her dedication to her objectives, and while Hades had shades of this in Zag and Meg’s relationship, Mel’s duty to her task intervenes in the pursuit of any of her romantic partners.

If Zagreus is Id, then Mel is Superego—reserved and disciplined to the point of self-criticism. She’s not quite as flagellating or antisocial as, say, Homura Akebi, but she bottles up a certain amount of angst about herself which serves as an interesting new type of characterization for the franchise to explore.

If you want to get a little tenth-grade English about it, Melinoë’s playstyle seems to embody her more decisive, technical personality quite elegantly. Whereas Zag was the kind of guy to happily wade into a room swinging, Mel’s combos ask you to think more about the space and resources at your disposal.

Instead of the last game’s bloodstones, Melinoë’s Cast and the alternate “Ω Omega” fires of her standard and special attacks deplete a shared well of “Magick” which replenishes throughout each run. By consequence there’s less artificial scarcity on your casts, but you equally possess less ability to spam them for big damage. Moreover, Casts now create a field which slows enemies within them, and can be upgraded to provide other secondary effects, thereby rendering them into an essential part of combat flow instead of the occasional “Big” moves you’d expend between attack spam.

With this change to the resource economy, combat becomes an elaborate balancing act of move rotation and resource management, which is significantly more fun than it actually sounds. There’s a certain way to string together your abilities so as to make them most effective, and part of the joy of early runs is trying to figure out these rotations. If you’ve played action games like Genshin Impact you’ll hopefully find the Magick management pretty intuitive, as it functions similarly to that game’s burst energy, right down to providing you a functional ult.

That’s right, replacing the original game’s metre-based “Calls,” which functioned kind of like mid-battle Final Fantasy summons, Hades 2 introduces the aforementioned moon I want to kiss, Selene, who gifts you “Hexes,” which function as resource-intensive actions you can perform only once you’ve consumed a certain amount of Magick.

The fact that you can use them multiple times per encounter, as well as their diverse pool of effects, gives Hexes significantly more utility than Calls had. With Selene’s blessing, burning through Magick is no longer a punishment but a reward, as spamming Ω attacks means you’ll more quickly be able to use some of your most powerful abilities.

Moreover, you can upgrade and modify these abilities throughout a run, making them less of a calculated risk than it could feel to choose a Cast instead of another Boon, especially late in a first-game run.

However the biggest change to combat I need to praise is that the first weapon in Hades 2 doesn’t suck.

Compared to Hades, a lot of the early weapons in the sequel can feel kind of samey—variations on the same theme. Within the first hours you’ll unlock a staff that does big damage at close range and shoots projectiles, a pair of daggers that do quick damage at close range and which you can throw, and a pair of torch-wands that are kind of like the staff, except they also let you cast 5e Spirit Guardians. In the abstract this sounds like it could be boring, though in practice I like it quite a bit because each of these weapons feel so exceptionally refined.

Zagreus’ sword in the first game is the first weapon to which you will have access for quite a while, and it is a miserable experience to use through and through. I have never willingly used the sword in late-game runs unless doing so expressly to grind currency which—if you’re on an endgame save file—is probably redundant anyway.

I understand that on paper Stygius is more powerful than Melinoë’s wand9 and can be played well10, but the sword is clunky as hell, none of its alternate forms dramatically change the way it plays (except for its special aspect, which makes it even more painfully cumbersome), and all told it’s outperformed in terms of my enjoyment by almost every other weapon in Zagreus’ arsenal.

Melinoë, meanwhile, starts with a weapon far more reminiscent of the spear, bow, or even the Adamant Rail (the first game’s machine gun corollary) in its playstyle. It features a devastating mixture of near and ranged coverage, with charged attacks being modified to provide even more situational utility. It can require a few runs to get used to the feel of each of its distinct attacks, though once you understand how they synergize and can be comboed into one another, it feels properly devastating.

Significantly, picking up the Witch Staff to farm currency never feels like an impediment in the way it does going back to Stygius in the first game, which is crucial not only for the sequel’s onboarding to go smoothly, but for its own long-term replayability. Melinoë’s signature weapon is versatile. It encourages experimentation and mechanically reinforces the unique game flow of Hades’ sequel. Whereas the first game’s sword often feels at odds with the mechanics of its Boons and modifiers, the Staff relishes in the unique flavour of 2’s emphasis on ranged, crowd control combat.

This change in arsenal feels like a response to the pace of combat. Whereas early chambers of Hades used to contain only a handful of enemies, 2 happily drops you into crowds the size of Burning Man within the first few rooms. Combat in the sequel can feel kind of overwhelming because of this. The bullet-hell flavours of the original game are drastically emphasized here. There are often a greater number of smaller enemies to take account of, more attacks to read and more projectiles tod dodge at any one time. Bigger rooms and boss battles look almost like Touhou Project screens.

Where in Hades you could generally deal with enemies by 1) mashing the “dodge” button 2) Turtling throughout shield runs, or 3) simply walking away, the tweaks to Melinoë’s kit punish lazy gameplay and dash spam. With only one dash and a slight delay on its recharge, you’ll be punished for trying to button mash your way through large clouds of projectiles, or trying to prematurely evade enemy’s attacks. Starting with less health than Zagreus makes these punishments hurt more, especially in early runs, forcing the player to learn to internalize timings and exploit vulnerabilities as opposed to blindly swinging at enemies until they die.

This emphasis on timing crops up in the boss fights, too. There are fewer moments where a boss will just stand there and let you whale on it. Unlike the last boss of the previous game, there’s no opportunities to simply wait out an attack and hit them for a couple hundred damage after the fact. If a boss is not on the move or in an attack animation, it almost certainly means they’re throwing out projectiles you’ll need to dodge while whittling them down.

This translates into a game that’s superficially more difficult than the first, or at least more involved. While the hardest fight for me in Hades was always the third-floor arena match at the end of Elysium, the second-floor boss in 2 has been giving me hell. It feels as if the skill check comes up much faster this time around—perhaps in a bid to slow down returning players. I do think Hades 2 is still be beatable for most players, even without God Mode, but boss fights might feel more like wars of attrition against your own Death Defiances and health bar than the enemy until you figure out their attack patterns.

As ever, you still get stronger night-after-night, meaning the more you do fail the more opportunity you’ll have to brute-force things later on. Nevertheless, the new resource economy means that you need to be more deliberate in choosing your skill upgrades.

The new mix-and-match tarot skill tree Melinoë’s Altar of Ash provides is fun and very pretty, and overall a significant UX improvement compared to the more spreadsheet-y Mirror of Night, but it’s also a lot to take in at first. I’ve shot myself in the foot several times by saving up for Arcana only to find I lack the necessary prerequisites to use them, dooming me to a run using my same build as before while trying to scrounge enough Ashes to remedy my mistakes.

The aforementioned Ashes are just one of the many currencies replacing the last game’s Cthonic Keys, Darkness, and Gems. The new currencies are fine. There’s probably too many of them, especially when you include other collectible resources, though the base three are all nested in such a way that scarcity is a pretty trivial issue. Occasionally I’ll notice I don’t have enough resources for a particular upgrade, but this is rare in the early game and when it does happen there are usually ways to exchange certain currencies for the one that you need. Bosses always dropping their unique currency is a big improvement, and removes the problematic mid-game plateau you could encounter in Hades 1.

Everything above is more or less as I feel it should be—what one would expect from a game called “Hades, Too.” In structure it is a mirror image to its predecessor, and while its gameplay and story differ in particular ways, it broadly succeeds at channeling the feel of Hades. There may be things you like or dislike in one game as opposed to the other, though the first game remains a fair litmus test for your mileage with the second.

One place, however, where it deviates significantly from the first game, but retains a degree of spiritual succession is in the game’s third major zone. It’s time to talk about the Field of Mourning.

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Elysium, the third floor of the original game’s path, has a bit of a reputation. Not only does it have arguably the hardest boss fight in the entire game, it’s littered with environmental hazards, the worst mini-boss in the game, and all of the enemies throughout have unique and annoying gimmicks and respawn unless dispatched sufficiently quickly after being brought to zero.

It’s a part of the game that consistently kills runs even for high-level players, and threatens to make less talented or persistent ones quit the game outright. Even when you get good enough to consistently clear Elysium, the zone never stops being annoying.

The Fields of Mourning are basically exactly that for Hades 2.

The gimmick here is that they’re big—so big you can’t see the exit. The Fields forego the conventional tight-room dungeon crawling of the original game and the roguelikes it borrows from to instead become a kind of shitty Vampire Survivors knock-off with a lot less of anything going for it.

The first time you walk into the third new area of the Underworld, you’ll probably go: “Wow, that’s pretty cool!” (and it is—the first time). It’s like exploring A Link to the Past’s scrolling overworld after being used to the single-screen environments of the original game.

However, the procedural-generation of Hades’ dungeon environments means it’s not especially well suited to creating large spaces—without constraints, they feel strangely empty, and the player will likely find themselves bumping into the walls of shades which appear at the nebulous boundaries of the zone to arbitrarily hem them in.

It is probably a bad sign that one of the permanent unlockables in the game exists simply to make these bloated maps more navigable. While the abundance of space is novel, sure, it isn’t really used well, and more than anything it isn’t fun.

The fact that there are more rewards within each room in the fields seems initially like a fair trade off, but this quickly becomes frustrating as it’s just more RNG completely out of the player’s hands. The fact that you’ll only go through a handful of rooms in this area as opposed to the dozen or so in prior zones also kneecaps your passive restorative and healing abilities. If you haven’t picked up a Magick replenishing boon by this point, you’re pretty much screwed.

None of the new enemies feel particularly challenging compared to those in Oceanus or Erebus, almost as if the developers knew they couldn’t really exploit the constraints of the terrain, and that a lot of players would just be stalling for time. The zone boss is just kind of fine? It does a ridiculous amount of damage should you get hit, but unless you’re playing a heavily melee-skewed build you’ll never really need to mix it up close.

Compared to Scylla, the Infernal Beast is just kind of unmemorable, and fails to evoke the white-knuckle sweatiness of the equivalent boss fight in the last game. In the grand scheme of things, my frustrations with this zone are a small nitpick in an otherwise great game. At the very least I spend less of my time in the Fields feeling like I’m bashing my head in a wall than I do in Elysium, and while they are a bit irritating, I never feel like they’re punitively challenging.

But then, the more I think about it I think that might be symptomatic of my biggest problem with the game.

Towards the start of this review, I said that the best thing about Hades 2 was that it was more Hades. If you’ll recall, I also said that this was the worst thing for me personally.

What I mean by that is that, for as much as I praise the game for how effortless it was for me to pick up, porting hundreds of hours of transferable skills from the end of the original game into my opening runs of the sequel, it’s this very thing that cracked the game wide open for me. The flipside of starting dramatically further up Hades’ exponential learning curve is that I’m missing out on a lot of the original experience this time around.

Part of the joy of the original Hades is that feeling of incremental improvement. Each run you get a little bit further, and each time you get knocked down your companion’s remark upon your progress. Supergiant took care to write dozens upon dozens of voice lines, some of them noting even the tiniest of accomplishments, to make sure players never felt that their progress was being made in vain.

Hades’ entire story is built around this cycle of repetition—the plot actually rewards you for spending more time in it before “beating” the game, and the more of the cast you meet and the story threads at which you’ve tugged, the more rewarding your victories tend to feel in the long run.

By my second run in Hades 2 I was getting so far into the depths of the game’s Underworld that I was inadvertently triggering dialogue FAR past the earliest stages of the game, effectively skipping vast swathes of those little interactions which made the first so memorable. Within three runs my companions basically never talked about Erebus, unless they (like Nemesis and Artemis) showed up in the area themselves, or I made some new discovery locked to later nights (such as a Chaos Gate).

The experience was somewhat like that of peeking behind the curtain; a reminder that all of the depth and emotional dimension afforded to these characters is ultimately a product of a series of hidden numbers and “Yes/No” flag states.

Within 10 runs I was consistently getting to the final boss chamber, and perhaps this is why I was feeling somewhat underwhelmed. There’s little catharsis to be had in whooping Grandpa’s ass when you’ve barely got to know him. It’s not nearly as satisfying as beating dear-old-dad for the first time.

To know Hades necessarily changes the way you approach the game. Playing Hades 2 with an intimate familiarity with its predecessor feels like a cross between competitive Microsoft Excel and late-stage gambling addiction.

The Hades fanatic approaches the game with a poker shark’s detachment. She thinks in rounds, and hands, and blinds—the value of the cards she holds rather than the things they represent. Because even from the first run of this new game, the elements of familiarity tempt you to break it; to pry it apart, lay bare its math and approach it as a series of real-time chess moves with associated BEDMAS equations as opposed to the story of a girl who wants to find her dad.

There are a lot of videogames which I think are actually more fulfilling the worse you are at them (at least initially). Part of the joy of Celeste, or Bloodborne, or literally any online multiplayer game in which you can shoot other people is the process of mastering their systems, of developing the knowledge and muscle memory requisite for you to “Git Gud.”

The brilliance of a lot of those games is how simple, or mechanically integrated their stories are to compliment this fact. Celeste’s story of climbing a mountain is quiet and unobtrusive, and pairs well as a second-order analogue for both its deeper themes of depression and self-discovery, and the player’s own eventual command of its mechanical intricacies.

Bloodborne foregoes conventional exposition to let the player’s own triumph over a series of foes of increasingly technical difficulty speak for itself as a sort of narrative. It’s much like how despite ostensibly having a plot about space marines on Mars, the real story of Doom for most people was that of a guy picking up bigger and bigger guns.

The problem with Hades’ level of narrative intensiveness is that the more you exploit its mechanical components—the more you throw wrenches in its machine—the more you cheapen the thing it is trying to be. The earnest dialogue from this insecure young woman feels at odds with the fact that five minutes ago I turned her into a 10,000-DPS mass-murder machine by maxing out my Hex tree.

It’s hard to mourn Aerith Gainsborough when I’m mentally working out how to allocate my materia slots.

There’s a section of Tim Rogers’ exhaustive review of Cyberpunk 2077 that much more articulately explains the thing I’m trying to get at here. In an early playthrough, Rogers stumbled upon a way to exploit the game’s “Quickhack” system which allows the player, at the press of a button, to inflict damage, status conditions, and other deleterious effects on enemy NPCs.

Because of the way the game was balanced at launch, Quickhacks scaled to a ridiculous degree based on the player’s Intelligence stat, effectively nullifying any need for weapons, grenades, or engagement in any other part of Cyberpunk’s skill tree. Rogers, employing what he calls a “gremlin-esque spirit,” methodically exploited this fact up to the point that he was able to one-shot the final boss with his “Short-Circuit” hack.

In short, this is what I have done to Hades 2.

At the current state of my 90-some hour, near-100% complete save file of the original Hades, I have devised a method, in the same gremlin-esque vein, to consistently render myself into an abomination of mathematical probability exploitation to which it is almost completely impossible to deal damage.

I achieved this using a relatively straightforward combination of exploits using Hermes’ keepsake and a handful of boons and items which are likely to spawn in a given end-game run. By the time I had properly mapped out this math-route in my brain like a blackjack player counting cards, I was able to squeeze the dodge chance conferred to me with the Lambent Plume above 40%.

With modifiers, my total dodge chance was more than 100%.

For the brief period it took me to complete this run I felt a near-orgasmic sense of self-congratulatory elation at my own combination of cleverness and short twitch reflexes. Then I walked through the final boss undamaged with all my supplementary lives.

Watching the end screen I felt a sort of emptiness. Evangeline wept, for she had no more boons to conquer.

It was not the last time I ever played Hades, but it was the time that bookended my experience. Thereafter each trip to the keepsake bin reminded me that this emotionally-resonant piece of interactive narrative entertainment I’d spent multiple tens of irretrievable hours of my life trying to fulsomely experience was, beneath the hood, just 11GB of ones and zeroes on the hard drive of my laptop computer.

At some point between the start of that fated run and mine completing it unscathed, I became aware that Hades was only just a game, and that game was no longer fun.

Despite the developer’s best attempts in Hades 2 to remedy the most transparently broken instances of the first game’s many mechanical exploits, I have already seen the code. The reason I got as far as I did within a fraction of the time I spent on Hades prime is simply because—try as I might—I cannot resist the urge to destroy this thing I love when it presents me with the opportunity to do so.

I am too good at Hades 2.

“Too good” not just in the sense that I got further than I probably ever should have in my first-ever fresh-file run of the game, but in the sense that as soon as it opened up to me, my gremlin hands went a-tinkering. The minute I intuited the most effective tactics available to me, I began to ignore about 80% of the game’s actual content.

I couldn’t even “just play worse” for the sake of a better emotional experience. Every fibre of my neurotic cerebellum shrieked at me whenever I deviated from the cold, calculated selection of the most damage-optimized option at my disposal. This game would have to drag me, kicking and screaming, to literally ever use a scorch build.

The only reason I’ve even played half the boons I have is because my completionist’s urge periodically overrides this reptilian compulsion for the sake of completing one of the game’s many checklists.

In turning Hades 2 into a numbers game, I have set my mind down a path which my heart cannot follow. A combination of comically destructive Critical Hit builds and ruthless exploitation of collectibles which scale everything from Magick, Max Health, to flat-out damage based on things so arbitrary as the number of Boons in your possession have sent me Concorde-jetting past the writers’ and programmers’ intended curve and into my own kind of nebulous godhood.

So it was that when I turned off my computer and stared at my reflection in the frosted black-mirror screen of my 5^th-Generation Lenovo ThinkPad P14s after a run in which a perfect confluence of Artemis and Selene boons gifted straight from RN-Jesus turned Melinoë into a hyper-critting, turbo-casting, self-replenishing multi-deca-thousand-damage Hex maniac—a perpetual motion machine of moon-wrought digital death—I beheld myself as some kind of monster.

Hades 2 is not a game about Freud. It’s not a game about killing your dad or sublimating your repressed libidinal urges into a conspicuous expression of Major League Gaming™. It is a game about a lot of things, but the things it’s about have little to do with its final boss, because the true final boss of Hades is myself.

When first I hit “Play” in Hades 2 main menu I started down a path from which, in true heroic fashion, a part of me can never return. I have pried apart this game until I saw it no longer as a holistic thing, but merely a synthetic collection of interwoven systems to which I took my proverbial seam ripper.

Having freed myself of the imagined shackles of mediation I glimpsed the actual perversity of reality. Each retro-linear beat of Hades’ narrative—each boon of every run; each ally, friend, and lover—represents to me an arbitrary confluence of raw, indifferent math. So it is that for as much of everything as it made me feel at one point in time, when I think too much about the person I made myself out of Hades, I just get a little bit sad.

Hades 2 might be the Game of the Year, but I don’t know if it can ever be my Game of the Year, because I have wholly digested and spit it back out.

This is what I mean when I say that the worst part of Hades 2 is how much it is like itself. When I picked up this game, I wanted to be a better player than I was, and in that precious and naïve gesture I have utterly and undeniably failed. In playing Hades 2 I lapsed back into precisely the person I was—the person who guiltily brain-blasted her way through Cyberpunk 2077 despite having literally thrice watched a video telling her not to do exactly just that.

By almost any capitalist measure which places absolute productivity above all else, videogames are a massive waste of time. We justify this implicitly recognized fact by telling ourselves little lies about these moments we waste; how they improve our hand-eye coordination. How a sufficiently “good” game might fundamentally change us as a person.

Hades 2 cannot change me. It cannot make me a better person. I let myself look forward to it, and in doing so I let myself down. I wanted to be the kind of person who could treat it as art, and instead I find myself undeserving of it.

This massively complex, lovingly-assembled, and (by almost any description I can muster) beautiful game is a diversion to me—an efficient means to consume time. I am reminded of this fact every time I boot it up and my fingers gravitate me instinctively towards the keepsake menu, already itching to figuratively card-count the coming run.

Maybe that’s what it means to be the sequel to Hades. Maybe that’s just me.

The sequel to a game I loudly proclaim to be one of the single greatest pieces of contemporary interactive art ever programmed by actual human hands is just that: a videogame. I play it. I enjoy it, but I don’t feel much else.

I have ruined Hades 2, and it’s my fault.

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