Hades II: The Early-Access Sequel That Already Sings

Early access is usually an apology in advance. A studio ships the skeleton, asks you to pay for the privilege of finding the gaps, and promises the meat later. Supergiant Games has never worked that way, and Hades II proves it again: the build that reached players in May 2024 already had a combat system with more moving parts than most studios’ finished games, a hub worth returning to, and a protagonist who justified the sequel on her own terms. You are not testing a prototype here. You are playing a game that happens to be missing its ending.

That distinction matters because the original Hades earned a reputation as the roguelike that solved the genre’s oldest problem — how do you tell a story across hundreds of deaths without the repetition curdling into filler. I wrote about how Zagreus’s escape attempts turned dying into the plot’s engine rather than an interruption to it. Hades II inherits that solution and then asks a harder question: what do you do once the trick isn’t a surprise anymore. The answer is Melinoë, Zagreus’s witch sister, and a moon-cursed war against Chronos that restructures the loop instead of just re-skinning it.

A witch instead of a prince

Melinoë isn’t Zagreus with a new coat of paint, and the game is careful to make the difference mechanical rather than cosmetic. Where Zagreus fought with whatever the underworld’s armoury handed him, Melinoë casts. Her kit runs on Magick, a resource that regenerates on a timer rather than a pickup, which turns every encounter into a rationing problem: spend the pool on a hex that clears a room, or bank it for the cast that saves your life against the boss two rooms later. It’s a small change with a large effect, because it converts Hades' button-mashing combat into something closer to a spellcaster’s tempo game, alternating attrition and burst.

The weapons carry the same logic. The Sister Blades reward the aggressive dash-and-slash rhythm veterans of the first game will recognise instantly, but the Witch’s Staff plays like a completely different genre bolted on — a ranged caster’s kit that punishes you for standing still and rewards kiting, which the underworld’s original arsenal never really supported. Having four or five weapons that don’t just reskin the same combo tree, but genuinely change what kind of player you have to become, is the clearest evidence that Supergiant didn’t treat the sequel as a victory lap.

The Moonstone Axe splits the difference between the two extremes, a slow, heavy weapon that rewards reading enemy wind-ups over reflex dodging, and it exposes something the first game’s arsenal never quite tested: how differently Melinoë’s kit performs when the player is encouraged to stand and trade rather than dash and retreat. Pair that with the boon system returning largely intact — Olympian gods still offer competing buffs each run, still force the familiar gamble of taking a strong single-god build against a weaker but more flexible spread across several — and the sequel ends up with more genuinely distinct ways to clear a room than the original had at its own launch. Most sequels widen a roster by addition alone, bolting new options onto an unchanged core. Hades II widens it by changing what the core rewards, which is the harder version of the same problem.

Why the Arcana works where the mirror didn’t need to change

The original Hades used the Mirror of Night for meta-progression: permanent stat boosts you bought with resources earned run over run, mostly invisible once unlocked. Hades II replaces it with the Arcana, a deck of tarot-style cards you slot into a limited grid, each one turning on a passive rule of the run — extra Magick regeneration, bonus damage while at low health, boons that stack differently. The grid is small enough that you’re always choosing what kind of run you’re building before the run starts, which does something the Mirror never did: it makes meta-progression a build decision instead of a background stat creep.

That’s the craft point worth dwelling on. A lot of roguelikes treat their meta-progression system as a separate ledger from the moment-to-moment combat — you unlock things between runs, and the run itself doesn’t know the ledger exists. The Arcana collapses that distinction. The cards you’ve unlocked become the deck you build from before every attempt, so unlocking new cards doesn’t just make you stronger in the abstract, it changes what strategies are even available to try. Spelunky 2 does something related by teaching you the level’s rules through repeated death rather than through a menu; Hades II’s version is gentler; but both games understand that the between-run systems should feel like part of the game, not a shop attached to it.

The surface world changes what a “run” means

The most interesting addition arrived mid-cycle rather than at launch: Ephyra, the mortal surface world, opened up as a second theatre alongside the underworld’s Fields of Mourning. Raids on Ephyra happen in daylight, against Chronos’s forces occupying the mortal realm, and they use different pacing — shorter, punchier expeditions rather than the long descents the underworld runs demand. Adding a whole second run-length to a roguelike mid-early-access is a genuinely unusual move, because it risks fragmenting the player’s sense of what a “session” is. Supergiant’s bet is that variety in run length keeps the loop from calcifying, and on the evidence so far it’s paying off — the surface raids are the sessions I reach for when I don’t have forty-five minutes for a full underworld descent, and the underworld runs are what I reach for when I do.

The Crossroads earns its rent

Hub spaces are where a lot of roguelikes quietly fail. You return between runs to buy upgrades or dump resources, and the space itself has nothing to say — it’s a menu wearing a coat of scenery. The Crossroads avoids that trap the same way the underworld’s House of Hades did in the first game: every character stationed there has a reason to exist beyond selling you something, and their dialogue advances on a schedule tied to your runs rather than a fixed story clock. Hecate’s tutorials evolve into something closer to peer conversation as Melinoë’s competence grows. Nyx appears as a familiar face carried over from the underworld, and the writers use that familiarity efficiently — a returning player already trusts her, so a handful of lines can carry weight that would take a new character several scenes to earn. It’s a small structural decision, reusing a trusted supporting cast member rather than introducing a stranger, but it saves the sequel from having to rebuild emotional credit from zero.

The hub also does real mechanical work. Crafting the game’s cauldron-based Incantations — permanent recipes that unlock new interactions with the run’s systems — happens here, between attempts, using resources gathered on the previous run. That loop, gather on the descent, spend at home, unlock a new option for the next attempt, is the oldest trick in the roguelike book, but Supergiant tunes the resource costs tightly enough that you’re never sitting on a hoard with nothing to spend it on, which is the failure state a lot of crafting-adjacent meta-systems fall into.

Should you buy in before it’s finished

The honest answer depends on what you want from the purchase. If you want a complete story with a resolved ending, wait — the back half of Melinoë’s arc isn’t written yet, and buying now means reading a manuscript that stops mid-chapter. If you want to watch a studio with an excellent track record build a sequel in public, refining boss fights against real player data and adding whole new areas mid-cycle the way Ephyra arrived, the early-access build is already worth the asking price on the strength of its combat alone. I’ve put enough runs into both the underworld descents and the surface raids to know the core loop holds regardless of how the story resolves, and that’s the bar that matters most for a roguelike — the narrative is the reason you keep coming back, but the moment-to-moment combat is the reason the fiftieth run still feels different from the first.

What early access has cost the game

None of this means the build is without seams. Boss encounters have been rebalanced more than once as Supergiant reads player data, which means anyone who bounced off a fight in an earlier patch may be pleasantly surprised returning to it now, and the story’s back half is still visibly under construction — threads involving Melinoë’s fractured memory and her relationship to Nyx are seeded but not resolved, because the writers haven’t finished writing the resolution yet. That’s the honest cost of buying in early: you are reading a manuscript with the last chapters still blank. It hasn’t stopped me finishing dozens of runs, because the moment-to-moment combat and the Arcana build-crafting are already complete systems in their own right, independent of where the plot lands.

Where this sits against the first game

The fair comparison isn’t “is Hades II better than Hades” — it’s too early to answer that, and Supergiant would tell you the same. The fair comparison is whether the sequel understands why the first game worked and builds on the actual mechanism rather than the surface trappings. It does. The dialogue system that made every death feel authored rather than punitive is back and expanded, npcs in the Crossroads accumulate new lines as the story advances the same way Zagreus’s underworld cast did, and the game still treats failure as data for the narrative rather than a game-over screen. What’s changed is the combat’s texture — slower to open up, more demanding of resource management, less pure button-feel than the original’s dash-attack loop — and that’s a legitimate trade, not a downgrade. A sequel that just reran the first game’s exact feel would have been safer and less interesting.

Spoilers below

Melinoë’s central hook is that she doesn’t remember most of her own life — she was hidden away as an infant during Chronos’s coup against the Olympians, and her memory returns in fragments tied to specific Arcana unlocks and Crossroads conversations rather than a single cutscene dump. That structure mirrors what made the first game’s Zagreus arc land: information rationed across dozens of runs so that a returning player is always slightly further into the story than the run before, never all at once. Her relationship with Hecate, who trained her as a witch in secret, is the emotional spine of the early-access build so far, and it’s doing more work than the Chronos fights themselves, which currently function as a difficulty ceiling rather than a resolved confrontation — appropriately, since the game hasn’t finished being written yet. Whether Chronos gets the same redemptive complexity Supergiant gave Hades in the first game, or stays a pure antagonist, is the single biggest open question the finished release will have to answer.