Roguelikes have always had a story problem, and it is a structural one. The genre runs on repetition — you die, you start again, the numbers reshuffle — and narrative runs on progression. Put the two in the same box and the story becomes something the player skips. Every roguelike before 2020 solved this by having almost no story, or by putting it in item descriptions and letting the community assemble it on a wiki.

Hades solved it by making the repetition the subject.

Supergiant Games put it into early access on the Epic Games Store in December 2018, moved it to Steam a year later, and shipped 1.0 on 17 September 2020 for PC and Switch, with PlayStation and Xbox versions following in August 2021. It won a BAFTA for Best Game and, in 2021, the Hugo Award in a one-off Best Video Game category — the first game to get one, voted on by a science-fiction readership that does not hand those out for combat feel. Five years and a sequel later, the thing it worked out about narrative repetition is still the most important design idea of its generation, and it is still barely copied, because copying it is enormously expensive.

Death is a commute

Zagreus is the son of Hades. He is trying to leave the Underworld. When he dies, he goes into the River Styx and surfaces in a pool in the House of Hades, which is his father’s office, and his father looks up from his paperwork and says something about it.

That is the entire trick, and everything else follows from it. Once dying returns you to aplace where people live, the run structure stops being a loop and becomes a commute. You leave home, you fail, you come home, and everyone at home has an opinion about your failure. Achilles is by the door. Nyx is in the hall. Cerberus wants attention. Dusa is dusting the chandelier and worrying. Hypnos — who is asleep at the reception desk and reads out your cause of death like a receptionist reading a delivery note — is the joke that makes the whole thing work, because he turns each death into an event the fiction acknowledges.

CompareRogue Legacy (Cellar Door Games, 2013), the closest ancestor, which made death diegetic first: your heir inherits the estate and the traits, and the castle persists. That is the right idea, executed as a frame.Hades runs the idea through the writing, and the writing is the part nobody wants to pay for.

The dialogue queue is the actual engine

Here is the machinery, and it is worth understanding because it is the whole answer.

Creative director Greg Kasavin wrote north of twenty thousand lines of dialogue forHades, all of it voiced, most of it by a small cast with Logan Cunningham carrying an implausible share of it. Plenty of RPGs have more words than that, so the volume is only half of it. The innovation is the priority system underneath.

Every character has a large pool of possible lines, each tagged with conditions: what boons you carried, who you last spoke to, which boss killed you, how many runs you have made, what you gave whom, what you have already been told. When you walk up to Achilles, the game queues the most contextually specific line that has not yet fired, and burns it. Say the wrong thing at the wrong time and the game notices; die to your father twice in a row and he has a fresh remark about it.

The player-facing consequence is thatHades almost never repeats itself for the first forty or fifty runs, and by the time it starts to, you are deep enough that the story has moved. The illusion is that the House is reacting to you. The reality is a very large deck being dealt in an intelligent order, and it holds because Supergiant did the unglamorous work of writing enough cards.

That is why nobody has copied it. The mechanic is cheap. The content pipeline feeding it is not.

The run itself

None of this would matter if the combat were poor, and it is excellent for a reason that has nothing to do with the writing: the boon system creates a build, and the build is a conversation with chance.

Six weapons, each with aspects that alter them substantially. Boons from the Olympians — Zeus chains lightning, Poseidon knocks back, Aphrodite weakens, Ares does damage over time, Artemis crits, Dionysus poisons — and boons that combine into Duo effects when the right two gods have already blessed you. The Mirror of Night spends darkness on permanent upgrades. Keepsakes weight the pool towards a god you want. Chthonic keys, nectar, ambrosia, the Fated List of Minor Prophecies: every currency you bring home buys something.

The design pressure this creates is genuinely good. You cannot plan a build. You can only lean — take Artemis’s keepsake, hope she shows up, adapt when she doesn’t. It is the same tension I wrote about inBalatro: The Poker Roguelike That Ate a Year: the run gives you a hand and the skill is recognising what hand you have been given rather than the one you wanted.Hades is more forgiving thanDead Cells about this, because the meta-progression means a bad run still pays, and that forgiveness is deliberate — the design wants you to get home so the House can talk to you.

The accessibility work belongs in the same argument. God Mode grants 20% damage resistance and adds 2% every time you die, so a player who keeps failing keeps getting stronger until the story unlocks. Supergiant understood that the story was the reward and refused to gate it behind execution. The Pact of Punishment runs the other way for players who want the difficulty back, in increments they choose.

What it owes

The Amiga I got in 1987 had a port ofRogue on it — Epyx published one in 1986 — and the thing aboutRogue is that it had no story at all and did not need one, because the dungeon generated the anecdote. You told the story afterwards, in a corridor at school. That is the genre’s founding compromise: the game supplies systems and the player supplies meaning.

Every roguelike since has honoured that compromise.Spelunky (2008),The Binding of Isaac (2011),FTL (2012) — all of them make you the author. What Supergiant did was ask whether a roguelike could supply the meaning itself without losing the generative anecdote, and the answer turned out to be yes, at a cost most studios cannot bear. Supergiant had also solved half of it already: the reactive narrator inBastion (2011) was the same technology in an earlier and cruder form, a system watching what you did and commenting on it.Hades is that prototype, nine years of iteration later, pointed at the exact structural problem it was built to solve.

The verdict

Hades is the rare game where the literary ambition and the mechanical design are the same object. Take the writing out and you have a very good isometric action roguelike with a strong art direction from Jen Zee and one of Darren Korb’s best scores. Take the combat out and you have a soap opera about a dysfunctional family of gods. Together they produce something neither half could: a story that getsbetter the more you fail at the game, which no other medium can do at all.

Its limits are honest ones. The Underworld’s four biomes are fixed in order — Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium, the Temple of Styx — so the variation lives in the boons and the room layouts, and after enough runs the geography is a hallway you walk fast. The bosses are few, and Theseus and Asterius carry more than their share. The moment-to-moment combat lacks the mechanical strangeness of the best of its peers.

It is on everything — PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch — it runs on a toaster, and it is a complete game that never asked for a season pass.Hades II followed the same early-access route and only widens the argument: Supergiant found a design position nobody else can afford, and they are still the only ones standing on it.

What to play next:Dead Cells: The Roguevania Blueprint for the harsher, more mechanically dense version of the same loop, andRisk of Rain 2: The Difficulty Curve as a Clock for a roguelike that solves pacing with time pressure instead of dialogue.

Spoilers below

The ending is the part people argue about, and the argument is a good one.

Zagreus escapes, reaches the surface, finds Persephone, and then dissolves — because he cannot survive outside the Underworld, and the game makes you do this repeatedly. Ten times, in fact, before the story concludes. Supergiant took the one thing a roguelike player wants (the winning run) and made it a chore you must grind, which sounds like a design failure and is instead the sharpest joke in the game: reaching Persephone is the beginning of the story, and the reunion has to be earned through the same repetition everything else was.

The epilogue lands the thesis. Persephone comes home, the family is assembled, and the whole thing closes on a family reconciling — Hades and Zagreus finally speaking plainly, Nyx’s role revealed, Demeter thawing. It is a domestic ending to a myth about escape, and the reason it works is that you have spent sixty hours in that hallway hearing these people slowly change their minds about each other, one death at a time.

Hypnos, who has been reading out your causes of death for the entire game with no idea what is going on, gets the last laugh. Correctly.

There is a moment, somewhere around twelve hours intoNier: Automata, where the credits roll, the game thanks you, and then it hands you a fresh save slot and expects you to start again. Most games treat that screen as the exit. This one treats it as a chapter break. PlatinumGames and Square Enix shipped it in Japan on 23 February 2017 and in the West a fortnight later, and the thing that made it a word-of-mouth monster was the same thing that should have killed it: it asks for your time twice, then a third time, then once more.

Asking a stranger to play your game four times is an enormous imposition. I take that seriously. A 40-hour commitment is 40 hours of somebody’s actual life, and the medium is full of designers who spend it like it’s free. Director Yoko Taro has been running this trick sinceDrakengard in 2003 and the firstNier in 2010, and both times the structure was the part people forgave rather than the part they praised.Automata is where it finally works, and the reason it works is mechanical rather than literary.

The chip system is the argument

Start with the thing nobody puts on the box. 2B’s abilities live on plug-in chips slotted into a storage grid with a fixed capacity. You spend that capacity on the things you’d expect: auto-heal, ranged attack buffs, drop-rate boosts, melee damage. You also spend it on your HUD. The health bar is a chip. The minimap is a chip. Damage numbers, the XP display, the enemy targeting overlay — all chips, all occupying slots, all removable.

Pull them out and you get more room for combat upgrades. You also lose the ability to see how close you are to dying. The game turns interface into an economy, and the exchange rate is brutal and honest: legibility costs power. I have never seen the trade stated so plainly. Every game has a HUD budget — art directors argue about it, players mod it away — andAutomata is the only one I can think of that put the argument in your hands and made you pay for the answer.

It goes one step further. One of those chips runs the operating system. Remove it and 2B dies on the spot, and the game files the death as one of its endings rather than a bug. That is a joke with a design thesis inside it. The interface is diegetic; the android is running software; the software includes the bit that draws your health bar. Once you understand that, the ending structure stops looking like an art-house imposition and starts looking like the same idea at a larger scale.

Why the second pass earns its keep

The pitch is that you play Route A as 2B, then Route B covers the same events as 9S. If that were a straight replay with a new hat, the game would deserve every complaint it gets. It isn’t a replay. 9S is a scanner model, and his combat kit is built around hacking, which drops you into a twin-stick shooter played inside the enemy’s head. Same fights, different verbs. The bullet-hell overlay that runs on top of the third-person action — machines firing lattices of white spheres while you’re mid-combo — is Platinum showing off, and it’s also the connective tissue that lets the game slide between genres without a loading screen.

More to the point, 9S can read the machines. Route B gives you access to information 2B didn’t have, so the same scene plays with a different amount of knowledge in your head. That is the whole engine. The repetition isn’t padding because yourcomprehension is the variable being upgraded, and comprehension is the only stat in this game that can’t be farmed.

Route C is new content outright, and by the time you reach it the game has stopped explaining its structure and started using it. The endings past the fifth are largely jokes — walk away from a mission, eat the wrong fish, quit at the wrong prompt — and they exist to teach you that the ending list is a systems menu rather than a narrative achievement board.

Where it fights itself

I’m not going to pretend the seams aren’t visible. The open world between set-pieces is thin, the city ruins and the desert and the amusement park are connected by a lot of running, and the sidequests range from genuinely wounding to fetch-quest filler that Platinum clearly built to a schedule. The PC port shipped in March 2017 in a state that took a fan patch — FAR, by Kaldaien — to make presentable, and Square Enix only patched the resolution and window handling years later, in July 2021. That’s four years of the definitive version of an acclaimed game being a community project. Worth remembering when a publisher tells you the platform matters.

The combat, too, is Platinum on cruise control. It’s fluid, it’s readable, it has the dodge- cancel rhythm you’d expect from theBayonetta lineage, and it has nothing like the depth ofBayonetta. Difficulty on Normal will not test you; the auto-chips will literally play the fights for you if you let them, which is a design statement in itself and also an admission that the fighting is a delivery mechanism. Play it on Hard, where one hit is catastrophic and the HUD chips suddenly feel like life support you can’t afford to unplug.

The ancestor

Everyone reaches forChrono Trigger and New Game+ here, and the shape is right — multiple endings, a replay that recontextualises — but the real ancestor is closer to the adventure games that built a full run around a single missing fact. The structure thatAutomata actually inherits is the one where the game withholds a perspective rather than a key, and you can’t buy your way past it.

For the modern version of the same idea, look atInscryption, which does its frame-breaking in a single sitting and pays for the compression with a weaker back half. OrHades, which solved narrative repetition by making the story respond to the loop instead of sitting behind it — the cleanest answer anyone has given to this problem, and a useful contrast, because Supergiant made repetition voluntary and Yoko Taro made it compulsory. And if you want the piece that tookAutomata’s melancholy and its multi-ending structure somewhere tighter and considerably nastier, that’sSignalis.

The verdict, argued

Nier: Automata is a game with mediocre traversal, decent combat, an ugly launch on PC and a script that lurches between undergraduate philosophy and genuine grief, sometimes in the same conversation. It is also the most structurally intelligent big-budget game of its decade, because it found a way to make the player’s time investment into the medium of the work rather than the price of it. The chip grid is the thesis in miniature: everything you see costs something, and the game will let you sell your own eyes for damage.

The four-route ask is real and it’s the honest thing to warn people about. Route A alone is a competent Platinum action game with a strange tone. Stopping there is the equivalent of reading the first act and filing a review. If you don’t have the hours, that’s a legitimate reason to skip it entirely; the game does not have a short version and pretending otherwise does nobody any favours. If you do have the hours, it repays them at a rate almost nothing else manages.

It’s on PS4, Xbox One, PC and Switch, and the Switch version —The End of YoRHa Edition, October 2022 — is the one that finally treats the structure as a feature to be supported rather than an obstacle. Play it on Hard. Strip the HUD when you’re feeling brave. Put it back when you aren’t.

Play next:Hades for the friendly version of the same problem, orSignalis for the version with worse dreams.

Spoilers below

The reason the structure earns its reputation is Ending E, and Ending E only works because of everything above.

After the fourth route resolves — after A2 and 9S have had their argument with a sword — the credits roll for the last time, and the game turns them into a shoot-’em-up. You fly a small ship at the names of the people who made it, and the names shoot back. It is unwinnable. The difficulty scales past any reasonable input, you die, you retry, you die, and the game asks whether you’d like help.

Say yes and rescue messages appear: real sentences written by real players who finished before you, floating in the bullet field as encouragement. They join your formation. They take hits for you. Dozens of them, wrapped around your ship like a shell, and every one of them is somebody who beat this sequence and then agreed to a bargain the game explains only at the end — to leave a message and offer help, you delete your save file. All of it. The chips, the routes, the hours.

The prompt is unambiguous about what it’s taking. And the game has spent four routes teaching you that data is what an androidis — that 2B and 9S are backed up, restored, replaced, and that the horror of YoRHa is precisely the persistence of the file. Then it asks you to give yours away so a stranger you’ll never meet can get through a credits sequence.

I know exactly what it is. It’s a magic trick with a permanence lever, engineered for maximum effect, and the emotional physics are shameless. It also works, and it works because it’s mechanical. Nobody tells you sacrifice is meaningful. The game charges you for it, in the one currency it has spent forty hours teaching you to value, and takes the payment without ceremony.

That’s the whole desk’s argument in one screen: the mechanic makes you feel it, and the mechanic is the only thing that could have.