Five years and one day ago I finally put down Hades after completing all the epilogue content and all of the Achievements. Now it is once again October and here I am playing More Hades.

As expected, it’s very good.

The premise in the sequel is pretty straight-forward: we’re at war now. An indeterminate number of years have passed since Zagreus successfully reconciled the dispute between the House of Hades and the Olympians. At some point The Mad Titan Chronos returned, imprisoned the Cthonic Gods, and began to wage war on Olympus. Few escaped the House of Hades, but one was Melinoë – Princess of the Underworld – and she has been training her whole life to kill Chronos and set things right. So instead of perpetually fighting your way out of hell, now you’re fighting your way back down there.

Unlike the original, I immediately slammed the Early Access purchase button the day it was announced, did a handful of runs, and then parked it until 1.0. I’m very glad I did, because the game was very rough in those first few builds – placeholder art everywhere, few Olympians implemented, etc – but mostly because they completely revamped foraging and made it FAR less painful.

Quick Aside: So there’s like 30 different kinds of materials you have to forage for to cast various incantations, each of which requires one of four different tools to acquire – shovel, pickaxe, fishing rod, and.. uh.. tablet.

You used to have to choose only one tool per night. So if you came across some sweet metal outcropping one night, and foolishly brought a shovel instead of a pickaxe, you’d just have to leave it.

Now you don’t pick, if it’s unlocked you have it, making this a complete non-issue. You cannot begin to understand how huge of a quality of life improvement this is.

The deal with Hades 2 is that yes, it’s More Hades but it’s like, an absurd amount of “More”. It’s not just like “we brought back all your favorite gods and added a couple more”, there’s roughly double the number of boon-givers, double the number of biomes, double the number of bosses. Same number of weapons but they’re all-new, and several core gameplay mechanics were completely reworked, like Casts and Dashes.

Casts in Hades were basically just projectiles, and there were a couple very silly weapon builds that would let you beef up your weapon damage to do Silly Burst Damage by “loading” your cast into it. In Hades 2 the cast has been completely thrown out and reworked, it’s now an AOE circle you can drop on the map at-will (you know, to ‘cast’ it) to briefly hold enemies in place, which also acts as a modifier-zone to apply boon-related effects like damage or debuffs. It’s no longer Just Another Button To Spam, it’s something that meaningfully contributes to your build as it’s an easy way to quickly apply a debuff to a bunch of enemies, or to slow guys down while you’re trying to get to a safer position.

Movement boons have been split into two distinct types because Mel doesn’t dash like Zag did. The concept of a dash-boon still exists as a “rush” attack, but you don’t have 3 dashes to spam around constantly, so it has to be used sparingly. Instead, Mel now has a “Sprint” that starts as a dash and if you hold it she’ll just keep running, so you have a full complement of boons that do something when you sprint into or past an enemy, and some of these are the best boons in the game.

Progression-wise, woof, they went all out from a More Hades perspective. Hades had some pretty nutty unlock requirements, but they only really had a handful of core things you were chasing for upgrade and unlock purposes: Gems, Darkness, Titan’s Blood, Nectar, Ambrosia, and Diamonds. In Hades 2… I don’t even know how many things there technically are. Every boss has its own unique material equivalent to Titan’s Blood. Every biome has a seed / plant / metal-or-rock, and some have multiple. All of these are used in various combinations for all of your unlocks, upgrades, and incantations. It can look incredibly overwhelming especially because when you first see some of these requirements you’ve likely never even encountered the material in question, but it’s all actually very accessible and reasonable.

I vastly prefer the run-modifying “build” system from Hades 2 to the original’s Mirror system. Originally you just had to keep pumping darkness into the Mirror to get all your sequential unlocks, and then dump even more to get their alternative versions, and then your “build” consisted of picking either the purple or green version of each modifier. The new system is a set of 25 Arcana Cards to unlock and upgrade, and your limiting factor is that each card takes a specific amount of Grasp to activate, which you can only upgrade to 30. Some also work directly in opposition to each-other, like the Death card gives you your traditional Death Defiances, but the Strength card gives incredibly beefy Damage Reduction and base Damage Buffs if you have no Death Defiances. So you’ve got to choose. Some also don’t require grasp, but have other requirements, like “only activate 3 cards” or “activate all cards in a row or column” or “activate no more than 2 cards per grasp-cost”. This opens up far more build variety than the Mirror, and depending on your specific weapon choice and what boon loadout you’re steering towards, you may want a completely different Arcana loadout to complement it.

(Oh, and of course like everything else, the upgrade requirements for Arcana cards are all over the place. The first tier typically requires a specific material just for upgrading Arcana, then most of the second tier require a ton of that material plus one or more boss-materials.)

If there’s a downside to Hades 2, I think it’s that there’s almost too much stuff. Too many mats. Too many upgrades. Too many relationships to chase. Too many build choices. Too many boon builds to chase. Often times straight up too many boons. There’s just so much stuff going on that it’s hard to keep track of, and it doesn’t help that the upgrade to simply give you the catalogue of boons comes incredibly late in the game. But it’s also hard to call that a downside, because this also brings with it an even higher level of variety than the already wildly-varied runs that Hades offered. I’m 40-ish hours in and just reached credits, and I still haven’t gotten all the Keepsakes (I’ve barely even used half the Keepsakes), I’ve only completed two bonds fully, I haven’t completed a full run with all the aspects, I haven’t unlocked any of the hidden aspects, and just generally feel like I’ve still barely scratched the surface of this game despite 10+ clears.

But that’s also a good thing. It means unlike Hades I likely won’t be putting this game down entirely and not returning to it for 5 years. But I’ve got to put it down for at least a little while, because there are too many games.

Like another highly anticipated indie darling sequel from this fall, this is another high-water-mark for its genre. Easy contender for a very crowded Game of the Year, Game of the Decade, Timeless Modern Classic. Highly Recommended. As highly recommended as I can recommend something.