hades, forthcoming

[jazzfish]

Hades II, sequel to an excellent videogame from 2020, is in early access. I am explicitly not playing it, because generally speaking I will only play not-yet-finished versions of games by Tom Lehmann[1], but I'm looking forward to its actual existence in a year or two.

[1] Admittedly this is 'analog games' not digital, but my point stands. To the left, the one non-Tom prototype I've played in the last few years was a cooperative deductive poker game, which sounds terrible but was actually a lot of fun. But that one was designed by a couple of acquaintances of mine who have an excellent track record, and also the game was advertised as being short and the company was good. None of these things except the track record are true of Hades II. Also I have done my time in sofware QA, and if they're not paying me I'm not interested in installing alpha software.

I'm also spoiler-averse, in that I know I enjoy plot twists etc more when I come to them as the material's presented rather than finding out about them elsewhere. (This is at odds with my desire to Find Out Everything tangential to a media property while I'm consuming it; I've frequently accidentally spoiled myself for TV shows by trying to figure out what actor X has been in lately.) So I'm deliberately not looking up more about it, and staying out of spaces where it's being discussed, but I'm also not able to stop myself reading brief initial-impressions.

vass writes Both the soundtrack and the gameplay strike me as putting more of a Transistor spin on Hades. This sounds all to the good to me. Transistor was more of a thinky game than Hades was, which I appreciate. And ... okay, I liked Darren Korb's soundtrack to Bastion an awful lot, it's still in frequent rotation, in part because it draws on so many genres. His work on Transistor was focused on more of a jazzy-synth feel, more thematically coherent, and it was maybe technically better but felt more limited and a little less appealing than Bastion. The Hades soundtrack did the same thing but with heavy metal, and I liked it far far less. So, Transistor-izing the sountrack sounds great to me.

Vass also writes Lots of crafting, which ... I am less looking forward to. I generally do not like crafting in games; combing through a mess of inventory items to combine them in hopes I will discover an appropriate mixture is not my thing, any more than pressing A repeatedly to read slow dialogue in JRPGs. But I shall reserve judgement until I see how it actually works out.

(Hey, look at me trying to get back in the habit of journaling about random stuff.)

Comments

[andrewducker]

I won't play Early Access games because I want to play the best possible version of the game, and I don't want to start playing that version having already played a not-quite-as-good version of it.

[jazzfish]

I agree with this as well. There are times when I'm interested in the creative / development process, but not many of them.

[mneme]

I don't mind playtesting stuff from random creators, especially if I'm early enough in the process to have a demonstrable impact on the result. I even go to a con 1/year about playtesting.

But...I'm much less interested in devoting time to an "early access" that is mostly a demo of a game where part of the hook is to try to hook you and then you'll have to start from the beginning when the game comes out (if you play).

Also, agreed that Tom Lehman prototypes in particular are generally worth playing.