Upon completion of their first successful run of Supergiant’s 2020 roguelike Hades, the player is greeted with a review screen. The left side of the screen displays the complete list of boons and other abilities accrued throughout the run, the top left displays the current character setup, and a table on the right side presents the player with some fresh challenges. This table provides the player with the time taken for the escape attempt as well as the player’s personal best time. It also lays out a chart with the player’s fastest time, best heat (heat is a challenge system that can be taken on after the first successful run), and number of clears for each weapon. Hades thus provides an additional set of goals to the player: you can escape. But how fast can you do it? How consistently? How hard can you make it on yourself and still get through? I would like to explore how one of these additional goals, when pursued to an extreme, alters the structures, rhythms, and failure points of Hades.
The goal of Hades is to take control of Zagreus, the surly prince of the underworld and, aided by the Olympian gods, escape to the surface. In order to do this the player must fight through four regions of shifting rooms full of enemies and helpful items. The game contains a large amount of chance: the orders of the rooms, their resident foes, the helpful NPCs one can encounter, and the items one collects are all randomly generated. The path to success within each escape attempt, though, largely depends on the skill of the player. Jesper Juul suggests that skill as a path to success is closely tied to learning through failure, writing that “[a]s players, we come to a game with a repertoire of skills that we try to apply to the problem at hand. We can continually improve our skills, and whenever we fail, we have the chance to reconsider our strategies, to recalibrate or expand our skillset. Success through skill is hence the path to success that is most closely tied to the experience of learning through failure” (Juul, 74). Through trying again and again to escape, the player develops improvisational skills. Although the rooms are randomly generated, the player learns how best to navigate each underworld region, hitting the highest concentration of helpful rooms. Although boons and items are randomly placed, the player learns how best to develop helpful synergies between the gods, hammers, and weapons provided. Although the enemies are randomly generated, the player learns the breakpoints and pathing to hack and slash their way through anything thrown at them. Chance provides friction rather than failure, and skill offers the player a way through. Each successful escape attempt tells the story of the player succeeding despite all odds and each failure provides an opportunity to learn.
When attempting to escape quickly, however, the stakes of the game dramatically change. Some strategies and boons are simply faster than others and chance is transformed from a source of obstacles to overcome into a run-killer. Most speedrunning strategies plan to build into a specific duo-boon and as such require a specific pool of gods. Whenever these gods don’t appear or a disadvantageous god does appear, the run must be reset. Most strategies also rely on particular hammers and boons; if these boons don’t show up, the runner resets. A fast escape also depends on helpful room generation; it’s much faster to run through a shop or chaos portal than it is to fight through waves of enemies. Fast escape attempts benefit greatly from a high concentration of free and fast rooms. In addition to an increased weighting of chance, the goal of speed introduces labor to the equation. Labor, Juul says, “corresponds to the Protestant work ethic as described by sociologist Max Weber, where the investment of effort is the path to salvation” (Juul 81). Just setting up for speedrunning attempts in Hades requires a huge expenditure of effort. The player must max out every possible character improvement at the mirror of darkness, purchase all the helpful rooms from the house contractor, acquire every keepsake that could be helpful in a run, and acquire the maxed out special keepsake from Megaera. The player must also unlock and max out their weapon of choice. These tasks require a huge investment of resources (as well as romancing Megaera) and to leave any of them undone would be to leave valuable seconds on the table. These tasks also reduce escape attempts to labor; one is escaping to accumulate resources rather than for the satisfaction of overcoming obstacles.
Eventually, after investing the time in menial grinding and getting great luck on a run, the player is in a position to secure a personal best. This is where success or failure is truly determined if speed is the goal; not every run is structurally set up to achieve a personal best. When the opportunity eventually presents itself, labor and chance fall away and the player has to put their skills to the test. The player must depend on their game knowledge to determine the optimal path for each room: whole minutes can be gained or lost in poor clearing. Since the in-game timer stops when the game is paused, the player can pause while choosing which room to tackle next and while choosing which boon to pick. These kinds of decisions have cascading effects: more powerful boons often have prerequisite boons that must be picked first and filling one’s pool with mediocre boons leaves a build unfocused and average. Succeeding in going fast thus requires a huge breadth of knowledge and skill; time saves can be eked out of game knowledge, build knowledge, mechanical skill, and pathing. Getting a new personal best therefore incorporates the feeling of succeeding despite all odds from a normal escape attempt, but also carries with it the knowledge of the luck and labor that went into producing the possibility of escape. It becomes much more rewarding to succeed and that much more crushing to fail.
Intermittent Mechanism 