In the Flesh: Hades II

Hades II is beautiful. Jen Zee’s much-lauded art direction deserves its roses, imparting a lived-in but rarefied feeling to the game’s mythological settings and characters, as though Alphonse Mucha were going around teaching himself how to utilize chiaroscuro by sketching ruined temples and hidden supernatural wine shops. It’s soothing to look at, deliriously fun and addictive to play, and includes a lot of hot weirdos you can bone off-screen with accompanying dirty sound effects in the tradition of fantasy dating sims. There are weak points in its polished facade, some clear balance issues rendering some weapons unstoppable and others virtually worthless, but that kind of thing amounts to a minor quibble. Supergiant Games has made a name for itself as a creator of gorgeous, lavishly voice-acted video games with some of the best soundtracks in the industry, courtesy of composers Darren Korb and Austin Wintory as well as a stable of talented singers. Then you get to the story.

Is there a weaker thematic pairing to be found than Greek mythology and cozy, conflict-free happy family wish fulfillment anime? If there is, I’ve yet to see it. Listening to Melinoë (Judy Alice Lee), princess of the underworld, handhold the incarnation of Doom through building his self-confidence is so treacly you can feel cavities forming in real time. Every relationship you have with every single character in the game, with the exception of the monster Typhon, will lead to this kind of therapy speak eventually, a series of endlessly repeating literally and figuratively bloodless resolutions to emblematic horrors so powerful they remain prominent in our collective consciousness thousands of years after their initial telling. Prometheus (Ben Starr) is pals with the eagle that ate his liver every day for countless millennia. Narcissus (Korb) and Echo (Lee) find their own happy endings through gruelingly protracted conversations about selfhood and friendship. The game stops just shy of having King Minos show up to re-parent the Minotaur and give him a course of EMDR.

Even the central conflict, Melinoë’s quest to unseat her usurping grandfather, Chronos (Logan Cunningham), and restore the House of Hades to its former glory, is solved in the space of a few quick conversations about second chances and learning not to hold onto hate. That the game’s architects have committed the common error of conflating Cronus, titan of the harvest, with Chronos, incarnation of time is perhaps forgivable in light of just how well “killing time” fits Hades II’s mission statement, but to take Goya’s wild-eyed monster, caught in the act of eating his own son, and turn him into a fussy old man who more or less just needs a hug from his grandkids to come around is beyond the pale. It isn’t just that Supergiant is creating a toothless, hollow version of Greek mythology in which to set its low-key story, it’s that it doesn’t even have the insight into that same subject matter to make hay out of that process. There is no winking here at the grotesquery of talking around Chronos having eaten his own children or Heracles (Matthew Waterson) murdering his wife and child. The writing elides anything too violent or dark to be absorbed into the Katamari of good vibes and hard-won but ultimately inevitable domestic happiness that is Hades II, and it puts nothing in its place.

What did Chronos do to his children? It is simply never stated outright. Why is Heracles such a dangerous guy? No comment. Are Pandora/Dora’s (Erin Yvette) past actions in unleashing demons on humanity figurative, literal, or somewhere in between, and was it her fault? Hades II knows you know the myths it’s manifestly about, but rather than building on your knowledge, it leaves it to do the dirty work it’s unwilling to touch. You, the player, know all that icky stuff, so we don’t have to go over it, we can just skip right to self-forgiveness and resolution. It’s a story composed entirely of endings and moral justifications for endings, unable to metabolize anything more complex than the idea that even maniac dictators only need to be understood and forgiven in order to change their hearts completely on the spot. Hades II posits a world where actions are meaningless and only words have power, and it doesn’t have the literary ability to pull it off.

Even the structure of the story is a mess. The Fates are missing, a calamity so tremendous it drives the entire first third of the game’s arc, but when Chronos makes his face turn and joins the good guys, we go straight into credits. No big deal. When they finally merit a mention in the epilogue material, it’s just to kick off a string of meaningless achievement/fetch quests. A story unwilling to depict lasting consequences or genuine irresolvable conflict has no momentum, no sense of tension or peril. Even the uniformly excellent voice performances suffer from this lack of heat, never deviating very far from baseline thoughtful conversation. Hades II is beautiful, it’s fun, it’s incredibly successful at so much of what it sets out to do, but at its heart it has the morals of a PTA censor and the storytelling prowess of a children’s book about learning to share. It is, in a word, insipid.