Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!
I’ve been powering through Hades, folks! Well into the postgame, I’m working hard on trying to earn that Epilogue I missed in my first playthrough. And one of the most fun parts of this has been discovering, again and again, new lines of dialogue. Hades has hundreds, maybe thousands of script pages, all interactions between Zagreus and the various eccentrics of Greek Mythology.
This is the thing that made Hades the megahit it became, because it turned the theoretical weakness of storytelling in roguelikes—that you’re constantly resetting—into a strength. Zag and these characters are constantly interacting across his litany of failed and successful runs. That’s pretty much a great idea for a prompt in and of itself, but no. I’ll use it for when Hades II is out. What I want to talk about is the way the game responds to your actions. Not in the “Bowser will remember this,” “Elden Ring tags stuff you did in Metal Wolf Chaos” sort of way, but in what some of the (former) Disco Elysium people call “microreactivity.” Stuff you do is tagged, and the game releases it when it needs.
Take this fight with Megaera, the boss of Level 1. She’s mocking Zagreus for not having found a weapon upgrade, one of the potential rewards scattered across the Greek Underworld. I don’t know Hades‘ code, but by my estimation, this specific interaction requires a few things. You’ll have needed to fight Meg (and probably beat her) with an upgraded weapon in a previous run, then get through Level 1 without one. I assume there’s more to it; maybe you have to have done multiple successful fights with one Infernal Arm or successful fights with different Arms, or it’s only scheduled for after you’ve beaten Hades once or twice. The point here is that I was mildly shocked by this line. It seems so simple, but it really made the game feel alive. The game was recognizing how I was playing it, at least by what random boons it didn’t give me. And it’s full of these. Hypnos will regularly mock you over which specific enemy killed you in your last attempt, bosses will remember lines they’ve said in previous fights for comments in your latest attempt, Olympians have multiple comments for if you’ve already allied with one of their own, and there are also very obvious duplicates so that the same interaction won’t have the canned dialogue you might see in other games. Hades feels distinctly alive as a game space because of this, and I’m just itching to see how its sequel follows this up.
For today’s prompt: what’s your favorite example of this phenomenon, a video game reacting not to big choices, but small ones, maybe not even conventional choices but natural ways to play?
And, of course, what did you play this weekend?