‘Hades II’ Is At War With Itself

This blog contains major spoilers for Transistor, Hades, and Hades II.

Supergiant's 2014 game Transistor is a love story in the drapings of an apocalyptic sci-fi action-adventure game. The protagonist, Red, is a singer whose voice is stolen after an attempt on her life. Her companion is the titular Transistor, a greatsword that killed and then integrated the soul—or data—of her lover, referred to in the game as only Unknown, who speaks to her through the sword and is the primary voice in the game. Taking the Transistor in hand, Red returns to the city of Cloudbank, which is now overrun by a semi-autonomous force called the Process. Once wielded by Cloudbank's leaders to shape the city in the direction of their choosing, the Process has slipped its leash and effectively become malware, indiscriminately deconstructing the city and its residents down to a bare slate. (As with any science fiction story, there are a lot of new proper nouns.) As she progresses through the city, Red learns more about the Transistor, the Process, and the events that led to the attempted assassination.

What is most appealing about Transistor is its restraint. It is not a long game. Depending on difficulty and the player's motivation to do combat-focused side content, the game is a tight six to eight hours with a tight six-to-eight–hour story. What it lacks in scale, it makes up for in formal precision. There are finer plot and world-building details that can be unlocked by tweaking combat builds, but the game understands that it doesn't need to explain all of the minutiae. Instead, it allows a lot of the story to be conveyed through art direction, mechanical flavor, and a killer soundtrack. The game's combat revolves around Functions that imitate coding syntax, like Cull() and Void(), which is thematically apt in a story about a city that's effectively being torn apart by its own code. The soundtrack is split between diegetic vocal tracks and non-diegetic background music; there's enough story significance that the publishers highly recommend playing the game before listening to it, which is honestly reason enough to purchase the game.