The last time my friends and I went out for a curry, I ordered something sweet and mild - a malayan. Two others, who had lost the vote to go elsewhere, ordered a plain korma. A jalfrezi, two madras, and a tikka masala were also ordered in our group. Everyone ate their own dish, enjoyed it, and went home. Video games do not work this way.
In the video game world, my curry is not a real curry. Maybe you’d call it ‘video game journalist curry’, seeing as it’s not particularly difficult to eat. Meanwhile, those on jalfrezi would have been pressured to challenge themselves with madras, while the madras group would not have truly eaten curry until they’d eaten a vindaloo. Difficulty is one of the most toxic of video game discourses, and it has no right to be. Thankfully, Hades does difficulty right.
There are some pieces of toxic gaming discourse that I understand, toxic though they are. ‘Too many women, or too many queer characters’ at least comes from a place of personal experience. If you love unbuttered white bread, play Mass Effect wrong, and only want to play as straight white male characters who never confront political or social issues, gaming becoming more mature than Duke Nukem must have been a shock to you. Gaming is leaving you behind. That’s for the betterment of games as a whole, but you personally might find reason to be angry that games strive to tell meaningful stories now. Meaningful stories with - ewwww - girls.
Difficulty doesn’t work this way. That I play on Normal, or Easy, or Games Journalist Mode doesn’t mean you can’t play on Super Hardcore or I Have A Massive Penis difficulty to prove your worthiness as a gamer. It has become a strange measure of ‘gamerness’, a gatekeeping tool that rises as high as the current gatekeeper can manage the difficulty on - but no higher - and for no reason. As childish as I think complaints about Abby having biceps in The Last of Us Part 2 are, I can at least understand on an academic level why people don’t want to play as an icky girl not designed from the ground up to be ogled.
Difficulty in Hades is genius. While only one difficulty setting exists, the game includes God Mode. With God Mode, every time you die, you get two percent stronger. This allows you to learn from the game by progressively getting stronger as you get better. Initially, you will lose a lot - even the best players do. It’s a roguelite, designed around the idea that you will lose, over and over again, before eventually getting better. You learn through failure. While the typical rougelite progression still happens in Hades - you fall to Megaera, you learn how to beat Megaera, etc - God Mode gives you an added incentive. Every failure matters, and that’s something Hades underlines.
On a practical level, it’s an interesting way of implementing a difficulty mode. Supergiant Games is a small studio, and creating and balancing multiple difficulties, especially in a roguelite with different weapons and boons, adds an extra layer of developmental challenge. God Mode allows things to get incrementally easier without various settings needing to be worked out. It’s not just the actual difficulty where God Mode shines though. That it means the game will perfectly balance itself for you over time is great design, but it’s thematically where God Mode truly shines.
Hades encourages failure. While some games are brutal in their punishment for death, and others allow you to just get back up and continue onwards, most games still dissuade the act of losing. Hades welcomes it. Zagreus is doomed to fail; that’s the entire point of Hades. Even in successfully escaping, Zagreus ultimately fails and must begin his quest anew. Failure, and learning from failure, is part of the journey. God Mode gamifies that in the best possible way, while rejecting toxic notions of difficulty and challenge that the roguelite genre typically embraces. Hades excels in many areas, but its implementation of difficulty might be one of the most unsung.
