Hades

Hades is a roguelike action dungeon crawler video game developed and published by Supergiant Games. It was released for Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Nintendo Switch in September 2020, which followed an early access release in December 2018. It was later released for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S in August 2021.

Players control Zagreus, the son of Hades, as he attempts to escape from the Underworld to reach Mount Olympus, at times aided by gifts bestowed on him from the other Olympians. Each run challenges the player through a random series of rooms populated with enemies and rewards. The game has a hack and slash combat system; the player uses a combination of their main weapon attack, a special attack, a dash ability, and a magic ability to defeat them while avoiding damage to progress as far as possible. While Zagreus will often die, the player can use gained treasure to improve certain attributes or unlock new weapons and abilities to improve chances of escaping on subsequent runs.

Hades was developed following Supergiant's Pyre, a game in which they wanted to explore procedural narrative storytelling, but due to the nature of the main gameplay, found that players did not play through Pyre multiple times to explore this. The roguelike structure of Hades gave them the opportunity to tell these branching stories to the player over the course of multiple runs.

A commercial and critical success, Hades received universal acclaim for its gameplay, art direction, music, narrative and characters and sold over one million copies. It is considered to be one of the best video games of 2020, and was named game of the year from several award ceremonies and media publications.