This is just my Steam review from this game lol. I wanted to write something more thoughtful and still might, but I feel like I don't want to let my Content languish on the Platforms anymore.
It's fun. There's a lot of game in this game. We heard you like Hades so we put Hades in your Hades so you could, etc. Level design, enemy design, environment design—impeccable. The whole thing is a 9/10 at least.
But I don't know, man. It's pristine to the point that it almost feels somehow a little precious or something. (The whole thing is twee in a way that makes me feel nervously nostalgic for 2018 or whatever, when the arc of history seemed, in the face of everything, still stubbornly and slowly drifting wokeward, though this feeling diminished once the game's narrative began to drift into incoherence.)
As for this game, "Hades II: More Hades," I muddled my way through and then unlocked an insane weapon and just sort of won. Did I get better at it? I guess. The enemy design is incredibly satisfying to learn. But it's still a lot of, like, "Oh ok I guess I got bonkers boons this run time to not screw it up." I "100%ed" it which I've only ever done for one other game, the Boltgun typing game—and then I kept playing it, which is bizarre.
Has anyone commented on how the characters are sexy hott in this game? It's like they knew I was a person who occasionally finds other people attractive on some visceral level! They really thought of everything when they made this thing, didn't they? The phrase "fan service" popped into my head a lot. You literally take baths with everyone (unfortunately not all at once). To be fair, I find Mel's, uh, bathtime portrait movingly vulnerable in a way that punches way above its character-development weight.
It's honestly a lot. The whole thing is a lot, like so much, but it's also sort of not a lot, like not quite enough. The writing is excellent on the sentence-by-sentence level but the plot, as others have said, rides powerful witch vibes for a while then just kind of flops around for a while. I thought it was kind of silly how the first one is so committed to remedying the tragedies of ancient Greek myth—what a hilariously American project!—but this one opts for justifying their injustice (in at least a few cases) in a way that I found genuinely maddening.
I love the witchy witch stuff in here. I am a gay woman. I love the Crossroads and I like Mel, whose name I'm not typing out not because we're pals but because I don't want to look up "umlaut e" on the internet, more than Zagreus. I laughed out loud dozens of times at a few of the characters' dialogue. Skelly and Dora are both exceptionally funny characters. Every character is overflowing with personality. It's a genuine achievement.
But there's something conservative about the gestalt of this game, something willfully unadventurous, that makes me feel like the adulation for it—which is, on its merits, entirely deserved—comes at the expense of something more daring, or evinces something unhappily zero-sum about "modern games." This is not Supergiant's fault! They did a tremendous job making seemingly exactly the game they wanted to. There's so much love in this game. It is moving to experience. Thinking about how good it feels to play makes me a little emotional: like, that was so nice of them to make me feel this good in my hands and eyeballs.
The "lite" part of Hades has always kind of felt like when they make a "healthy" version of junk food, like high-protein organic Pop Tarts, except the original is, like, free-to-play numbers-go-up endless-checklist Cookie Clicker-type shit. To be clear, like 90% of my diet is that weird protein stuff, because I don't know how to live. But when you're eating it, you're unusually aware of what it's not. I'm trying to stop putting on podcasts or audiobooks when I play games and this game was good for being a "podcast game" that gave me enough to resist that impulse. I really enjoyed my time with this video game and will probably keep playing it, though I hope it makes me want to play more games that are nothing like it, instead of games that are lesser versions of it.
I will conclude with an ironic '90s game magazine-style breakdown of the game's components: GAMEPLAY: TEN OUT OF TEN! STORY: SIX OUT OF TEN....CHARACTERS: NINE OUT OF TEN! MUSIC: EIGHT POINT FIVE OUT OF TEN. GRAPHICS: FIVE OUT OF TEN—THEY'RE GOOD FOR WHAT THEY ARE BUT THEY'RE NO "AVATAR: FRONTIERS OF PANDORA." OVERALL: NO ONE KNOWS