At first, though, the game was going to be set in Minos’ labyrinth of the minotaur. Hades’ Greek mythology setting came soon afterwards, along with the idea that players would wield powers defined by various gods, who’d also be characters. “Whatever form the narrative would take, it was meant to make moments of story that’d intersect with the action and help contribute to memorable runs,” says Kasavin. But the studio loved the narrative design they created, so they decided their next game would refine and be in a genre much better suited to it: the endlessly repeatable Roguelike. Pyre may as well have been just as linear as Bastion and Transistor. “Man, we did all that work to create truly branching open-ended storytelling, but Pyre feels like a game that you’d only play once,” he says. It was well received, but I get the sense that Kasavin is a little disappointed with some of the creative decisions he and team made for it. This sports-cum-strategy game, which was released in 2017, is wrapped inside a choice-driven visual novel about a bunch of fantasy jocks who have been banished into purgatory and must travel the land to play other crims in the hope of cleansing their souls. This article was first published on February 12th 2020, but we've brought it back From The Archive to celebrate Hades' launch on Xbox Game Pass for PC. Hades’ Sisyphean-twitch-action, in which you take repeated runs through the Underworld in an attempt to escape your hellish dad, is brought to life by a setting within the rancorous interplays between the gods of Greek mythology, and dynamic story design which responds to your progress. “And it turns out, it immensely benefits from it.” I have to agree. “We were really curious to see if narrative could fit into an Early Access experience,” writer and designer Greg Kasavin tells me. But in a Roguelike? And what’s that? They intended to put Hades in Early Access? Could they ever fit with the kind of rich characterisation and storytelling that made Supergiant’s name? Across Bastion, Transistor and Pyre, they’d found they were pretty good at telling stories.

When Supergiant Games started to make Hades, their Roguelike action-RPG, they had plenty of experience making narrative games. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games.

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