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alias_sqbrHades is a great game with a story that's intertwined with the gameplay in a way that means you'll get more of a feel for it by playing than watching someone else on youtube. There's a LOT of combat, even with cheats, if that sounds boring or will require too much strain on your hands etc I'm sure there's good videos that capture the basic gist. But personally, as someone who enjoys combat but is bad at it, I enjoyed playing it with cheats.
So! This guide is aimed at people who, like me, have the narrative as first priority but are ok with combat if it's easy enough. I'm not going to assume you're using cheats, and will avoid spoilers as much as possible. I start with some very basic advice and a description of the game, with no spoilers at all.
If my advice seems wrong, it possibly is, double check with another source! And if you've played the game and KNOW I'm wrong please let me know >.>
Content notes: While overall fairly light hearted, Hades is a game about death and violence, and also a shitty dad. The main characters are greek gods and demi-gods, and while the more controversial aspects of the myths have been retconned or glossed over, there's still plots and backstory involving consent issues and quasi-incest. There's also well meaning but awkward handling of an aroace character, and what feels like ableism to me.
General advice: A nice thing about Hades is that you can't permanently screw anything up. Bad decisions will at worst cause you to have to replay like 20 minutes of combat, or use up items you can always get more of. So if you own the game, just try it out for a while, and only worry about a guide if you feel stuck.
Structure of the game
Hades is a roguelike: you play until you die, then get sent back to the beginning with more knowledge/skills/items etc, and play again. A 'run' of the game means getting through all the dungeons/levels/bosses. To keep things interesting, although the basic structure of each run is always the same, the individual levels vary quite a lot, and you can make different choices about what weapon to use, what skills to choose etc.
The levels start out relatively easy, then get harder, and there's few opportunities to heal. You're expected to fail many attempts before completing your first run. This is part of the plot: You play an immortal, Zagreus, trying to escape his father's realm of the Underworld. The fact Zagreus keeps dying and coming back and trying again is part of his character arc.
There are some plots you can progress even if you die early, eg by talking to characters in the main hall where the game starts. But some characters/conversation/plot will only trigger once you reach later parts of the game.
The game has a 'God Mode' that gives you an extra 20% damage reduction, adding another 2% every time you die. But this caps out at 80% damage reduction, which you only reach after dying 30 times. By the time I got to the end of those 30 failed playthroughs I had seen basically everything that can trigger when you've only seen the first few levels, and was getting bored. And I still couldn't progress more than 1/3 of the way through! But it was a lot easier than it had been at the start, and many players who find the game impossible at the start find it doable by this point. Once I'd played the game enough times with cheats on, gathering upgrades and practice, I could complete a run without cheats.
How to use cheats
So, given the nature of the game, I do recommend playing it at least a few times without cheats. Many people will find the combat gets much easier with practice and increased skills/damage reduction etc. But even if you find the combat completely impossible, a few deaths makes sense for character reasons and gives you a feel for what the combat is intended to be like.
There's a lot of different ways to use cheats, I settled on Wemod since the others I found cost money or looked dodgy. I did have to whitelist it in my virus protection (as explained on their site) but reddit seemed SURE it's not malware and nothing's caught fire so far??
Wemod is only available on PC, and afaict that's typical. You have to remember to turn the cheats back on every time you start up the game.
One of the nice things with Wemod is you can turn cheats on and off with hotbuttons. I used cheats to get through areas I was bored of, but turned cheats off for new areas or when I wanted to die early.
The three cheats offered by Wemod:
Unlimited Health: I leave this on at all times unless I've decided to die for plot reasons.
Unlimited Money: I always leave this on. Having limited money is purely a gameplay challenge and has no characterisation/plot effects.
Fast Kill: I turn this on to get through areas and fights I've seen before, but leave it off the first time I see an area or boss. Sometimes boss battles have conversation which you'll miss if you go through them too fast, though all the important plot conversations are guaranteed to happen.
Note that there is no way to reduce the number of fights. You still have to kill every enemy in every level, which takes some time and effort even when they die in one or two blows. If you pick your weapons and skills correctly you can kill more enemies in one hit, which I'll get into later, but my hands still end up kinda sore.
I've just finished the plot, including the optional epilogue and all romances, and it took me about 50 hours of playtime. Now one reason I wrote this guide was that I wasted a bunch of time thanks to misunderstanding how the game worked, but the game is never going to be quick.
Ok! THE REST OF MY ADVICE HAS MINOR SPOILERS. But at this point you should have enough information to know if you want to play the game, and to get started once you have it.
**** MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD ****
How to progress the plot
There are two kinds of semi-independent plot in this game: the overall game plot, and the arcs of the individual characters.
The overall plot has two sections: the main story, and the epilogue.
You finish the main story by repeatedly completing runs. I can't think of a way to explain how to finish the epilogue without spoilers, but it basically involves finishing a bunch of character's arcs.
There are a lot of different actions that may be required to move a given character's plot forward:
Also, some characters are usually present in the main hall at the start of a new run, but others only show up in random encounters, which is marked by an exclamation mark on the doorway (though the mark is still there even if they've run out of dialogue).
So! To progress the main story, start out by just playing the game and completing runs. I suggest dying at least a couple of times first since it's an expected part of the character arc, and to see how people react to that.
Progressing individual character arcs is more fiddly, but necessary, both because it's interesting and to progress the overall plot. This requires a LOT of nectar, which requires a lot of runs of the game.
There are basically no dialogue choices, except right at the end of each love interest's arc when you can choose not to progress things further.
You kinda have to do everyone's arcs in the end, with the exception of the love interests. But I would prioritise Nyx, Achilles, Maegera, Thanatos, Orpheus, and anyone you bump into in a dungeon, because these arcs take FOREVER and/or have knock-on effects.
The first time you give someone nectar they will give you a useful item. So make sure to give one nectar to everyone you can early on.
Always talk to ANYONE with an exclamation mark over their head. If you see a dungeon with an exclamation mark on the door, pick it! Keep an eye out for purple smoking chaos gates on the ground. Make sure to check whole hall for people to talk to, they move about and the balcony on the bottom left is especially easy to miss.
There's a vendor in the lounge where you can swap gems for keys and then keys for nectar. I recommend always having at least 5 nectar on you, it is VERY frustrating to finally bump into a character in a random encounter and not have any nectar to give them.
You can get more gems/nectar etc (as well as things like diamonds which are required for some upgrades) by finishing dungeons and completing side quests.
Once you give a character enough nectar (usually 6 but sometimes less) you'll hit a 'lock' on giving them more gifts which will only unlock once you fulfil some requirement. Sometimes this is just talking to them a whole bunch, others require random coincidences you just have to wait for, but I had to look some of them up on the wiki once it became clear nothing was happening.
Some of the Olympian gods give you sidequests and afaict these have no bearing on their affection. At the very least, you don't have the finish Poseidon's, because I didn't.
The love interests are Maegera, Dusa, and Thanatos. If you keep giving gifts to a love interest, it will always eventually make them and Zagreus into each other. I think you can probably get away with not progressing their arcs past the first nectar gift if you're not into their romance, but I romanced them all and it was fun!
Gameplay
Here's a nice guide to the basic gameplay.
If you're playing without cheats then there's a billion guides out there by people who are better at the game than me. When I asked for advice a lot of people recommended the bow with Chiron's aspect on it and Artemis boons, and when I tried that it worked pretty well (but I still died lol).
If you're playing with cheats those guides won't really apply but the combat still requires you to get to the enemies and hit them one or two times. If you have trouble aiming, there's weapons that damage all enemies in a large area, or target enemies for you.
For example: The sword you start out with has a 'special' attack (default button 'Q', though I switched it to the middle mouse button) which damages everything in a radius around you. Artemis (arrow symbol) or Zeus (lightning symbol) often offer boons with arrows or lightning that auto-target enemies.
You can unlock more weapons and skills as the game progresses, I personally enjoyed trying them all out, and doing so gets you loot through sidequests. Every run, one weapon will glow purple: this means using it will get you 20% more darkness, which you can use to purchase upgrades and unlock skills.
Choosing the right boons with cheats: anything that gives more damage/money/health is meaningless, instead pick things which offer loot or hit more foes or a wider area. Combinations of the right boons can be extra effective, but I'm not very good at figuring that stuff out so just have fun just playing around.
Choosing Upgrades From the House Contractor
Most of the upgrades from the House Contractor in the main hall are purely cosmetic, but there's a few exceptions as below. Some upgrades only unlock after you've completed the right prerequisites, such as dying a bunch of times or buying other upgrades.
Work Orders: often important for plot or gameplay reasons, including some that don't seem important if you're using cheats, like the fountains. One of the most useful is 'The Fated List of Minor Prophecies'. The themes are purely cosmetic.
Lounge: The Aquarium and Bat Cage offer information. One sidequest requires you to upgrade the lounge a fair amount, not sure how much.
Bedroom: Lyre affects plot. Scrying Pool offers information.
And that's all I can think of for now! There's much more information on the wiki etc, I just found it hard to sift past all the combat related parts and thought other people might have the same problem.
So! This guide is aimed at people who, like me, have the narrative as first priority but are ok with combat if it's easy enough. I'm not going to assume you're using cheats, and will avoid spoilers as much as possible. I start with some very basic advice and a description of the game, with no spoilers at all.
If my advice seems wrong, it possibly is, double check with another source! And if you've played the game and KNOW I'm wrong please let me know >.>
Content notes: While overall fairly light hearted, Hades is a game about death and violence, and also a shitty dad. The main characters are greek gods and demi-gods, and while the more controversial aspects of the myths have been retconned or glossed over, there's still plots and backstory involving consent issues and quasi-incest. There's also well meaning but awkward handling of an aroace character, and what feels like ableism to me.
General advice: A nice thing about Hades is that you can't permanently screw anything up. Bad decisions will at worst cause you to have to replay like 20 minutes of combat, or use up items you can always get more of. So if you own the game, just try it out for a while, and only worry about a guide if you feel stuck.
Structure of the game
Hades is a roguelike: you play until you die, then get sent back to the beginning with more knowledge/skills/items etc, and play again. A 'run' of the game means getting through all the dungeons/levels/bosses. To keep things interesting, although the basic structure of each run is always the same, the individual levels vary quite a lot, and you can make different choices about what weapon to use, what skills to choose etc.
The levels start out relatively easy, then get harder, and there's few opportunities to heal. You're expected to fail many attempts before completing your first run. This is part of the plot: You play an immortal, Zagreus, trying to escape his father's realm of the Underworld. The fact Zagreus keeps dying and coming back and trying again is part of his character arc.
There are some plots you can progress even if you die early, eg by talking to characters in the main hall where the game starts. But some characters/conversation/plot will only trigger once you reach later parts of the game.
The game has a 'God Mode' that gives you an extra 20% damage reduction, adding another 2% every time you die. But this caps out at 80% damage reduction, which you only reach after dying 30 times. By the time I got to the end of those 30 failed playthroughs I had seen basically everything that can trigger when you've only seen the first few levels, and was getting bored. And I still couldn't progress more than 1/3 of the way through! But it was a lot easier than it had been at the start, and many players who find the game impossible at the start find it doable by this point. Once I'd played the game enough times with cheats on, gathering upgrades and practice, I could complete a run without cheats.
How to use cheats
So, given the nature of the game, I do recommend playing it at least a few times without cheats. Many people will find the combat gets much easier with practice and increased skills/damage reduction etc. But even if you find the combat completely impossible, a few deaths makes sense for character reasons and gives you a feel for what the combat is intended to be like.
There's a lot of different ways to use cheats, I settled on Wemod since the others I found cost money or looked dodgy. I did have to whitelist it in my virus protection (as explained on their site) but reddit seemed SURE it's not malware and nothing's caught fire so far??
Wemod is only available on PC, and afaict that's typical. You have to remember to turn the cheats back on every time you start up the game.
One of the nice things with Wemod is you can turn cheats on and off with hotbuttons. I used cheats to get through areas I was bored of, but turned cheats off for new areas or when I wanted to die early.
The three cheats offered by Wemod:
Unlimited Health: I leave this on at all times unless I've decided to die for plot reasons.
Unlimited Money: I always leave this on. Having limited money is purely a gameplay challenge and has no characterisation/plot effects.
Fast Kill: I turn this on to get through areas and fights I've seen before, but leave it off the first time I see an area or boss. Sometimes boss battles have conversation which you'll miss if you go through them too fast, though all the important plot conversations are guaranteed to happen.
Note that there is no way to reduce the number of fights. You still have to kill every enemy in every level, which takes some time and effort even when they die in one or two blows. If you pick your weapons and skills correctly you can kill more enemies in one hit, which I'll get into later, but my hands still end up kinda sore.
I've just finished the plot, including the optional epilogue and all romances, and it took me about 50 hours of playtime. Now one reason I wrote this guide was that I wasted a bunch of time thanks to misunderstanding how the game worked, but the game is never going to be quick.
Ok! THE REST OF MY ADVICE HAS MINOR SPOILERS. But at this point you should have enough information to know if you want to play the game, and to get started once you have it.
**** MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD ****
How to progress the plot
There are two kinds of semi-independent plot in this game: the overall game plot, and the arcs of the individual characters.
The overall plot has two sections: the main story, and the epilogue.
You finish the main story by repeatedly completing runs. I can't think of a way to explain how to finish the epilogue without spoilers, but it basically involves finishing a bunch of character's arcs.
There are a lot of different actions that may be required to move a given character's plot forward:
- Give them nectar (or, at a high affection level, ambrosia)
- Talk to them. A little exclamation mark will show up if they have new dialogue.
- Progress the main plot
- Progress some other character's arc
- Finish a specific boss battle
- Buy a specific upgrade from the House Contractor in the main hall
- Do some other arcane thing I would never have figured out without a walkthrough but if you're lucky you'll do it by accident
Also, some characters are usually present in the main hall at the start of a new run, but others only show up in random encounters, which is marked by an exclamation mark on the doorway (though the mark is still there even if they've run out of dialogue).
So! To progress the main story, start out by just playing the game and completing runs. I suggest dying at least a couple of times first since it's an expected part of the character arc, and to see how people react to that.
Progressing individual character arcs is more fiddly, but necessary, both because it's interesting and to progress the overall plot. This requires a LOT of nectar, which requires a lot of runs of the game.
There are basically no dialogue choices, except right at the end of each love interest's arc when you can choose not to progress things further.
You kinda have to do everyone's arcs in the end, with the exception of the love interests. But I would prioritise Nyx, Achilles, Maegera, Thanatos, Orpheus, and anyone you bump into in a dungeon, because these arcs take FOREVER and/or have knock-on effects.
The first time you give someone nectar they will give you a useful item. So make sure to give one nectar to everyone you can early on.
Always talk to ANYONE with an exclamation mark over their head. If you see a dungeon with an exclamation mark on the door, pick it! Keep an eye out for purple smoking chaos gates on the ground. Make sure to check whole hall for people to talk to, they move about and the balcony on the bottom left is especially easy to miss.
There's a vendor in the lounge where you can swap gems for keys and then keys for nectar. I recommend always having at least 5 nectar on you, it is VERY frustrating to finally bump into a character in a random encounter and not have any nectar to give them.
You can get more gems/nectar etc (as well as things like diamonds which are required for some upgrades) by finishing dungeons and completing side quests.
Once you give a character enough nectar (usually 6 but sometimes less) you'll hit a 'lock' on giving them more gifts which will only unlock once you fulfil some requirement. Sometimes this is just talking to them a whole bunch, others require random coincidences you just have to wait for, but I had to look some of them up on the wiki once it became clear nothing was happening.
Some of the Olympian gods give you sidequests and afaict these have no bearing on their affection. At the very least, you don't have the finish Poseidon's, because I didn't.
The love interests are Maegera, Dusa, and Thanatos. If you keep giving gifts to a love interest, it will always eventually make them and Zagreus into each other. I think you can probably get away with not progressing their arcs past the first nectar gift if you're not into their romance, but I romanced them all and it was fun!
Gameplay
Here's a nice guide to the basic gameplay.
If you're playing without cheats then there's a billion guides out there by people who are better at the game than me. When I asked for advice a lot of people recommended the bow with Chiron's aspect on it and Artemis boons, and when I tried that it worked pretty well (but I still died lol).
If you're playing with cheats those guides won't really apply but the combat still requires you to get to the enemies and hit them one or two times. If you have trouble aiming, there's weapons that damage all enemies in a large area, or target enemies for you.
For example: The sword you start out with has a 'special' attack (default button 'Q', though I switched it to the middle mouse button) which damages everything in a radius around you. Artemis (arrow symbol) or Zeus (lightning symbol) often offer boons with arrows or lightning that auto-target enemies.
You can unlock more weapons and skills as the game progresses, I personally enjoyed trying them all out, and doing so gets you loot through sidequests. Every run, one weapon will glow purple: this means using it will get you 20% more darkness, which you can use to purchase upgrades and unlock skills.
Choosing the right boons with cheats: anything that gives more damage/money/health is meaningless, instead pick things which offer loot or hit more foes or a wider area. Combinations of the right boons can be extra effective, but I'm not very good at figuring that stuff out so just have fun just playing around.
Choosing Upgrades From the House Contractor
Most of the upgrades from the House Contractor in the main hall are purely cosmetic, but there's a few exceptions as below. Some upgrades only unlock after you've completed the right prerequisites, such as dying a bunch of times or buying other upgrades.
Work Orders: often important for plot or gameplay reasons, including some that don't seem important if you're using cheats, like the fountains. One of the most useful is 'The Fated List of Minor Prophecies'. The themes are purely cosmetic.
Lounge: The Aquarium and Bat Cage offer information. One sidequest requires you to upgrade the lounge a fair amount, not sure how much.
Bedroom: Lyre affects plot. Scrying Pool offers information.
And that's all I can think of for now! There's much more information on the wiki etc, I just found it hard to sift past all the combat related parts and thought other people might have the same problem.
no subject
Date: 2021-11-30 03:29 am (UTC)Actually, in dungeons, this doesn't mean new dialogue at all! In the dungeons, the little grey panel with the exclamation mark simply means: Sisyphus in Tartarus, Eurydice in Asphodel, Patroclus in Elysium and that's it. Once you've run out of dialogue options with them (and you do), you will still see the exclamation mark. It's just letting you know you can choose their gifts over a 'regular level.' (The exclamation mark only means new dialogue when it's over a character, not over a level).
no subject
Date: 2021-12-11 02:03 pm (UTC)nods