This blog contains major spoilers for Transistor, Hades, and Hades II.
Supergiant's 2014 game Transistor is a love story in the drapings of an apocalyptic sci-fi action-adventure game. The protagonist, Red, is a singer whose voice is stolen after an attempt on her life. Her companion is the titular Transistor, a greatsword that killed and then integrated the soul—or data—of her lover, referred to in the game as only Unknown, who speaks to her through the sword and is the primary voice in the game. Taking the Transistor in hand, Red returns to the city of Cloudbank, which is now overrun by a semi-autonomous force called the Process. Once wielded by Cloudbank's leaders to shape the city in the direction of their choosing, the Process has slipped its leash and effectively become malware, indiscriminately deconstructing the city and its residents down to a bare slate. (As with any science fiction story, there are a lot of new proper nouns.) As she progresses through the city, Red learns more about the Transistor, the Process, and the events that led to the attempted assassination.
What is most appealing about Transistor is its restraint. It is not a long game. Depending on difficulty and the player's motivation to do combat-focused side content, the game is a tight six to eight hours with a tight six-to-eight–hour story. What it lacks in scale, it makes up for in formal precision. There are finer plot and world-building details that can be unlocked by tweaking combat builds, but the game understands that it doesn't need to explain all of the minutiae. Instead, it allows a lot of the story to be conveyed through art direction, mechanical flavor, and a killer soundtrack. The game's combat revolves around Functions that imitate coding syntax, like Cull() and Void(), which is thematically apt in a story about a city that's effectively being torn apart by its own code. The soundtrack is split between diegetic vocal tracks and non-diegetic background music; there's enough story significance that the publishers highly recommend playing the game before listening to it, which is honestly reason enough to purchase the game.
For the vast majority of the game, Red's voice can only be heard through the occasional vocal tracks, though the game also allows the player to press Tab for Red to hum along to the non-diegetic soundtrack. And by taking away Red's voice, the game keeps Red's motivations hidden from the player, even as the player ostensibly controls her actions. This disconnect is what makes the game's story so effective. The easy assumption is that Transistor is about Red's journey to save the city. And, indeed, after defeating the final boss, she has the ability to do so. The sword—or rather, her lover through the sword—remarks excitedly upon the potential at her fingertips. There is, for the very first time, hope for Cloudbank.
But the game reveals now that Red's primary concern was never the city. She returns to the point where the game begins: over the body of her dead lover. She attempts to bring him back, only to realize that she cannot. Then she sits down beside him, raises the sword, and, ignoring his pleas, kills herself. The credits of the game roll while Red, briefly joined by a male voice, sings, "Paper Boats." The final image of the game is of the two reunited in a field. Red has her voice back; she says, "Hey."
It is, in some ways, a happy ending. More importantly, it's one that is only possible because of the structure of the game: a linear, finite story that can have an ending change all of its characters irrevocably. The game does offer a replayable, NG+ version, but there's no real in-universe explanation or reward for it; the ending remains the same in each playthrough, hammering home the narrative of star-crossed lovers.
In Transistor you can see bits and pieces of design that survive in Supergiant's breakout Hades: the isometric format, the idea of a "build," a fondness for dashing and dodging. Other than that, the similarities dry out. If Transistor is a masterclass in storytelling in such a compact package, Hades takes the theoretically infinite genre of a roguelike and figures out how to wrangle the genre's Samuel Beckett–ass "Try again. Fail again. Fail Better" philosophy into a compelling narrative. (Hades is also a better game to play. Transistor's combat felt clunky, though I'm willing to blame some of that on myself, for playing on a Macbook Air with a trackpad; in my defense, I had limited resources at the time.)
Hades, despite being more expansive in length, chooses a more contained story than that of Transistor, to great effect. The primary narrative in Hades is a familial one. As it happens, "Try again. Fail again. Fail better" functions quite well as a philosophical approach to interpersonal relationships. As the game's protagonist Zagreus repeatedly tries to fight his way out of the underworld both to stick it to his father, the titular Hades, and find his mother Persephone, he bonds with the various underworld denizens. During each run, the player has the opportunity to meet shades who help Zagreus on his journey. Between runs, the player has the opportunity to incrementally build up Zagreus's relationships—romantic and platonic—with residents of the House of Hades. The player's catharsis upon their first complete run is mirrored by Zagreus's joy upon seeing his mother for the first time.
But some of the finest moments for Hades come after the main story is resolved. The eventual excuse for Zagreus to continue breaking out of his father's realm even after his parents are reunited is a bit contrived, but still makes narrative sense: Zagreus is dubbed Security Specialist and is tasked to find exploits in the underworld's security; his official title is also an example of him taking on more responsibility with the running of the House, an initial point of friction between him and his father.
As Zagreus continues forging bonds (technical term) with those he encounters on his way to the surface, he incrementally improves the lives of those he encounters. He reunites Achilles with Patroclus, Orpheus with Eurydice; he frees Sisyphus from his fate. There is no real terminal point to the game, so the ultimate ending is more that every character in the story reaches a place that they, either immortal or in the afterlife, can be happy with, for eternity.
I played Transistor for the first time over the holidays, when I was ruthlessly separated from my PC and, thus, from Hades II. By that point, I had something like 55 hours in Hades II, had a 32-fear clear, reached the epilogue of the story, and had no particular urge to continue playing. Much has been written and even more has been posted about the writing of Hades II, particularly its ending and protagonist. The ending of the game had already been patched; I personally never experienced the unpatched version, due to starting the game on a delay.
But the issues with Hades II are fundamentally formal. That is, for all that there could have been better storytelling decisions, the project of trying to fit the game's narrative into a roguelike was doomed from the start. Where the original game was a touching family drama, albeit with some Greek mythology–style fighting to the death, the second game has the scope of a war story. The initial gameplay loops center around Melinoë, Zagreus's little sister, who is fighting to kill her grandfather Chronos and rescue her family from his clutches. Once she successfully executes the plan, with Zagreus offering to bond with Chronos, rather than kill him, Hades II tries to narrow the scope back down to one of family: Chronos was betrayed by his children; faced with an alternate timeline where he could have had love, he has to reckon with the damage he has wrought. But rather than stay on the family's relationship for the post-credits epilogue, the game expands to even more sweeping philosophical ramifications of who gets to control Fate.
The issue is that the pay-off for this scale of story requires sweeping, dramatic change that the roguelike genre is not equipped to handle. After a war ends, you want everything to look and feel different; after the Three Fates vacate their position and declare that the gods should leave the decision-making to the mortals, you might want to see some of that manifested in-game. You want an ending, that is to say, which is the one thing the roguelike definitionally cannot provide. Compounding the problem is that by introducing a bigger story of gods and titans and the Fates (oh my!) the side characters of Hades II have issues that Melinoë, who is effectively a soldier in a war, is not equipped to change.
This leads to the fundamental problem described in Jay Castello's blog for Aftermath: Despite Melinoë being referred to by Prometheus as "Agent of Change," almost all of the characters remain, at the end of the story, exactly the same as they were. Of the static characters, Melinoë herself is the worst offender. She's handicapped at genesis. She doesn't have Zagreus's snark or charm; worse, she's a woman, which—perhaps due to post-Gamergate consideration for a reactionary subsection of an unserious audience, perhaps because the generic tropes of ostensibly progressive gendered personalities adore a failson/girlboss dichotomy—means that she can't have flaws.
As Gita Jackson noted, Melinoë's only real feature is her competence. She is granted one moment of frustration, when Zagreus expresses doubts about killing Chronos, but not much else. Where Transistor hides its protagonist's internal motivations, Hades II fails to give her much interiority at all.
The story of a soldier who does not know her family and yet has sacrificed her entire life for them could be compelling, if she were given the space to feel any helplessness or even bitterness toward her burden. That Melinoë is so competent but, past defeating Chronos, seemingly incapable of changing the circumstances of those around her compounds the frustration. When Red kills herself to be with her lover rather than save the world, it is perhaps not particularly cool of her, but at least she could choose to do it.
The tendency of a game studio that has found previous success is to go bigger on the next game. This is a natural development, as the studio has the money and means to hire more workers, and also faces higher expectations from the audience. Hades II is hardly a failure; it is, still, a great game, in its mechanics and art and music. But you can't help but feel that its story is fundamentally at odds with the roguelike genre: It needed a world where choices matter, and where change is possible. In Hades II, there's no room for either.
