Hades is famously recognized for its tight motion gameplay, unmatched means to weave narrative right into a run-based roguelike, and for Supergiant Video games making the pantheon of Greek gods nice as hell. The staff mentioned that magnificence was a advantage in its character design, however the truth that the unique recreation lacked physique variety dissatisfied many. Fortunately, it appears just like the sequel, Hades II, is taking a step ahead on this entrance with Hephaestus, the god of the forge.
Supergiant confirmed off Hephaestus throughout its prolonged technical check stream on April 17. He’s a blacksmith on Olympus, certainly one of many characters who offers the participant boons to improve their talents throughout a run. His look within the stream is transient, however his portrait has already caught the eye of followers, as he’s a heavier-set bear (a person who is greater and hairier than the typical Hades god) in a sea of ripped gods. He additionally makes use of a wheelchair and has a prosthetic leg, seemingly a reference to his lameness in Greek mythology because of a fall from Mount Olympus. Whereas we don’t see a lot of him within the technical check, followers are already excited a few god who doesn’t have the identical physique kind as all of the others.
When Hades left early entry in 2020, then-Kotaku employees author Ash Parrish talked with Supergiant concerning the staff’s making everybody in its roguelike hotter than the fires of Hades. Studio co-founder Greg Kasavin defined that, as gods, it felt that they might naturally be straightforward on the eyes as they embodied the fantastic thing about sure concepts.
“For a few of our characters, their attractiveness in actual fact is a part of who they’re,” Kasavin mentioned. “Aphrodite and Dionysus spring to thoughts. For chthonic gods resembling Nyx or Thanatos, I feel their magnificence is extra effortlessly incidental. They’re the personifications of those profound ideas resembling Night time and Loss of life — we felt, how may they not be stunning?”
Nonetheless, that additionally raised questions on what’s and isn’t thought of stunning below that framework. If all of the Greek gods are shredded, swole, and in any other case match and able-bodied, does that make fatness and otherwise abled our bodies by some means antithetical to that concept of magnificence? That was the actually the feeling some people had on the time. As Wired identified in 2021, the one fats characters that seem within the first Hades recreation are the Wretched Lout enemies, which, based on the sport’s codex entries, had been “lowered to merely their most base of destructive impulses.” The implication that fats characters are the pure results of somebody dropping all self-control is just not nice, however it looks as if Supergiant has taken the criticism to coronary heart.
Whether or not Hephaestus is a one-off deviation from how Hades and its sequel depict god-like magnificence or foreshadowing of better physique variety to come back stays to be seen. However on the very least, these on the lookout for a bear as an alternative of a chiseled god are consuming with Hades II, as properly. Supergiant is at present taking sign-ups for Hades II’s technical check on Steam.
