Hymn to Hades: How to Perfectly Adapt a Myth (1)

In honor of Hades finally leaving Netflix Games after a year-long sojourn, the spirit of Eurydice has compelled me to revitalize my (short-lived) writing career for my favorite and most underrated game.

Before I analyze the beauty of Supergiant Games’s retelling of the myth of Hades and Persephone, I should first explain what Hades is. Hades is a roguelike fighting game where you play as Zagreus, Hades’s son. As the player, you’re immediately tossed into battle with no babying tutorials, forced to discover and pick up brand new skills as you pound skulls into bone dust and stab drunk ghouls to death. After all, the prince of the Underworld waits for no one, not even his creator. Waking up in the dark depths of Tartarus, you navigate your way through deadly chamber after deadly chamber, trying to fight your way out of the Underworld to find your absent mother. You do not know if the way you are going is correct, but all you know is that you must plow forward. So, you continue to seek out Olympian boons, riding on the adrenaline of adventure…until you die before you even make your way out of the lowest layer of hell. Is this already the end?

Fortunately for Zagreus, there’s still 50 hours of playtime left. You wake up in a pool of blood, and you realize that, due to your immortality, you’ve been reborn again inside the halls of Hades—your father. He chews you out (like usual) for being a rowdy, undisciplined son, and—well—he’s not entirely wrong, because you’re about to try escaping again. And so, the Sisyphean cycle continues. 

What truly sets Hades apart from any other roguelike is that every single run is unique. Every encounter is meaningful and contributes to the game’s worldbuilding in some way. As Zagreus progresses, he unlocks new conversations. With even one extra character that is introduced, the tone of the game shifts. You are no longer just playing to beat the final boss. You’re playing to see the stories of these dozens of other characters play out. You play to rekindle the relationship between the air-headed musician Orpheus and the feisty Eurydice, lovers separated by a special contract that is only revealed after the tenth playthrough or so. You want to uncover the truth about the mysterious, cold bearded man sitting in the fields of Elysium and why the mention of his presence awakens something latent in your old friend and mentor Achilles. Moreover, you also want to see Zagreus figure out his own identity and his relationship with his old companions-turned-enemies. At its core, Hades is a game about love in its most natural sense, which is precisely why, even while appealing to a modern audience, the same classical themes and emotional complexities hit just as hard as if they were part of Ovid’s epics.

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The rest of this essay will contain spoilers regarding the main plot of Hades.

The world of Hades is built on one of the most clichéd myths of all time: the abduction of Persephone. In the oldest version of this story, Hesiod describes Zeus as the instigator who took young Persephone away from her mother and gave her to Hades, who reluctantly and remorsefully carried her away into the Underworld. In a slightly later version, Hades kidnaps Persephone by himself, and she reluctantly becomes the feared Queen of the Underworld. While kidnapping, in any context, is morally dubious, the Greeks didn’t really see that much of a problem with their marriage. After all, Hades followed all marriage laws, and Persephone grew to like him after a little bit. The origins of the marriage between Hades and Persephone is ambiguous, but no one can deny that the two of them genuinely loved each other for bringing out two sides of them that would be otherwise inaccessible: Hades’s softness and Persephone’s autonomy and authority.

Many retellings of this myth in particular receive lots of criticism for oversimplifying the characters or excessively trying to “modernize” the story in a way that makes it inaccurate and misleading for the general public, including young children. The most infamous example of this is Lore Olympus, a series whose bad press got so bad that several Reddit communities and Discord servers were created for the sole purpose of tearing it apart. One of its major criticisms was the poorly rendered relationship between Hades and the overtly-infantilized Kore/Persephone, who had barely turned 19 at the start of that story. In contrast to the corporate leader Hades, who was—eh—roughly around 2000 years old, the age gap will surely disturb anyone who approaches it with a set of modern ethics. Logistically, the relationship between Persephone and Hades lined up pretty well with the original myth, but Rachel Smythe’s individual characterization of Persephone makes it a hard read. Lore Olympus honestly deserves an essay on its own, so I’ll leave aside most of my criticism of it for now, but the main problem that the public has with Lore Olympus is not that the story differs from the original myth (there is no “accurate” way to tell a myth in the first place), but rather that Smythe ripped the myth out of its cultural context and whacked it around like a soggy towel until it turned into the dry, unrelatable “romance” stuck in an identity crisis between retelling and new fiction. 

Supergiant Games found a way to revitalize such a hackneyed myth, and the key to their strategy was none other than Zagreus himself. Zagreus’s story is also the story of Hades and Persephone, told in a series of non-linear memories. The first time that Zagreus defeats his father and reaches Persephone, her reaction is the complete opposite of what the player who just dedicated 20 hours of their life to finding her would expect. Her shock and anxiety reveal a darker history behind her relationship with Hades, which up until that point we have been led to believe was out of unhappiness. What is she hiding from Zagreus? From Olympus? But before you can open your mouth to ask all these burning questions, you die again. 

After several rounds of climbing to the surface, the full truth finally reveals itself to you. You, Zagreus, were not supposed to exist. Growing up on Olympus, Persephone grew tired of all her in-laws fighting each other. To “help” her, Zeus impulsively brought her to Hades, telling her that as long as she kept her whereabouts a secret, she would never have to go back to Olympus. Unexpectedly, Hades and Persephone fell in love and had a child, but he came out stillborn. Heartbroken, Persephone fled to the mortal realm, unaware that Nyx had found a way to bring her son back to life. To protect his family's freedom, Hades never told the Olympians what transpired. Ultimately, Zagreus convinces Persephone to return, and she rekindles her relationship with Hades, bringing the warmth of spring back into his cold, dark life.

The story that Hades tells is distinctly classical, despite having a large portion of original content. Supergiant Games doesn’t try to force a modernized narrative onto the player. Zagreus’s imagined story integrates itself perfectly into the story that we already know of. Persephone and Hades’s love extends beyond a simple, mutual attraction—it embodies their individual aspirations. Persephone’s love for Hades represents her desire for freedom and autonomy from Olympus, and Hades’s love for Persephone represents his desire to become human. Classical love is all about loyalty and equality, and Hades was able to faithfully adapt those values into a fresh, new love story. 

Although the end of Persephone and Hades’s story represents the official “end” of the game, Hades is not even close to over. The second half of the game shifts to focus on Zagreus’s own relationships with some other familiar mythical figures. Without any original content to base this part of the story off, it would have been insanely easy for Supergiant Games to fall into the corny y/n self-insert trap, but their genius proved to be unparalleled once again. How? By using Zagreus’s ambiguous canon to their full advantage…